Chapter 2
Emma’s fingertips traced the cold edge of her silver fork as she surveyed the dining room.
Light splintered from the chandelier, fracturing across the mahogany table in dazzling pinpricks that made her eyes water.
She shifted forward in her chair, the silk upholstery whispering beneath her, careful to maintain the half-inch gap between her back and the ornate carving that pressed against her shoulder blades whenever she relaxed.
Each breath came shallow and measured against the unyielding pressure of whalebone.
A footman leaned between guests to pour wine, his sleeve brushing against the towering arrangement of lilies.
The petals shuddered, releasing a fresh wave of perfume that coated her tongue with a sickly film.
It was a beautiful room, an opulent room, and she had never felt more like a trespasser.
Across the table, her brother Emmett fiddled with his cravat, his expression as strained as her own.
Poor Emmett, a baron more comfortable with ledgers and wood planes than with the delicate architecture of society small talk.
Beside him, his fiancée, Lucy Pembroke, was a vision of pale, romantic loveliness, her gaze fixed adoringly on him.
And beside Lucy, a thundercloud in mauve silk, sat her mother, Lady Brackenfeld, whose pinched face suggested she was enduring the dinner only through sheer force of will.
It was their unhappy union that brought them all to Brighton. A place away from London to have a quiet, more intimate wedding for the reclusive Baron Cresthaven and his young bride.
As much as Emma disliked her brother’s soon to be mother-in-law, she felt exactly like the grimace permanently affixed to Lady Brackenfeld’s drooping features.
The weight of the family’s future, of restoring the Goode name from the mire of their father’s scandals, rested on this match. Emma could feel the pressure of it in the air, heavier than the scent of roasted meat and too many competing perfumes.
The conversation, thankfully, did not require her participation.
It eddied around her, a dull murmur of gossip and pleasantries, until one of the men—a baronet with a florid face and an opinion on everything—began pontificating on the Corn Laws.
He spoke with the unshakeable confidence of a man who has never missed a meal in his life about the necessities of keeping bread prices high.
“…a matter of protecting our landowners,” he boomed, gesturing with his fork. “It is the very bedrock of our national prosperity.”
Emma listened, her stewed squab growing cold on her plate. She had read the pamphlets, the arguments from the manufacturing districts, the accounts of families in Manchester who could barely afford a loaf. Her fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass.
“But surely,” she said, her voice clear and carrying in a momentary lull, “a prosperity built on the starvation of the laboring class is no prosperity at all? It is a sickness in the nation’s accounts.”
A sudden, profound silence descended upon the table. Forks paused halfway to mouths. Lady Brackenfeld’s nostrils flared. Emma felt a dozen pairs of eyes turn to her, not with interest, but with a kind of horrified shock, as if a horse had just offered an opinion on the sherry.
Pru’s lips compressed to a single, bloodless line.
Then, a gentle pressure on Emma’s arm.
Honoria. Nora.
Her raven-haired sister, who had ruled the family with a velvet-gloved iron fist since the scandal broke, leaned close. Her perfume, a subtle and expensive lavender, was a stark contrast to the lilies. Her voice was a low, urgent whisper, meant for Emma alone.
“Emma, dear,” she murmured, her tone infused with a genuine, painful concern that was somehow worse than anger.
“You know I adore your opinions on the state of the world.” She paused, her grip tightening almost imperceptibly on Emma’s forearm.
“It’s only…this wedding is so vital, Emmett fears one misplaced word could bring it all down around our ears.
Please, darling, for his sake. Try to be…
be less…less…you know. Just for this week. ”
The words struck Emma with the force of a physical blow.
Less.
Less herself.
A request to erase the very substance of her being. To sand down her sharp edges, to quiet her inconvenient thoughts, to become one of the smiling, silent, sibilant women who populated this world.
A hot, furious shame washed through her, so potent it threatened to choke her. Blood rose in her cheeks, a traitorous blush broadcasting her humiliation to the entire room.
She yearned to stand up, to throw her napkin on the table, to stride out of this gilded cage and back to the honest world of mud and horses and open sky of Fairhaven.
Instead, she drew a breath, forced her lips into a brittle approximation of a smile, and looked directly at the eldest Goode sister.
“But who would be the family’s designated scandal-maker, Nora?
” she quipped, her voice tight with defensive irony.
“It seems the position has been vacated recently, and I do hate to see an idle opportunity.”
Mercy, who had been watching the entire exchange with eyes that missed nothing, coughed violently into her wine glass, her shoulders shaking with what was clearly not a respiratory ailment.
She raised the glass to her lips to hide a grin, her azure eyes sparkling with wicked amusement over the rim.
“A position most recently held by me,” she chuckled.
A single, defiant note of support in a symphony of disapproval.
Emmaline smiled ruefully at her sister.
The conversation resumed its flow, but for Emmaline, the current had shifted, leaving her stranded on an island of misery.
She retreated into herself, a spectator at her own family’s dinner party.
She watched Mercy charm the florid-faced baronet, her wit a bright, sharp thing that deflected his pomposity without giving offense.
She saw Felicity engaged in a quiet, intense conversation with a scholarly gentleman, her amber eyes alight with intellectual fervor.
Rosaline chatted about astronomy with their neighbor, the Earl of Wheeldon.
Her beloved siblings… They navigated these treacherous waters with such inherent skill, while she, Emma, could only ever seem to crash against the rocks.
