Chapter 3 #2
He was not always looking at her, but often enough that she felt it, and when she turned and found his gaze across a room full of people, it was like walking into something solid and having to correct her balance.
He is watching me because he thinks I am Eleanor, she reminded herself. He is watching because he is suspicious of Eleanor. It has nothing to do with me.
This was a perfectly rational thought, and she was going to keep thinking it.
By half eleven, her nerves had reached a pitch that she did not think she could sustain much longer without something giving way.
She worked her way gradually toward the edge of the room, paused to exchange a few words with a group near the doors to the terrace, and then, when no one was looking directly at her, she slipped through them and out into the night.
He had been watching her all evening.
Alexander was not entirely sure when the unease had begun. It was somewhere between the second dance and the supper interval though he could not have said precisely what had unsettled him.
Eleanor had performed well enough. She had moved through the room with ease, spoken to the right people, and filled her dance card as he had instructed. By any observable measure, the evening had proceeded exactly as he had intended.
And yet...
As he watched his sister laugh at something Lord Ashworth’s youngest son said, a thought nudged the back of his mind.
She is taller, and that is not due to shoes.
He had noticed it at the top of the staircase and accepted the explanation readily enough.
Eleanor was prone to theatrical choices, and the shoes were not impossible, but the thought had not quite left him.
Nor had the stillness. Eleanor was not a still person.
She moved through rooms the way she moved through conversations with an energy that sometimes exhausted him.
Tonight, she was contained, somehow. Present but careful, and Eleanor had never once been careful in her life.
Alexander set down his glass on a nearby table.
He was overreacting. He was a man who had spent ten years anticipating problems, and he was applying that habit where it was not needed.
Eleanor was simply on her best behavior, which was what he had asked of her, and he ought to be grateful for it rather than standing here manufacturing reasons for suspicion.
He looked across the room.
Where did she go?
He scanned the ballroom once, quickly, the dancers, the groups near the windows, the people clustered around the supper table, and she was not among any of them.
The doors to the terrace stood slightly open which they had not been a few minutes ago, and Alexander was moving before he had consciously decided to move.
The terrace was empty. He crossed it without stopping and went down the steps into the gardens, and there, further along the path than she should have been, moving fast and away from the house in the direction of the far gate, was the white figure of his sister.
She is meeting him here? The damned chit! The certainty landed in his chest like something cold. She had arranged it tonight, here, with two hundred of London’s finest in his ballroom not thirty yards away.
“Eleanor.”
She did not stop; she only walked faster which told him everything he needed to know.
Alexander moved after her, jaw set and a very controlled anger building steadily behind it.
He was not a man who shouted. He had never needed to.
But Eleanor knew his voice well enough to recognize when he meant something, and she was choosing to ignore it.
That choice was going to have consequences she would not enjoy.
Then she ran.
Alexander stopped for precisely half a second, surprised, because Eleanor had never in her life actually run from him, and then he followed because apparently this evening was determined to exhaust every resource of patience he possessed.
The path curved, and the figure ahead of him was faster than he had expected, but he caught up to her. As he was reaching for her shoulder, she stumbled forward before he could make contact. His body moved entirely without instruction.
He caught her around the waist, both of them jolting with the impact of it, and for a moment, neither of them moved.
His arm was locked around her, and she was breathing hard, and the whole situation was so far beyond what he had imagined his evening would contain that he had not yet caught up to it.
Then he registered, with a confusion that took a moment to resolve itself, that the figure in his arms was definitely not Eleanor. There was also a scent that was not his sister’s, a detail so small and so certain that it cut through everything else with startling clarity.
With his arm still around her waist, Alexander turned her to face him, and to his surprise, she didn’t resist.
He reached up and pulled the mask away.
The face that looked up at him in the darkness was not his sister’s.
He knew it immediately and completely: the line of it, the eyes, the particular stillness with which she was looking back at him. He had last seen that face across his drawing room two days ago when it had been considerably less frightened and considerably more combative.
Lady Frances Pembroke.
“You,” he rasped, his heart pounding. “Where is my sister?”