Chapter 3 #3
And Edward, standing still with the afternoon light touching one side of her face and the grey gown making her look all the more severe and unguarded at once, discovered that distance had become its own torment.
He could stand half the room away and still be acutely conscious of her.
His gloves, still in his hand, creaked softly where his grip tightened before he forced it to ease. The thought did not improve his temper.
“I shall write to my brother this evening,” he said. “Crispin must be informed before the story reaches him by some more decorative route. Clara is already enlisted, which means resistance would now be futile even if I wished it.”
“And your mother?” Lydia asked.
It was a foolish question, perhaps, yet suddenly important. Mothers meant families. Families meant judgments. Drawing rooms. Invitations. Scrutiny.
A life larger than this room.
Edward’s mouth curved faintly. “My mother will have opinions. She always does. She will also, once she decides you are under Hallworth protection, defend you with a vigor I would not advise any enemy to underestimate.”
The answer should not have eased her.
It did.
A beat passed.
Then, quietly, Lydia said, “Thank you.”
He did not make light of it.
He only inclined his head, and somehow that was worse—worse because it felt as though he understood the weight of gratitude she had not meant to show.
“Rest while you may, Miss Ashby,” he said. “Tomorrow will require rather more of us than today.”
He reached for his gloves, then paused.
“Unless,” he added, looking back at her, “you wish to begin quarreling over the announcement already. In which case I can remain and be disagreeable at once.”
To Lydia’s horror, a laugh nearly escaped her.
It reached only her eyes this time, but he saw it all the same.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Cowardice,” he murmured.
“Prudence.”
“A less entertaining vice.”
Then he went.
The door closed behind him with soft finality.
Edward stood in the corridor a moment longer than necessary, one hand still resting on the latch. His jaw tightened once before he deliberately loosened it, as if the body must be reminded of the composure the mind had already chosen.
Paper and ink waited in his study. A letter to Crispin waited as well, one that would need to explain impossible circumstances with enough clarity to secure cooperation and not so much as to invite immediate interference.
Yet for a moment he remained where he was, looking at the closed door and thinking of Lydia in the grey gown, standing at the window as if vigilance itself had become a habit her body no longer knew how to put down.
He meant to protect her.
The disturbing part was how little that resolve now resembled duty alone.
Duty did not account for the way relief had struck him when she turned at the sound of his knock and looked glad—however briefly—to see him.
Duty did not account for the restless awareness that still rode beneath his skin whenever she laughed.
Duty certainly did not explain why the prospect of another man approaching her now, speaking her name with careless familiarity, sent something cold and proprietary through his blood.
He disliked the shape of that thought enough to turn away at once and go in search of paper before he could examine it more closely.
Inside, Lydia did not at once return to the window.
She stood in the middle of the sitting room and listened to the diminishing sound of his steps.
Only when they were gone did some of the rigid attention leave her spine.
She lowered herself into the chair he had vacated, as though her knees had finally exacted payment for remaining so stiffly upright.
After a moment she rose again—sitting there felt too intimate somehow—and crossed slowly to the hearth, where she rested her fingertips against the mantel.
Protection. Visibility. Credibility.
The words remained brutally sensible.
So did the danger.
A public engagement to Edward Hallworth would solve one kind of vulnerability by inviting another. She would be watched, discussed, measured, and interpreted by people whose opinions could shape the course of a season and, in quieter ways, a life.
Yet for the first time since her father’s death, the shape of her future did not look like a narrowing corridor.
It looked like risk.
Chosen risk.
That distinction mattered.
Outside, the city carried on in wheels and voices and afternoon light.
Inside, Lydia lifted her hand to the bruise hidden beneath her sleeve and let her fingertips rest there a moment before letting them fall, as if confirming for herself that the pain remained real and therefore so must the answer to it.
Finchley had built his scheme on silence, isolation, and her presumed helplessness.
He had misjudged at least one of those things.
Perhaps two.
And Mr. Edward Hallworth, she thought as she turned at last back toward the window, might prove every bit as reckless as she had feared.
The more dangerous possibility was that he might prove worthy of the trust she had not meant to begin giving him.
More dangerous still, she realized as her pulse gave one inexplicable, disloyal beat at the thought of his mouth curving over some quiet remark meant only for her, was the possibility that trust might not be the only thing beginning between them.