Chapter 13 #2
“And I have observed,” she continued, because she had started now and could not stop, “that you are not nearly as cynical as you pretend to be. That you defend people in ways they do not notice. That you read things four times over and still do not put them down.”
His eyes flickered. “How do you know what I read?”
She had said too much. The words had been spilling out of her like water from a cracked vessel, and now the vessel was empty and she was standing in the puddle of what she had revealed.
“I don’t,” she said. “I guessed.”
“You are a poor liar.”
“I am an excellent liar. I am merely having an off night.”
He laughed. It was the same laugh she had heard on the seafront, surprised, unguarded, entirely unlike the polished amusement he deployed in ballrooms. It transformed his face.
It made him look younger. It made him look like someone she might have liked, if she had met him in a different life, under a different name, with a different history stretched between their families like a tripwire.
“You are,” he said, “the most exhausting person I have ever met.”
“I shall take that as a compliment.”
“You should.”
The silence that followed was not empty.
It was full of everything they were not saying.
The curtain stirred in some unfelt draft.
The sconce guttered and steadied. Somewhere in the ballroom, the orchestra launched into a waltz, and the music reached them as a distant pulse, a heartbeat heard through walls.
“I have been thinking,” Alistair said, “about what you said. At the seafront. About masks.”
Sophia’s throat tightened. “I said a great many things at the seafront.”
“You said we wear them at breakfast, at tea, at dinner. You said we call them smiles.”
She had not said that. The Brighton Observer had said that.
The words were from the second essay, the one about the social masquerade, the one that had appeared the morning after the Hargraves’ reception.
She had written them at her desk while the Channel churned grey outside her window, and she had not known, then, that he would read them.
She had not known that he would read them four times.
“I was quoting,” she said carefully. “The Observer.”
“Yes.” His voice was very quiet. “You were.”
He knew.
The realisation arrived not as a shock but as a slow, cold settling.
He knew. He had known, perhaps, since the seafront.
Perhaps since the gallery. Perhaps since the moment she had opened her mouth at the Hargraves’ reception and said something too sharp, too observant, too exactly like the voice that had been appearing in newsprint and unsettling the ton.
“Alistair,” she said. She had never used his name before. It felt dangerous in her mouth. It felt like stepping off a ledge.
“I am not going to expose you.” He said it quickly, as if the words had been waiting behind his teeth.
“If that is what you fear. I am not going to tell anyone. I have been trying to find you, the author, for weeks. I wanted to offer patronage. Protection. A way to write without fear of discovery.” He stopped.
His hand moved, an aborted gesture, falling back to his side.
“And then I realised it was you, and I did not know what to do with that information. I still do not.”
“Why?”
“Because you are an Ainsworth.”
“And you are a Cavendish.”
“Yes.”
The word hung between them. It contained generations of silence and a surveyor’s error and two proud men who had refused to admit fault.
It contained Lady Beatrice’s cold disapproval and Lady Eleanor’s anxious warnings and the fact that Sophia’s family was running out of money and Alistair’s family was not.
It contained everything that should have kept them on opposite sides of the ballroom, exchanging nothing but the barest civilities.
And yet here they were. In an alcove. Alone.
“What do you want?” Sophia asked. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to. “From me. From, this.”
He did not answer immediately. He looked at her, and the looking was not the way men usually looked at her, assessing her figure, calculating her dowry, weighing her against the other eligible young women like a merchant comparing bolts of silk.
He looked at her as if she were a question he had been asking for years and had only just found the words for.
“I want,” he said, “to sit across from you in a quiet room and ask what you think. About everything. About the things no one else notices. I want to know if you see me, not my name, not my reputation, not the performance I have been giving for so long I have forgotten how to stop. I want to know if you see me.”
Her breath caught. She did not mean it to.
It simply happened, a small hitch in the rhythm of her lungs, and she saw him notice it.
She saw his eyes drop to her mouth and then rise again, and something in his expression shifted, a door opening, a wall coming down, a mask slipping before he could catch it.
“I see you,” she said.
The words were barely a whisper. They were not enough. They were too much.
He reached out. His fingers touched her arm, just above the elbow, where her glove ended and her skin began. The touch was light, lighter than it should have been, given the size of his hand, given the strength she could feel held in check. It was the touch of someone asking permission.
She did not pull away.
She did not breathe.
He stepped closer. The space between them shrank to inches, to nothing, to the distance that exists between two people who have been circling each other for weeks and have finally stopped pretending they do not know what they are doing.
“Sophia,” he said.
And then he kissed her.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was not the chaste brush of lips that a suitor might risk in a garden, with chaperones watching from the terrace.
It was a kiss that had been building since the moment she had opened her mouth at the Hargraves’ reception and said something too sharp and too true.
It was a kiss that tasted of champagne and desperation and the particular hunger of two people who had spent their lives being watched and had finally found a place where no one was watching.
His hand moved from her arm to her waist. Her own hands found the lapels of his coat and held on.
The velvet curtain brushed her shoulder, a whisper of fabric against fabric, and somewhere very far away the waltz was still playing, and none of it mattered.
None of it mattered except the pressure of his mouth and the heat of his palm through her gown and the sound he made, a sound that was almost a word and almost a sigh and almost something she would remember later, in the dark, when she could not sleep.
They broke apart.