Chapter 6
Chapter Six
The breakfast room at Somerset House had been arranged, at Tristan’s precise and prior instruction, for forty-two guests.
The long table was dressed in white damask, the centerpieces an exercise in restrained good taste; white roses and trailing ivy, candles already lit against the grey morning light, the silver laid with the kind of symmetrical perfection that only Mrs. Richards and her considerable force of will could produce on short notice.
It looked, in other words, exactly as he had planned it.
The woman seated to his left had not been in the plan.
He was managing, he thought. Tolerably well, all things considered.
He had shaken hands and accepted congratulations and smiled with sufficient warmth that his great-aunt Cordelia had taken his face between her small gloved hands and told him he looked exactly like his father, which was not a compliment he particularly welcomed but which he received with good grace.
He had guided Imogen through the receiving line with his hand at the small of her back—a detail he had introduced without calculation and which he was now trying very hard not to think about—and she had said precisely the right things to precisely the right people with a naturalness that suggested she had been rehearsing for this morning her entire life.
She was, he was beginning to understand, alarmingly competent and undeniably charming.
He had not yet decided how he felt about that.
“So.”
The voice arrived beside him as he reached for his tea, and Tristan did not need to look up to identify its owner.
He had known Flynn Cavendish for twenty-two years, which was to say he had known him for long enough to recognize the particular note of suppressed hilarity that currently inhabited that single syllable.
“Cavendish,” Tristan said pleasantly. “Do sit down.”
Flynn sat down. He was, as always, the kind of man who made sitting look like a performance—long-limbed, easy, with the slightly irreverent air of someone who had inherited his title young and spent the intervening years deciding that it entitled him to say whatever he liked to whomever he liked, consequence be damned.
He had a pleasant face, which he arranged now into an expression of elaborate innocence.
“Lovely ceremony,” Flynn said.
“Thank you.”
“Bride looked—” He paused, with the timing of a man who had once, briefly, considered the stage. “—different than I remembered.”
“Yes,” Tristan said. He lifted his tea. “I found her improved.”
Flynn regarded him for a long, assessing moment. To his credit, his expression betrayed nothing to the rest of the room. Tristan had always appreciated that about him—whatever Flynn thought or said in private, he understood, in public, the value of discretion.
“When,” Flynn said, very quietly, helping himself to a piece of toast with enormous ease, “were you going to tell me that you had apparently developed an uncontrollable passion for the other one?”
“There was not, as you may imagine, a great deal of opportunity.”
“She’s Eliza Reeding’s friend.”
“Her dearest friend,” Tristan said. “Or so I am reliably informed.”
“And Miss Reeding herself is—?”
“Indisposed.”
“Mm.” Flynn buttered his toast with great attention to the corners. “She eloped.”
It was not a question. Tristan said nothing, which Flynn appeared to take as confirmation.
“Naturally.” Flynn bit into his toast. “So Eliza Reeding has eloped with some unsuitable person, you have arrived at your own wedding breakfast with an entirely different woman on your arm, and you are asking me to believe that this is the result of—what was it you told old Pemberton in the receiving line—’a connection that could not be denied’? ”
“I told Pemberton I had found the lady of my heart. Which is appreciably more dignified.”
“It is,” Flynn allowed, “considerably more than that. It is so far outside the bounds of anything I have ever known you to say or feel or apparently believe in that I am wondering whether I have taken a blow to the head this morning without noticing.”
“I am a complex man,” Tristan said.
Flynn looked at him.
Tristan looked back.
“Tristan.” Flynn set down his toast and dropped his voice to a pitch suited for confessionals.
“You once told Lord Harrowgate—at his daughter’s wedding, I might add, while people were literally exchanging vows—that love matches were the primary mechanism by which otherwise competent men ruined perfectly sound family estates. ”
“I believe the word I used was reliable.”
“You believe—” Flynn pinched the bridge of his nose. “The word.”
“I stand by the sentiment,” Tristan said mildly. “I have simply found that I am not immune to the occasional exception.”
Another silence. Flynn turned his head and looked down the table to where Imogen sat, deep in conversation with his great-aunt Cordelia—rather successfully, by the look of it, given that Cordelia was showing no signs of her usual tendency toward tearful monologue.
As Tristan watched, Imogen said something that made the old woman laugh, and the sound of it carried the length of the table.
He found his own gaze traveling, as it had been doing all morning with the same involuntary, unhelpful persistence, to the soft rise of her bosom above the ivory silk.
The dress still strained, slightly, at its altered seams, a detail he could not seem to stop noticing.
She was, in that gown and in that light, an extraordinary amount of woman.
He looked away. He returned to his tea.
Flynn, he realized, was watching him watch her.
“I will say this,” Flynn began.
“I would very much prefer you did not.”
“She’s stunning,” Flynn said, with the settled appreciation of a man delivering an objective verdict.
“You had no idea what you were passing over, all that time. Half those girls the matchmaking mamas parade around are so malnourished a good November wind would carry them off. Your—” he paused, with a faint, admiring gesture that somehow managed to encompass all of Imogen without actually pointing “—your wife looks as a woman should. With curves. Real ones. The kind a man could actually—”
“Cavendish.” Tristan’s voice came out several degrees cooler than he intended.
