Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The carriage slowed.
Imogen became aware of it gradually—the slight change in the rhythm of the wheels, the horses’ canter easing into a walk—and with it came the sickening recognition that they were nearly there.
The gravel drive of Somerset House would be coming into view around the next bend, and with it, every guest, every well-wisher, every sharp-eyed relation who had sat in that church and now expected to be charmed.
She straightened her spine and reached up to smooth the veil, which was still pinned back over the comb in her hair. Her fingers found it trembling. She pressed them still.
“We shall need a story.”
She had not meant to be the one to say it.
She had rather hoped he would raise the matter.
This was, after all, his household, his guests, his breakfast, and she could simply nod along and acquiesce.
Acquiescence, she was beginning to understand, was not a skill she possessed in any reliable quantity.
Tristan turned from the window. His expression did not shift, but something in his eyes sharpened with what she was coming to recognize as his particular variety of attention—the kind that made one feel examined rather than observed.
“Go on,” he said.
“The guests will expect to be introduced to Eliza. When they are not—when I am the woman on your arm instead—they will notice. They will ask questions.” She kept her voice measured. Practical. “We need an answer prepared before we step out of this carriage.”
“Yes,” he agreed, with the irritating ease of a man who had already thought of this and was merely curious how long it would take her to catch up. “We do.”
She pressed her lips together. “I have been thinking—”
“Have you.” It was not quite a question.
“—that the simplest explanation is the most credible one.” She drew a breath. “We tell them that it was love.”
A silence.
It was not a long silence. It lasted perhaps three seconds. But those three seconds contained within them something she could not quite name—a quality of stillness that was distinct from his previous stillness, heavier, as though the word had struck a surface he had not expected to encounter.
Then he laughed.
It was a short sound, not unkind, but unambiguous in its meaning. “Love.”
“Yes.” She held his gaze. “We tell them that you and I formed a sudden and overwhelming attachment. That Eliza, being the generous creature she is, recognized it and stepped graciously out of the way so that you might—” She paused. “So that we might be together.”
He stared at her.
“It is,” she continued, before he could speak, “a perfectly believable story. It requires no complicated particulars. It accounts for the change of bride without suggesting anything improper about Eliza—she appears nobly selfless rather than scandalously absent—and it places the irregularity squarely at the feet of sentiment, which half of England will forgive immediately and the other half will at least find romantic enough to repeat.”
Tristan said nothing for a moment. Outside, the gates of the Hall appeared through the carriage window—stone pillars, wrought iron, a lodge-keeper already touching his hat.
“You want me,” he said at last, very precisely, “to tell the assembled guests of my wedding breakfast that I was struck, between the betrothal and the altar, by an uncontrollable passion for my bride’s companion.”
“Her dearest friend,” Imogen corrected. “It sounds slightly more plausible that way.”
“It sounds,” he said, “like the plot of a particularly overwrought three-volume novel.”
“Then it will be thoroughly believed. Undoubtedly, half the county has read that novel.”
He turned to look at her fully. There was something in his expression she could not read—not quite exasperation, not quite reluctant calculation, not quite the faint, dangerous flicker of amusement she had learned to watch for.
Some combination of all three, and something below them that she could not yet name.
“You are very composed,” he said, “for a woman who committed fraud at an altar not an hour ago.”
“I find,” she said, “that composure is considerably easier when one has a plan.”
“And before you had the plan?”
She thought of her hands, hidden in her skirts the entire drive. “I was considerably less composed.”
He said nothing. The carriage turned through the gates, and the long pale front of Somerset House appeared at the end of the drive—stone and symmetry and an absurd number of windows catching the morning light, flanked on either side by yew hedges clipped into submission.
“It will not,” he said finally, “hold up with everyone.”
“No,” she agreed. “But it does not need to hold up with everyone. It needs to hold up with the room. Those who question it—” She hesitated.
“Those who know you well, perhaps, they will find their own answers in time. But for today, for this breakfast, we need nothing more than a story that the majority of them want to believe. And people are remarkably willing to believe in love matches, particularly at weddings.”
“How illuminating,” Tristan murmured. “You have clearly given considerably more thought to the practical management of scandal than I have.”
