Chapter One #3
“I was assessing the relative quality of the ferns,” she said, and there was a thread of humour in her voice that made him want to pull it, to see what would unravel. “This ballroom has quite a varied collection.”
“Ferns.”
“I have a keen interest in botany.”
“Do you indeed.”
His voice had dropped without his permission, taking on a quality that was far too intimate for a public ballroom. He saw her register it, saw the deepening of her blush, the slight parting of her lips, and felt an answering heat in his own body.
She has never been kissed.
The knowledge came to him with sudden, absolute certainty. This was not the reaction of a woman accustomed to male attention. This was something rawer, more fundamental, the response of a body awakening to sensations it had never experienced.
She was innocent. Truly innocent. Not performing innocence as a strategy, not affecting naivety to intrigue him. She simply had no experience of men, no armour against attraction, no defences against what was happening between them right now.
The realisation should have made him retreat. She was exactly the sort of woman he avoided, the kind whose ruin would be genuine, whose heart could be truly broken. Whatever game he was playing, it needed to stop here.
Instead, he stepped closer still.
“And what have you concluded?” he asked, and his voice came out rougher than intended. “About the ferns?”
“That they are the most sensible inhabitants of this room.” Her voice was slightly unsteady, but she held her ground. “They ask nothing, expect nothing, and provide excellent cover for those of us who find large social gatherings somewhat overwhelming.”
The admission surprised him. It was too honest, too vulnerable, for the conversation they had been having. She was not supposed to show him weakness. She was supposed to maintain the verbal sparring, the careful distance of wit.
“You are overwhelmed?” he heard himself ask.
“I am… unused to London, Your Grace. In Devonshire, one is not required to perform quite so constantly.”
“Perform?”
“Surely you of all people understand performance.”
It was a blade slipped between his ribs, elegant, precise, and uncomfortably accurate. “You believe I perform?”
“I believe everyone here performs, Your Grace. The difference is merely in the quality of the acting.”
“And my acting? How would you rate it?”
“I have not observed enough to form a judgment.” Her eyes met his, and there was something in them he could not quite read. “Though I suspect it is quite accomplished.”
For a long moment, William simply looked at her.
This girl, this country nobody with her ink-stained fingers and her botanical metaphors, had seen through him in five minutes of conversation.
Had identified, with devastating precision, the central fact of his existence: that he was performing, always performing, and had been for so long he was no longer certain what lay beneath.
No one saw through him. He had made certain of that.
And yet here she stood, looking at him as though his masks were made of glass.
“You are a curious creature, Miss Hayfield,” he said softly.
“I do not believe I am curious at all, Your Grace. I believe I am quite ordinary.”
“No.” The word escaped before he could stop it. “No, I don’t think you are.”
He took her hand.
It was an impulse, reckless, uncharacteristic, and the contact of his bare fingers against her ungloved hand sent a shock through his entire body.
Her skin was warm. Soft. Her fingers trembled in his grasp, and when he bowed over her hand, bringing his lips close enough to feel the heat of her skin without quite touching, he heard her sharp intake of breath.
He wanted to kiss her hand properly. He wanted to turn it over and press his lips to her palm, to her wrist, to the flutter of pulse he could feel beneath her skin.
He wanted to pull her closer and discover whether the rest of her was as warm as her fingers, whether she would tremble all over if he touched her properly.
He did none of these things.
But it cost him more than he cared to admit.
“I hope,” he said, and his voice did not sound like his own, “that we shall have occasion to continue this fascinating discussion of botany, Miss Hayfield. I find myself suddenly quite interested in… specimens.”
He released her hand. Stepped back. Turned and walked away before he could do something genuinely foolish.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur.
William performed the expected rituals, dancing with appropriate partners, making appropriate conversation, allowing Lady Chelmsford to press against him during a waltz with all the subtlety of a battering ram.
He smiled. He charmed. He was, by all external measures, exactly the man everyone expected him to be.
But some part of his attention remained fixed on the girl by the ferns.
He watched her laugh at something Miss Thornbury said, a genuine laugh, unguarded, that transformed her face into something approaching lovely.
He watched her decline a second dance with a young buck, her expression polite but firm.
He watched her watching him, once, across the crowded room, and when their eyes met, she looked away again.
Again.
As though his attention were something to be escaped rather than captured.
“You’re still staring,” Worthington observed, appearing at his elbow with two glasses of brandy.
William accepted one and drank deeply. “I am contemplating.”
“Contemplating what? How best to ruin a country innocent?”
“She’s not…” He stopped. Started again. “I have no intention of ruining anyone.”
“Then what is your intention?”
William stared into his brandy, watching the amber liquid catch the candlelight. He did not have an answer. He did not understand his own fascination, why this particular girl, this particular evening, had lodged beneath his skin like a splinter he could not remove.
Perhaps it was simply novelty. He had grown bored with women who wanted him, and here was one who apparently did not. The chase was everything; the capture merely concluded the entertainment.
Then why, asked a voice in his head, can you still feel the warmth of her hand?
He left early. Claimed fatigue, which no one believed, and escaped into his carriage before he could do something he would regret. The streets of London slid past his window, dark and indifferent, and William sat alone with his thoughts.
She had not been performing.
He was almost certain of it now. Whatever masks she wore, they were not the calculated constructions of a woman playing at innocence. She was simply… herself. Uncomfortable, overwhelmed, stubbornly honest in a world that rewarded artifice.
Or, whispered the voice of long experience, she’s simply better at it than the others. Better at seeming genuine. More sophisticated in her manipulation.
His mother had been like that. Beautiful, charming, utterly convincing in her devotion, right up until the moment she’d walked away without looking back.
All women perform, he reminded himself. All of them. The ones who seem real are simply the most dangerous.
This was the truth he had built his life around. The armour he had constructed to protect himself from becoming his father, destroyed by love, hollowed out by trust, a ghost in his own house for the last fifteen years of his life.
William would not be destroyed.
William would not trust.
William would take what pleasure he wanted and offer nothing in return, and if Miss Eliza Hayfield of Devonshire was hurt in the process, well, she had been warned.
This is what he told himself as the carriage stopped before his townhouse. This is what he repeated as he dismissed his valet and stood alone before the window of his bedroom, staring out at the darkened city.
He would forget about her. He would return to his usual pursuits. He would find a widow or a bored wife or anyone who understood the rules of the game he played.
She is nothing, he thought. A country nobody with a sharp tongue and an unfortunate tendency to blush. There are a hundred women more beautiful, more sophisticated, more suited to your tastes.
All of this was true.
None of it explained why, as he finally climbed into bed and closed his eyes, it was not his usual fantasies that filled his mind.
It was brown hair catching candlelight.
It was the tremble of fingers in his grasp.
It was a voice saying surely you of all people understand performance, cutting through every defence he had ever built.
Damn, he thought.
And then, more softly: Who are you, Eliza Hayfield?
He did not sleep well.
And when dawn finally came, grey and unwelcome through his curtains, he knew, with a certainty that settled into his bones like an ache, that he would see her again.
Not because he wanted to.
Because he could not seem to help himself.