Nora’s careful words echoed in her mind—be less—and a cold knot of despair tightened in her stomach.
She was tracing the pattern of her water glass with a fingertip, lost in thought, when the dining room doors banged open and the butler cleared his throat with enough drama to warrant an audience.
“Her Grace, the Duchesse de la Coeur.”
The room froze, as if the very announcement had doused all conversation in a bucket of ice.
Emma looked up, the name turning to ash in her mouth.
Amélie Beauchamp, the Duchesse de la Coeur.
She was all potent essence, her age distilled into grace rather than whittled into bitterness.
Her gown was the color of a midnight sky, a deep, fathomless blue silk that whispered against the floor and seemed to drink the candlelight.
It was cut with a daring simplicity that spoke of Parisian ateliers and absolute confidence.
Dark hair, the color of polished jet, was swept up in an elegant style, secured by a single, ornate pin that looked carved from a magic wand.
She moved with the deliberate, fluid agility of a dancer, her posture straight, her shoulders set with a poise that felt less like training and more like an innate claim to the space she occupied.
Inflate your lungs, Emma ordered her traitorous body.
She simply couldn’t when she looked at the duchesse.
The high cheekbones, the olive tint of her skin, the knowing, almost sorrowful curve of her full lips.
But it was her eyes that seized Emma’s attention—dark, expressive, and intelligent, holding a hint of amused weariness, as if she had seen all the world’s follies and decided to be entertained by them rather than dismayed.
The duchesse’s gaze swept the room, a cool, assessing glance that acknowledged everyone and lingered on no one.
Until Emma.
Not a glance, nor a glare, and yet it landed with devastating physical impact.
A jolt, sharp and electric, shot through Emma’s body, from the base of her spine to the tips of her fingers.
A dizzying heat bloomed in her cheeks, a furious, mortifying blush that had nothing to do with her earlier gaffe and everything to do with the woman standing in the doorway.
Her pulse, which had been a sullen thud, began to hammer against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Emma very carefully made a dedicated study of the congealed sauce on her uneaten squab, but the image of the duchesse was burned onto the inside of her eyelids.
The physical reaction was so violent, so involuntary, it terrified her.
It was accompanied by a familiar, sickening wave of shame, the old, secret horror she had spent years burying, pretending it did not exist.
This feeling—this breathless, consuming awareness of a woman—was her deepest, most guarded flaw.
And this continental stranger had unearthed it with a single look.
The duchesse was seated, her placement at the host’s right causing a minor shuffling of the other guests as she made lovely apologies for her tardiness.
A tardiness that might have been constructed to make just such an entrance?
Emma risked a glance from beneath her lashes.
She couldn’t stop herself. She watched as the duchesse unfurled her napkin with a quiet economy of movement.
She watched the long, elegant line of her throat as she sipped her wine.
She noted the strength in her hands, the fingers long and capable, not fragile and ornamental.
Emma watched, transfixed, as the duchesse inclined her head to her sister Pru, then to Nora, before allowing her gaze to sweep the length of the table. It passed over Mercy—who smiled with genuine delight—over Felicity—who nearly dropped her pen—and finally landed on Emma.
The contact was brief, but it detonated something inside her, a shock so sudden she nearly toppled her glass.
The duchesse’s eyes were an unplaceable color, neither blue nor green nor gray but a shifting amalgam of all three, and when they fixed on Emma, it felt as though every hidden, shameful part of herself had been laid bare.
Lord, but she was breathtaking. The very act of breathing the same air felt both profane and exhilarating. Emma felt large, clumsy, her practical dress a sack, her calloused hands objects of grotesque utility. How could she possibly eat, chew, swallow, in the presence of such a creature?
“What interesting conversation have I so rudely imposed upon?” the duchesse asked in a voice dripping with unapologetic honey.
The baronet, his face even more flushed, resumed his political discourse. “Your Grace, we were just discussing the necessity of the Corn Laws for national stability. I’m not certain you’d have an opinion on the matter.”
The duchesse smiled, a slow, captivating curve of her lips.
She did not look at him, but at the flame of a nearby candle, as if it were a more interesting conversationalist. “Ah, yes. The stability of the roof, maintained by cracking the foundations,” she said, her voice a low melody with the ghost of a French accent.
“A most peculiar theory of nationalistic political architecture, is it not? So ubiquitous it’s almost boring. ”
The words were almost identical in sentiment to what Emma had said.
Yet where Emma’s had been a stone, thrown bluntly into the placid pond of conversation, the duchesse’s were a perfectly skipped pebble, creating elegant, widening ripples of meaning.
The wit was effortless, the observation lethal, the delivery a masterpiece of social grace.
Emma felt the last of her composure shatter. To be so clumsy, and then to see her own clumsy thought rendered with such exquisite, devastating perfection by the very woman who had just electrified her to her soul—it was unendurable.
How, when she prided herself on being a callused, imperturbable woman, did she become a raw, open nerve around the duchesse?
“If you will excuse me,” she murmured, her voice a strangled whisper that was lost in the ensuing polite laughter. She pushed her chair back, the legs scraping harshly against the floor. “The heat… I am not feeling quite the thing.”
She did not wait for a response. She fled, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs, escaping the opulent room, escaping her family, escaping the terrifying, magnificent presence of the Duchesse de la Coeur.