Chapter 1 #2
His mouth curved. “Have we fallen into formality?”
“Society has taught me that gravity improves a woman’s prospects.”
“Then society is a menace.”
The laugh escaped her before she meant to allow it. “You are in a charitable humor this evening.”
“No. Merely accurate.” His gaze rested on her a beat longer than custom strictly required. “What has happened?”
There was no need to ask what he meant. Thomas had always possessed an alarming ability to hear what had not yet been said.
“Nothing has happened.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Eleanore sighed. “Very little, then, except the usual maternal concern that I have somehow bungled the art of becoming wanted.”
Something in his face altered—not dramatically. Thomas was not a dramatic man, but the warmth sharpened into something quieter and more dangerous.
“Who,” he said, “has been speaking to you in such terms?”
“No one you may challenge in the street, if that is where your imagination has leapt.”
“It had not leapt so far as the street.”
“How reassuring.”
“It had, however, formed a distinct opinion.”
She ought to have been soothed by the note beneath the words. Instead she felt that absurd pressure beneath her ribs again, only this time less like humiliation and more like an ache seeking relief. It made her feel perilously close to honesty.
Thomas glanced toward Lady Wingate, then back at her. “Come away from the doorway.”
He moved slightly aside as he spoke, not taking her arm, not presuming, yet making it clear he expected her to follow.
She did. He drew her toward a quieter stretch of wall near an arrangement of white roses and greenery, just removed enough from the room’s center to allow conversation without impropriety.
The musicians had not yet begun. Around them, guests settled into clusters of candlelight and silk and polished conversation. The room smelled faintly of beeswax and hothouse blooms.
Thomas waited, one hand settling lightly at his back again, his expression giving away nothing except attention.
The patience of it made pretense feel childish.
“My mother means well,” Eleanore said at last. “Which is, I think, what makes her observations so exhausting.”
“What observations?”
“That I am amiable without being memorable. Pretty enough, perhaps, but not with sufficient force to command sustained notice. Too inclined to smile and yield and vanish before any gentleman has had time to think of me twice.” She kept her gaze fixed on one of the white roses rather than on him. “I paraphrase. Only slightly.”
Thomas was silent long enough that she was forced to look at him.
His expression had gone very still.
And beneath the stillness, unmistakably, was anger.
Not at her.
At the injury.
The knowledge of it moved through her with alarming immediacy. Warmth broke over her skin in a light, bewildering rush.
She tried to laugh. “There. I have now made myself tiresome as well as forgettable. A remarkable evening.”
“Eleanore.”
The quietness of her name in his mouth did more to steady her than any soothing speech could have done.
He leaned one shoulder lightly against the wall behind him, but his attention remained wholly fixed upon her.
“Do you know what your greatest fault is?” he asked.
She blinked. “Must we proceed to an accounting?”
“Yes.”
“How merciless.”
“How useful.”
“Very well, then,” she said, lifting her chin. “Pronounce sentence.”
His eyes held hers. “You retreat before anyone has the chance to come to you.”
The words landed with humiliating accuracy. She felt them almost physically, like a hand laid without permission upon the weakest place in her.
“I do not retreat.”
“No?”
“No.”
He looked, maddeningly, unconvinced. “You soften every opinion before you speak it. You smile before anyone has earned it. You make room for other people’s comfort before they have done anything at all to merit the sacrifice.”
She stared at him.
This was not consolation. It was worse. It was truth.
And because it was truth, she could feel it strike every weak place in her at once. Of course he would see it. Thomas had known her too long to be deceived by the softened version she showed the rest of the world.
“That is monstrous,” she said faintly.
One eyebrow lifted.
“It is observable.”
A pulse began to beat at the base of her throat. “So I am to blame for my own neglect?”
His expression sharpened. “That is not what I said.”
“It is near enough.”
“No.” For the first time, his voice lost some of its dry ease. “I said you make it too easy for fools to underestimate the force of you.”
The force of you.
No one had ever spoken of her as if force belonged naturally anywhere in her composition. The phrase struck somewhere deeper than vanity.
He saw that he had struck home. She could tell by the brief tension in his mouth, by the way he exhaled and seemed, for a moment, to reconsider what he had allowed himself to say.
Then, more quietly, he added, “You are not lacking, Eleanore. You are merely too well-bred to elbow your way into the notice of idiots.”
She laughed then—really laughed—and the relief of it was so immediate she nearly loved him for it.
“A savage judgment.”
“A moderate one.”
“And the remedy?”
His gaze lowered for the briefest instant to her mouth before returning to her eyes. The movement was so slight she might have imagined it.
Except she did not think she had.
“The remedy,” he said, “is not to become someone else.” He paused, and she watched his hand flex once where it rested against his back. “It is to stop helping other people misread you.”
