Chapter One #2
“Our eyes met. She looked away.” William could hear the bemusement in his own voice and did not bother to hide it. “When was the last time that happened?”
“I… cannot recall.” Worthington’s brow furrowed. “Lady Rutherford at the Devereaux ball, perhaps?”
“Lady Rutherford is sixty-three and nearly blind.”
“Still. She did look away.”
“Because she couldn’t see me, Worthington. This girl saw me perfectly well. She simply chose not to continue looking.”
The concept was so foreign that William found himself turning it over in his mind like a puzzle box, searching for the mechanism that would reveal its secrets.
Women did not look away from him. They looked at him, with hunger, with calculation, with fear, with challenge, but they looked.
His attention was a commodity, and anyone who received it understood its value.
Except, apparently, Miss Hayfield of Devonshire.
“Perhaps she didn’t recognise you,” Worthington offered.
“Everyone recognises me.”
“Perhaps she’s not interested in dukes.”
“Everyone is interested in dukes.”
“Perhaps…” Worthington stopped, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Perhaps she’s simply not interested in you.”
The suggestion should have been amusing. Instead, it landed with unexpected weight.
Not interested in him.
The idea was preposterous. William knew exactly what he looked like, exactly what he had to offer, exactly why women found him compelling.
He was handsome, devastatingly so, according to more than one discarded mistress, and wealthy beyond measure and possessed of one of the oldest titles in England.
He was charming when he chose to be, witty when the situation demanded it, and skilled in arts that young ladies were not supposed to know existed.
No woman was “not interested” in him. They might pretend disinterest. They might calculate the advantages of appearing aloof. But underneath the performance, they were always interested.
Weren’t they?
He looked at Miss Hayfield again. She was speaking to one of the other girls now, Miss Thornbury, if he wasn’t mistaken, nodding along to whatever tedious conversation was occurring while her eyes continued their detached survey of the room.
She did not look in his direction again.
Perhaps it’s a strategy, he thought. Perhaps she’s been advised that indifference intrigues. Perhaps she’s playing a longer game than the others.
This was the most logical explanation. Women were performers, every one of them. His mother had taught him that lesson early, and the years since had only confirmed it. The appearance of sincerity was simply another mask, sometimes more sophisticated than the obvious ones, but a mask nonetheless.
Miss Hayfield was probably performing right now. Pretending to be uninterested because she understood that his interest was aroused by what he couldn’t easily have.
And yet.
Something about her didn’t fit the theory. The way she held herself. The expression on her face when she thought no one was watching. The complete absence of the subtle positioning, the angled shoulders and lifted chins, that characterised women who wanted to be noticed.
She genuinely seemed to wish she were elsewhere.
“I am going to speak to her,” William heard himself say.
Worthington choked on his champagne. “You are what?”
“The girl. Miss Hayfield. I am going to introduce myself.”
“Will, she’s a debutante. First Season. Respectable family. Not your usual—”
“My usual has grown tedious.” William set down his champagne glass and straightened his cuffs. “Perhaps I require variety.”
“Variety in the form of innocent young ladies is the sort of variety that ends in marriage or scandal. Neither of which you want.”
“I have no intention of marrying her.” William’s voice was dry. “Or ruining her. I simply wish to discover why she looked away.”
“That seems like a dangerous curiosity.”
“All curiosities are dangerous. That’s what makes them interesting.”
He left Worthington spluttering and made his way across the ballroom.
The crowd parted for him as it always did.
He registered the attention, the whispers, the flutter of fans, the careful repositioning of ambitious mamas, and dismissed it as background noise.
His focus was fixed on the girl by the ferns, who was still holding her lemonade with an expression of mild suffering and had not once glanced in his direction.
Up close, she was… interesting.
Not beautiful, as he had already established.
But there was something compelling about her face that he had not been able to see from across the room.
Intelligence, perhaps, in the way her eyes moved.
Or character, in the stubborn set of her jaw.
She was not blank and pleasant like so many of the debutantes he encountered.
There was something there, something active and engaged beneath the surface.