Flynn stopped.
There was a short pause during which Tristan set his tea cup down with extreme precision.
“Noted,” said Flynn, in a tone of considerable satisfaction. He reached for his cup. “Well, well.”
“Do not.”
“I have said nothing.”
“You are thinking several things.”
“I am always thinking several things. It is my condition.” Flynn leaned back in his chair and regarded him with an expression that Tristan recognized, and disliked, as genuine warmth.
“I have known you a long time. I have seen you at negotiations and funerals and the occasional catastrophe, and I have never—not once—seen that look on your face when you looked at Eliza Reeding. Or any other woman for that matter.”
Tristan said nothing.
“Whatever the particulars of this morning,” Flynn went on, more quietly now, all theatre set aside, “I think it may have worked out rather in your favor.”
“The jury,” Tristan said, “remains convened.”
Flynn laughed, soft enough for the table, and turned his attention back to his breakfast.
Tristan did not turn his attention back to anything in particular.
He was, with considerable effort, not looking at his wife.
He was also, with marginally less success, not thinking about the particular problem that would present itself this evening—that she was in fact exactly as untouched as she had declared herself, sitting opposite him in the carriage with that steady, furious dignity, and that the same ivory silk that strained now at its seams would require, at some point, to be removed.
He’d never before bedded a virgin.
He picked up his fork.
“You appear to be enjoying yourself.”
He looked up.
Imogen had apparently concluded her conversation with his great-aunt, who had been claimed by a nephew at the far end of the table and was now subjecting him to the reminiscences Tristan had narrowly avoided.
Imogen’s eyes were on her plate, her expression entirely composed, her voice pitched only for the foot of space between them.
“I am not known for enjoyment,” he said.
“You are staring at your fork as though it owes you a personal apology.” She cut a precise slice of ham. “I thought perhaps that was your version of enjoyment.”
“It is my version of restraint.”
“I see.” She lifted her eyes to his—and then, smoothly, performed a small transformation that he suspected was intended to appear to the room as the soft, private look of a woman adoring her husband.
Her expression did not change dramatically.
It was subtle—a slight softening, the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth, a quality of attention that suggested she found him wholly absorbing.
It was, he recognized with some irritation, deeply convincing.
“You are very good at that,” he said.
“I told you. When you grow up with a horde of siblings, you learn to perform emotions on demand.”
“And what emotion are you performing at present?”
“Devotion,” she said simply. “You are my love match, Tristan. Do keep up.”
“Mm.” He turned so that his shoulder angled toward her—a gesture that would read, to the room, as the instinctive leaning of a man who wished to be near his wife. Two could, evidently, play at this. “And should I look—devoted, in return?”
“Ideally.” She took a small sip of her wine. “Though I will confess, from what I have observed of you thus far, devoted may be something of a stretch.”
“What would you suggest as a more natural register?”
“Interested,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “Interested, I think you can manage. You are, at minimum, interested.”
“I am,” he agreed. “Comprehensively.”
He watched her absorb that. The faintest color touched her cheekbones.
“That will do,” she said, with brisk composure.
“Or,” he said, setting down his fork, “I could simply do what Flynn has apparently been observing me do for the past quarter of an hour.”
She glanced at him sidelong. “Which is?”
“Look at you,” he said, entirely straightforwardly, “as though I am thinking about…” He paused, in the manner of a man selecting his words. “The event of the evening.”
The color in her cheeks, which had been faint, became rather less faint.
“That,” she said, after a beat, “might be a little too convincing.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “That is precisely the right pitch. A man does not look at his new wife and think about Parliament.” He reached over and, for the benefit of whatever portion of the table might be watching, lifted her hand from where it lay beside her glass and pressed his thumb briefly to the inside of her wrist—the same wrist he had held in the church, the same betraying pulse he could feel now, quick and unsteady beneath the thin kid leather.
“He looks at her and thinks about his wedding night.”
She held very still.
“And if you would like to know,” he continued, in the same quiet, conversational tone, “precisely what I am thinking about, I would suggest it is this: that gown has been refitted once in haste, and I intend to take considerably more time with the reverse process.”
“Your Grace—”
“Tristan.”
“Tristan.” She retrieved her hand. She did it without haste, and without any visible outward disturbance, and only the small, precise breath she drew gave her away. “You are incorrigible.”
“I have been called worse.” He picked up his fork again. “But you will admit the effect is convincing.”
She turned to look at him then—full on, without the performance of softness or devotion, simply looked at him the way she had looked at him in the church when he had raised the veil, with that same clear, assessing, undaunted gaze.
She swallowed visibly. “It is,” she said, quite steadily. “Very.”
He felt it somewhere below his ribs. Filed it under problems for later, and returned to his breakfast.
Across the table, he was peripherally aware of Flynn lifting his cup with the expression of a man thoroughly pleased with the morning’s entertainment.
Tristan did not dignify it with a glance.