Chapter 3 #2
Annoyance moved across her expression, quick and complicated. “I’m not sure what sort of ideas you have in your head, Your Grace, but you don’t have the authority to—”
“I am not claiming what authority I do or do not possess.” He kept his voice level.
“I am telling you that if you walk back into the Black Boar again, or any establishment in that district that hosts unsanctioned boxing matches, I will consider my obligation to my closest friend and act accordingly. I don’t say this to be difficult. ”
“You do not need to try,” she said pleasantly. “You manage it entirely naturally.”
He let out a long exhale. Oh, she was a witty one indeed, but he would not smile at that.
“Lady Caroline—”
“I will be going again,” she said very simply, as though she was commenting on the weather.
“Not necessarily to that particular establishment, but I will be going.” Her chin was up, and her hazel eyes were entirely clear.
“You may tell my brother if you like. I’ll face the consequences when they arrive.
But I shan’t make a promise I cannot keep. ”
Anthony looked at her, and he thought about the determination with which she had stood her ground in a dark alley long past midnight, in a man’s coat, with her hair loose over her shoulders.
He thought about her voice, and how fervent her tone was when she’d told him about her lifetime of other people’s expectations…
The hidden dread in it when she’d concluded that her Season would end with a man who’d stifle her.
To others, she might have seemed a difficult, even brattish chit.
To him… To him, Lady Caroline was a woman with a lively, beating heart, who yearned for a taste of freedom before she would be schooled into wifehood and motherhood.
And Anthony knew what it felt like to be scrutinized, pressured, and ordered to change himself to fit someone else’s expectations.
Only, he had the ease to act as he pleased in private.
“Then what would you suggest?” he asked. “Since you seem to have given this considerable thought.”
“Come with me.” She said it as though it were the most reasonable proposition.
He stared at her. “Come… with you?”
“If your concern,” she continued, entirely serene, “is the matter of personal safety, then the simplest solution is for you to escort me. You are, by all accounts, a man who can manage himself in… a variety of establishments. So, if you want to keep me out of danger, Your Grace, why don’t you come with me? ”
“No,” he said, without hesitation.
“No?” she repeated, and a beat passed as they stared at each other. “I see. So, your alternative is to simply forbid me?”
“I… I cannot forbid you, but I cannot accompany you, my lady,” he replied.
She pursed her lips. “We are not off to a promising start.” She tilted her head slightly. “I would like to tell you something, if I may.”
He nodded, and then she moved to the window, not quite looking at him, and said, “I have a list.”
“A list?”
“Yes. My friend Laura and I made it together. Six things.” She folded her hands against her skirt; a gesture so studied in its composure that it told him more than he’d need.
“Things we’ve read about. Things that are ordinary if you happen to be a man, and unthinkable if you are not.
” A brief pause. “The boxing match was the first item on the list we wished to see in person.”
“And the others?”
She turned from the window then and met his gaze decidedly. “Attend a university lecture. Gamble at a gaming hell. Visit a fortune teller.” She counted out confidently, but then hesitated. “Paint a… nude figure.”
Anthony said nothing. He kept his expression entirely neutral, which required a degree of effort he chose not to examine.
“And the last,” she said, “is to have a proper, passionate first kiss.”
The room held the silence for a moment. He regarded her, and she regarded him, and neither of them looked away.
“My brother has been arranging suitors,” she continued, her voice even now, stripped of any appeal to sympathy.
“These suitors are men who have done nothing but shut my opinions down, to tell me to smile, for I am most pleasant when I’m smiling, to tell me what I’m supposed to offer to them as wife, but have offered nothing of substance in return. ”
She stopped and let out a quiet breath as she looked away. Anthony knew that pause, the one people made when they stopped themselves because they didn’t want to seem as vulnerable as they were.
He felt a sharp pang in his chest. Not pity, no. Pity was condescending. He didn’t pity Lady Caroline, yet he didn’t want to examine exactly what kind of feeling it was.
Mercifully, she continued, distracting him from the sensation. “I know that I will marry. I know what my life will become. I only want these things first. While they are still possible.”
The room was very quiet again.
Anthony recalled Lewis saying she’d been restless. Restless. He thought about the word, and all the things it covered and all the things it could not quite reach. About what it costs a person to build a cage of their own requirements and then climb into it gracefully.
He knew something about that.
She was watching him with those direct, vivacious eyes, and he recognized the honesty in them. Lady Caroline had spoken honestly, and she was not going to take her words back.
Now, she was simply waiting to see what the world did with her wishes.
Still, she was too reckless to be left alone.
That was the plain fact of it. She would go with or without him, and without him was a considerably more dangerous proposition.
By Jove, he was standing in a morning room in Grayston House applying logic to a problem that didn’t require logic to reach its inevitable conclusion.
He was aware of this, yet it did not change the conclusion.
He leaned in, aware of the tightness in his jaw. He had changed his position, but that didn’t mean he liked it.
“All right,” he said at last.
Caroline blinked once, surprise blatant in her stare. “All right?”
“All right.” He straightened, then nodded. “I’ll help you through your list.”
Her lips parted, and Anthony decided that he did not notice that. He could not.
“If you insist on chasing scandal, sweetheart… then you will do it under my watch,” he continued.
Caroline bit her lip just then. Another thing which he pretended not to notice.
Instead, he held her eyes, smoothing every reaction from his features. “You will do exactly as I say, when I say it. You will not deviate, you will not negotiate, and you will not run off into dark alleys without me. Agreed?”
Something lit in her face, fast and warm, like a struck match. She pressed her lips together, clearly making an effort to contain her excitement.
“Agreed,” she said.
He held her gaze a beat longer than was strictly necessary, and a part of him wondered just what she’d look like free of this composure. How she’d look if she were completely and utterly free.
That was a very dangerous thought.
And so, Anthony put his hat on and showed himself out before he had the time to think about what he had just agreed to do.