Chapter 23
He found Cecily near the windows at the edge of the ballroom at half past ten, briefly between conversations, looking at the room with the expression she had when she was thinking about something.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” he said.
She turned. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m merely making an observation.”
“Lady Pemberton has introduced me to nine people in the last hour. Three of them were very kind. Two were curious. The rest were measuring me for something I haven’t identified yet.”
“Standard proportion,” he drawled. “For this room.”
“Is it always like this?”
“It’s particularly like this tonight.” He looked at her. “You’re doing well.”
“I know.” She gave him a cheeky grin. “I’ve been doing well since I came into the party and you went into defense mode.”
He looked at her. She looked back at him with an arched eyebrow.
“I didn’t–” he began.
“You did,” she cut him off. “It was very gratifying. I decided not to mention it.”
“And yet…”
“And yet here we are.” She turned back to the room and glanced at him sideways. “It isn’t as bad as I half expected it to be.”
He looked at her.
She was smiling, and he thought—with the helpless clarity of a thought that arrived before he could intercept it—that he would do a great deal to keep that smile on her face.
“Dance with me,” he demanded.
She turned back to him, looking surprised, as if it wasn’t expected for couples to dance at a ball. But then she quickly schooled her features into calm.
“All right,” she said.
William had danced a hundred waltzes in rooms like this one and had never once thought about his hands.
He thought about his hands now, the one on her waist and the one holding hers. He thought about the precise distance of a proper waltz, which was close and not close enough.
He was aware of both facts and found the combination instructive.
She danced well. Of course, she danced well. She did most things well, and the ones she did badly, she did with enough conviction that it barely counted.
“You’re quiet,” she noted.
“I’m dancing.”
“You’re capable of both simultaneously. I’ve seen you.”
He looked down at her. The candlelight caught the blue of her gown, the earrings she wore, and the slight shimmer on her perfectly shaped lips. Her eyes were very clear.
“Do you know?” she asked quietly.
“Do I know what?”
“Why I walked alone that morning. In Brighton.”
“No, tell me.” He pulled her a little closer than the dance warranted.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked past his shoulder at the room.
“Beatrice and I had been up since four,” she said. “The baby was restless. And Beatrice…” A slight pause. “Beatrice had been talking to me about Mr. Alderton.”
“Who? A suitor?”
“One of several,” she replied. “Though she was particularly persistent about Alderton. He was very well-regarded. Excellent estate in Wiltshire. Kind face.” She mentioned each qualification as though reading from a list. “She wasn’t wrong about any of it. That was the problem.”
“Then what was the problem?”
“He was perfectly suitable, and I felt nothing whatsoever,” she murmured.
“Beatrice was telling me that feeling was a luxury I was no longer in a position to indulge—she wasn’t wrong about that either and the room was small, and the baby was crying, and I…
I” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I needed air. I needed somewhere I could stand without someone expecting an answer from me.”
“So you went to the shore.”
“I went to the shore.” A small, wry smile. “Alone. At five in the morning. Without a chaperone. Which I thought at the time was the most irresponsible thing I had done in several years.”
“And then you found a duke lying in the tide.”
“And then I found a duke lying in the tide,” she echoed. “Which rather put my irresponsibility into perspective.”
He led her through the steps of the dance. For a moment, she was way closer than the waltz strictly required, yet he did not adjust the distance.
“Were there really six ?” he asked.
She looked at him. “ Six what?”
He knew he should not ask. He was asking anyway. “Suitors.”
Something moved in her expression—amusement, recognition, something else. “Why?”
“Curiosity.”
“Yes, six,” she said. “That we officially acknowledged. There were others that didn’t reach the formal stage.”
Six.
He said nothing, but looked at the middle distance and examined what had just happened in his chest with methodical honesty.
It must be pride that I feel.
It was not pride.
He knew what pride felt like. He had a thorough acquaintance with it.
Pride was clean and upright and had a kind of dignity to it.
This was not that. This was something considerably less comfortable.
Something that had risen at the word six and had not left, that was sitting inside him now with the stubborn weight of a feeling that knew its own name even when its owner was reluctant to use it.