She was also, he noticed, not wearing gloves. She had removed them at some point, and her bare hands cradled the lemonade glass with an informality that was technically improper and somehow utterly charming.
There was an ink stain near her thumb.
A woman who wrote things down. How novel.
“Miss Hayfield?”
She startled. Actually startled, her lemonade sloshing dangerously, and she turned to face him with wide eyes and flushing cheeks. The blush was immediate and uncontrollable, he could see it spreading from her face down to the neckline of her gown, and something shifted in William’s chest.
That blush was not performed.
He would stake his entire fortune on it.
“I believe we have not been introduced,” he continued, watching her with an attention that felt suddenly more focused than it had been in years. “But I observed you from across the room and found myself quite unable to resist the urge to remedy that deficiency. I am Hollowshade.”
He watched her process the name. Watched the flicker of recognition, the brief calculation, the decision being made behind those brandy-brown eyes. She was not stupid, that much was immediately clear. She knew who he was. She knew what his approach meant, in the language of the ton.
And she did not simper. Did not flutter. Did not assume any of the poses he had expected.
She curtsied, proper, precise, betraying the hours of practice that had gone into its execution, and met his eyes directly.
“Miss Eliza Hayfield. And I am not certain, Your Grace, that propriety permits us to converse without a formal introduction.”
It was a challenge. A gentle one, wrapped in politeness, but a challenge nonetheless. She was pushing back, and she was doing it to him, and William felt something spark in his chest that he had not felt in a very long time.
“Propriety,” he repeated, letting amusement colour his voice. “Do you find yourself much concerned with propriety, Miss Hayfield?”
“I find myself much concerned with avoiding scandal, Your Grace. Which I am given to understand amounts to the same thing.”
“Ah.” His lips curved. “You have been warned about me.”
She did not flinch. Did not look away. “I have been warned about rakes in general, Your Grace. You are merely… a specific instance of a general category.”
William stared at her.
And then he laughed.
It was not the practised chuckle he deployed for social occasions. It was an actual laugh, surprised, genuine, escaping before he could contain it. When had anyone last surprised a laugh out of him? He could not remember.
“A specific instance of a general category,” he repeated. “I do not believe anyone has ever described me thus.”
“Then perhaps your acquaintance has been insufficient in natural philosophers.”
“My acquaintance has been deficient in a great many things.” He held her gaze, and something electric passed between them, a current of awareness that made his skin prickle. “Tell me, Miss Hayfield, what do the natural philosophers say about my… category?”
“They say that specimens of your type are best observed from a safe distance.” Her chin lifted slightly, and he saw a flash of spirit beneath the proper exterior. “Preferably behind glass.”
“And yet here you stand. Without any glass between us at all.”
He stepped closer. It was a calculated move, one he had made a thousand times, but when her breath caught, he felt the impact in his own chest. A sympathetic response. An involuntary reaction. As though her body’s response to his proximity had somehow become his own.
This was not how seduction usually felt.
“I was not aware that you were approaching,” she said, and her voice was slightly breathless in a way that sent heat curling through his belly. “Had I been, I would certainly have sought appropriate protective barriers.”
“Ah. So your disengagement was not a strategy.” Something loosened in his chest, relief, perhaps, though he was not certain why. “You genuinely wished to avoid my attention.”
“Is that so surprising?”
“In my experience, Miss Hayfield, young ladies at balls do not generally avoid the attention of dukes.”
“Then perhaps your experience has been deficient in ladies capable of independent observation.”
She was magnificent.
The thought rose unbidden, and William shoved it aside with something approaching alarm. He did not think women were magnificent. He thought them beautiful, occasionally clever, frequently tedious. But magnificent implied admiration, and admiration implied respect, and respect implied…
He did not finish the thought.
“You are not what I anticipated,” he said instead.
“I cannot imagine what you anticipated, Your Grace, given that we had not met.”
“That is precisely my point.” He allowed himself to study her, the scatter of freckles across her nose, the ink stain on her thumb, the way her eyes met his without the coy evasion he had come to expect.
“I saw you across the room, standing apart, watching the crowd as though it were a curiosity rather than a society you belonged to. You looked… distinctly unimpressed.”