The room had become strangely narrow.
She was aware of the music stands at the far end, of candlelight reflecting in gilt mirrors, of the murmur of a dozen conversations around them.
And yet all of it seemed to have receded behind the unnerving fact of Thomas looking at her as if this conversation mattered too much.
Her pulse beat hard enough that she could feel it at the base of her throat.
“Are you giving me instruction now?” she asked.
“I may be.”
“How officious of you.”
“How charitable.”
Her pulse gave another hard, foolish beat.
The question rose before she had fully decided to ask it.
“Will you help me, then?”
For the first time that evening, Thomas looked caught off guard.
“To do what?”
“To stop retreating,” she said. “To stop making matters easy for every dull gentleman in London.” The attempt at lightness fell away by degrees. “If you can see the problem so clearly, perhaps you can teach me how to mend it.”
He stared at her.
It was an outrageous request. She knew it. A lady did not ask a gentleman—least of all one who had known her nearly half her life—to instruct her in how to draw male admiration. It was absurd. Improper in spirit if not in letter. Precisely the sort of scheme sensible women avoided.
And yet, standing before Thomas under the candlelight, with all their years of ease and familiarity between them, it seemed the only honest thing she had said all day.
“Eleanore,” he said again.
There was something in his voice now she could not safely name.
She forced herself to answer lightly. “You need not look as though I have invited you to treason.”
“I am deciding whether you have.”
“I assure you my intentions are perfectly peaceable.”
“That is what concerns me.”
She laughed despite herself. “You are insufferable.”
“And you,” he said, “are asking for dangerous assistance with far too calm an expression.”
That ought to have warned her.
Instead it only made her want to press further.
“Well?”
He looked at her for a long moment, and in that pause she had the strange impression that something larger than either of them had shifted, though neither had moved enough to account for it.
Then he said, “Very well.”
The words were simple. Their effect was not.
Her breath caught. “Very well?”
“I will help you.”
Victory should not have felt so much like stepping onto uncertain ground. Yet a little thrill of alarm moved through her all the same.
“On one condition,” he added.
“Of course.”
“You must do precisely as I say.”
Eleanore stared at him. “That sounds unbearably tyrannical.”
“It is merely practical.”
“I have observed that men often use those two words interchangeably.”
His mouth twitched. “Do you wish for my help or not?”
She ought to have hesitated.
Instead she said, “I do.”
The answer came too quickly. She knew it. His eyes told her he knew it too.
Something unreadable flickered there, low and brief and dangerous.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “At four. Come to Oakford House. Clara will provide a respectable setting, Lydia will watch me as though I am likely to corrupt the draperies, Eden will assume I have taken leave of my senses, and I shall begin the impossible task of persuading you that half the ton is less formidable than it appears.”
She tried to rally herself. “Only half?”
“I pride myself on moderation.”
The musicians lifted their instruments. The first notes of the evening stirred through the room.
Thomas straightened.
And because he did, the moment altered. Propriety returned to the air between them like a door quietly closed.
“What is the first lesson?” she asked before he could step away.
He looked at her.
This time there was no amusement in his face at all.
“Stop making yourself so easy to leave.”
The words struck low and deep. His voice was low, but it carried the force of something said less for effect than because he could not help meaning it. For one suspended instant she could do nothing but stand there and feel them beneath her breastbone.
Before she could answer, Lady Wingate approached with a gentleman at her side—a pleasant, mild-looking man of entirely unobjectionable appearance—and all at once the room rushed back into full, glittering existence.
“Lady Eleanore,” her mother said, “Mr. Sutterby has been hoping to secure the first set.”
Mr. Sutterby bowed.
Eleanore responded as she must. She smiled. She accepted.
When she looked back, Thomas had stepped away.
Not far.
Only enough to restore the shape of the evening.
Yet she felt his absence at once, as distinctly as if the room had lost a source of heat.
As she took her place for the dance, she found that she could scarcely have said what color Mr. Sutterby’s eyes were, though he stood directly opposite her.
She knew instead the exact timbre of Thomas’s voice when he was trying not to reveal too much, the line of contained anger that had appeared in his face on her behalf, and the dangerous stillness with which he had agreed to help her.
Stop making yourself so easy to leave.
The set began.
Outwardly, the evening proceeded like any other. She danced. She smiled. She said the proper things. But beneath it all ran a sharp new current of feeling she had not known how to fear until now.
For the first time in months—perhaps years—Eleanore did not feel resigned.
She felt altered, as though some careful seam in her life had given way and let in light.
Somewhere across the candlelit room, Thomas Thornton watched her with the attention of a man who had just made a grave mistake and meant, nonetheless, to keep every word he had given.