Six men, it said. Six men before you. Six men she looked at and considered and ultimately turned away, and you do not like that she looked at them at all, which is–
Jealousy.
He looked at her.
She was watching his face.
“What were they like?” He had no idea why he was persisting.
“Some were kind. One was very handsome and knew it. One talked about his estate the way you’d talk about a business transaction. One–” She paused. “One was actually rather lovely, if I’m being honest. Good conversation, genuine warmth. I almost said yes.”
That landed somewhere uncomfortable.
“What stopped you?”
She was quiet for a beat. “I didn’t feel it,” she said simply. “Whatever it was supposed to feel like. I had read about it, and I had been told it was real, and I…” She heaved a sigh. “I couldn’t find it with him. And I decided that mattered.”
He was quiet.
“Do you think that was foolish?” There was vulnerability underneath the question.
“No,” he said without hesitation, without the pause of a man considering his answer.
She looked at him.
“I think that it was the only position worth holding,” he added.
He turned her again, and his hand moved slightly down her waist. Not dramatically, not in a way that would have been visible from the edges of the room. Just closer, the smallest renegotiation of distance.
“And I think the men who tried and didn’t manage it were simply unlucky.”
He felt her breath shift. Not saw, but felt through the hand on her waist.
“That,” she said quietly, “is almost a compliment.”
“Almost,” he agreed.
The music moved through its final measures. Around them, the room continued its glittering self-involved business, the ton performing the ton, no one watching them particularly, everyone watching them constantly.
William was aware of it all and irrelevant to it all because she was looking at him. He should put distance between them. He knew how to create distance. He had been creating it with considerable consistency and diminishing success.
He drew her slightly closer.
Just enough. Just once.
Her eyes didn’t leave his until the music ended.
* * *
The garden was cool, dark, and entirely welcome after three hours of candlelight and managed conversation.
William had taken her hand from his arm and kept it. Not dramatically, but simply kept it, his fingers closing around hers as he steered them toward the door to the terrace. She had let him, and neither of them had remarked on it.
Now they were outside, in the November air, with the music faint through the glass behind them and the rest of the garden dark and quiet ahead.
He led her away from the terrace, where two other couples stood taking the air, further along the stone path to where a low wall separated the formal garden from the lawns beyond. A lantern on a post nearby gave just enough light. The voices from the terrace faded.
He stopped.
She stopped beside him.
They stood for a moment, looking at the dark garden, and she thought how strange it was that the most honest conversations she had with him seemed to happen in the dark—the nursery, the carriage, and now here.
“Better?” he asked.
“Much.” She breathed it in—cold air, damp grass, the distant smell of woodsmoke from somewhere. “I had forgotten what air felt like.”
“You were doing well in there.”
“I was performing well in there,” she corrected. “I think there’s a difference.”
He looked at her. “Is there? Tonight, it seemed the same thing.”
“It never feels the same from the inside.” She looked at the dark lawn. “You’re better at it than I am. You walk into a room, and the room adjusts to you. I walk in, and I adjust to the room.”
“That is not what I observed.”
“You observed the result, not the effort.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I suppose I did,” he relented.
It was honest enough that she looked at him.
The lantern light caught the side of his face—his jaw, the shape of his lips, the green eyes that were looking at her with an expression that was very different from what she was used to.
“The suitors,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Still?”
“One more question.”
“You said curiosity before.”
“I was being imprecise.”
She waited.
“When you asked me if I thought it was foolish, is it because you regret it?” he asked. “Not choosing one of them. The lovely one, in particular.”
She looked at him for a long moment. There was something in the way he had said lovely, as if he had been doing his best to sound neutral and had not quite managed it.
Is he jealous?
The thought came with a warmth she had no intention of suppressing.
“No,” she replied.
“No regrets at all?”
“I would rather have been alone for the rest of my life than marry a man I felt nothing for. I knew that at fourteen.”
“Even knowing what alone looks like,” he pressed. “In practice. Living it?”