“I have eight siblings,” she said. “It was something of an education.”
Another silence, shorter this time, and different in quality.
The carriage drew to a smooth halt. Through the window she could see the first carriages already arrived, guests already gathered on the broad front steps—silk and morning coats, the bright flash of a woman’s parasol, the small black figure of what she suspected was the bishop.
Tristan reached across and settled his glove over her hand on the seat between them. He did not grip it, merely covered it—a light, deliberate pressure, the kind one might use to still a thing that was in danger of flight.
“You understand,” he said quietly, “that there are people in that house who know me rather well. People who will find the notion of my having fallen headlong into a love match approximately as credible as my having taken up with a circus troupe.”
“Yes.”
“They will not believe it.”
“They will not be able to disprove it,” she said. “Which is rather more useful.”
He looked at her for a moment. The pale grey light from the window made his eyes impossible to categorize—not quite silver, not quite blue, something cool and altogether too attentive.
“A love match,” he repeated. The words came out flat, but not hostile. He appeared to be testing them the way one tests ice before committing one’s weight.
“Madly in love,” she said, and heard the slight, reckless edge in her own voice. “Helplessly so. From the very first moment.” She paused. “That is what they’ll need to hear.”
A faint, thoughtful crease appeared between his brows.
“Eliza will have to be said to have behaved beautifully,” he said. “Graciously. No hint of impropriety or distress.”
“Eliza did behave graciously,” Imogen said. “In her way. She had the grace to remove herself entirely from the situation.”
“Mm.” He appeared to consider this. “It could be worse.”
“It is worse,” she said, with feeling. “We are simply choosing to describe it differently.”
Something shifted in his expression. It was brief—a fraction of a second—but she saw it, the corner of his mouth tucking in on itself, the small involuntary capitulation of a man who had been handed an argument he could not quite refute.
He removed his hand from hers.
“Very well,” he said. He settled back in his seat and cast one brief, assessing look toward the house, where the footmen were already moving toward the carriage door.
“We tell them it was love.” His voice carried no warmth, no softness, no concession beyond the purely logistical.
“A sudden and violent attachment. Eliza acquits herself nobly. We are, against all precedent, the romantic event of the season.”
“Yes,” Imogen said.
“Those who disbelieve it are welcome to their disbelief. As you say, they cannot disprove it.”
“Exactly.”
“And you,” he said, and there was that quality again, that slight, cool edge of something, “will endeavor to look appropriately besotted when the occasion requires it.”
She met his eyes. “I shall do my best.”
“See that you do.” He reached for his gloves and smoothed them with unhurried precision. “I have never been known to inspire that particular emotion in anyone, except for perhaps my mother. I would find it rather difficult to counterfeit convincingly without your assistance.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but he put a gloved finger to her lips.
“There is one problem.”
“Problem?” she asked.
“Indeed. I can’t very well appear to be madly in love with my bride if I’ve never even kissed her properly.”
With that, he leaned forward and took her mouth, slanting his lips across her own. When he swiped his tongue across her plump bottom lip, she gasped. He took the opportunity to slide his tongue into her mouth.
The sensation was not at all as repulsive as she might have guessed had someone told her that a duke would plunge his tongue into her mouth before noon. On the contrary, it was immeasurably pleasurable. Her nipples tightened into hard little peaks, and she found herself gripping her groom’s lapels.
Tentatively, she moved her tongue against his, and he growled in response. Why had none of her sisters told her about this kind of kissing? Certainly, the married ones must all be enjoying such activities every spare moment they had.
When Tristan ended the kiss, she found herself brazenly moving towards him to once again feel his lips.
He chuckled. “That will do,” he said.
Before she could respond—before she could determine whether she had been offered a piece of self-deprecation or a warning or something else entirely—the carriage door opened.
The footman extended his hand.
Tristan descended first, turning back to offer her his arm. The morning light fell full and merciless across his face, and whatever had been in his expression inside the carriage had been replaced, with absolute efficiency, by the particular pleasant blankness of a man entirely at ease in public.
He was, she realized, rather good at this.
She placed her hand in his.
“Smile,” he said, from the corner of his mouth. “You are, after all, madly in love.”
Imogen lifted her chin.
And smiled.