“Even then.” She met his eyes. “I am not afraid of being alone. I am afraid of the wrong version of not being alone.” She paused. “Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it makes considerable sense.”
The music drifted through the glass—a new set beginning, the faint brightness of it reaching them out here.
“Not all arrangements are cold,” he said, after a moment. Quietly, carefully, the way he said things he had been turning over for a while.
She looked at him. “No,” she agreed. “Not all of them.”
“Ours–” he began.
“Was meant to be,” she finished. And then, because it was true and she was tired of pretending it wasn’t complicated: “That was what we agreed on.”
“We agreed on a great many things at the beginning that have not entirely held.”
She did not respond.
He turned toward her. “I told you from the beginning that I would keep my distance. That I would treat it as a duty and nothing more.” He looked at her directly, with the full attention that undid her more than anything else. “I have not been keeping my distance.”
“No,” she said. “You haven’t.”
“And you have not been–”
“No, I haven’t either.”
The garden was very quiet. Behind them, the warm light of the house pressed against the glass, and in front of them, the dark lawn extended into nothing. And here, in the lantern light, it was simply them and the cool air and everything that had been accumulating since a shore in Brighton.
He stepped closer.
She stayed exactly where she was.
His hand found her waist, and she could feel herself moving closer to him.
“I totally do not like that you feel cornered by other men,” he rumbled.
“Oh,” she breathed.
“I mean it. Especially not by me.”
She looked up at him. “And yet.”
His mouth twitched. “And yet.”
“You corner me rather consistently for a man with good intentions,” she said.
“I do. I’ve noticed that.”
“In your study. In the library. On the riding path. In the nursery.” She tilted her head slightly, despite the hammering of her heart. “In a garden, apparently.”
“In a garden,” he confirmed.
“And you always step back.”
His hand pressed slightly against her waist. “Not always.”
“Consistently,” she countered. “Reliably. Every time something real happens, you–”
“I know,” he said. “I know I do.”
“Then why–”
“Because…” His jaw tightened slightly. “Because I have spent years being very certain about what I would not allow myself, and then you came, and I have been significantly less certain about most of it since approximately the second morning of our marriage.”
She looked at him, unable to breathe.
He was close enough now that she could feel the warmth of him despite the cool air, could see the slight bob of his throat, and she thought of every evening in the nursery and every moment in every room and the waltz and the garden.
“And yet you are staying,” he said softly. For her ears only.
I am.
He lifted his free hand and touched her face—the back of his fingers, just once, along her cheekbone, the most careful thing she had ever felt—and she closed her eyes for a moment at the warmth of it.
When she opened them, he was looking at her like something he had not expected to be given and did not know how to put down.
He leaned in slowly. Not urgently, but slowly.
Giving her every opportunity to back away.
His eyes stayed on hers until they couldn’t, until he was close enough that she could feel his breath and his forehead nearly touched hers, and his hand on her waist had drawn her in by degrees she had not tracked until she was simply pressed against him in a dark garden, with the music faint through the glass and the lantern light warm behind them.
She closed the last inch herself.
His lips met hers, and it was not what she had imagined, not the neat romantic architecture of novels, not the practiced perfection of a scene. It was warm and real. His hand cupped her jaw and tilted her head gently, and she felt a thrill rush to the base of her spine.
She felt it everywhere. In her chest, along her spine, in the way her fingers curled into his coat without her noticing. She kissed him back with everything she had not been saying for weeks.
His other hand pressed against her waist, drawing her closer, and she felt his breath shudder against her mouth.
This is what real feels like.
When they pulled apart, it was slow, neither of them rushing it, the way one moved back from something they intended to remember.
He rested his forehead against hers. Neither of them spoke.
The music played on behind the glass, the garden was dark and cool, and the lantern burned steadily. She could feel his heartbeat where her hand had found his chest without her deciding to put it there, and it was not steady. She found that more reassuring than anything he could have said.
“Cecily,” he rasped.
“Don’t,” she said gently. “Not yet.”
A pause.
“All right,” he sighed.
They stood there in the garden for a little longer, in the dark and the quiet, neither of them saying anything, and it was enough.