Chapter 1
The Worthington ball was, by all accounts, the event of the early Season, and Cassian Arnolds was bored to death.
He stood at the edge of the ballroom with a glass of something warm in his hand and watched the ton mingle.
The candles were too high. The room was too hot.
A young matron in puce had been trying for the better part of ten minutes to gain his attention without appearing to gain it and was failing on both counts.
“Such a delightful turnout, do you not agree, Your Grace?”
Lady Whitcombe had come up on his right at last. She was perhaps a year older than him and twice married. She angled her face toward his glass, tipped her fan, and looked up from under her lashes in a manner that had clearly required practice.
“Quite,” he replied.
“The Worthingtons do throw the most charming little affairs.”
“Quite.”
“And the music. Have you ever heard such fine string work?”
“Quite.”
She paused. He did not look at her. After a moment, she gave a small breath of a laugh and moved away to find better sport. He did not watch her go.
His sister was on the dance floor. He could see her bright head bobbing among the others.
Joanna was twenty-three years old, redheaded, and possessed of an aggressive enthusiasm for life that had not been dampened by the long mourning for their father.
The only consolation available to him at any social gathering was the knowledge that she would make it out without having become engaged to anyone disastrous.
Her best friend was less of a consolation.
Cassian’s eyes drifted, against his will, toward the wall opposite the orchestra where Lady Alice Lockwood was standing in a pale green gown and pretending to take great interest in the company.
He had been pretending not to notice her for the past forty minutes.
Two years had not made her any less of a problem.
She had grown up. She had filled out in the way young women did when they stopped being girls and became something the rest of the room had to reckon with.
Tonight, the silk did unkind things to the dip of her waist. Her dark hair was pinned up, and a single curl hung loose against her neck, as if her maid had given up on it.
He looked away.
He had told his sister, on no fewer than a dozen occasions, that her friendship with Lady Alice was unsuitable.
Lady Alice was not unsuitable in any of the obvious ways. She was the daughter of an earl. She moved in the right circles. She danced well, played the pianoforte excellently, and was reported to be capable of running a household.
She was unsuitable in the way that only certain women were unsuitable which was to say that she carried herself like a person who would do something inadvisable at any moment and enjoy it.
She had thrown pebbles at his window two years ago.
She had told him plainly that she did not particularly care what he believed. He had not forgotten it. He had tried.
His sister had not listened of course. Joanna had taken every warning he had ever issued and shown her teeth at it.
The two of them had become inseparable, and Cassian had given up trying to forbid it, partly because forbidding things made them attractive to Joanna and partly because Lady Alice had in a strange way been good for her.
His sister had stopped weeping. She now laughed at things.
He owed Lady Alice a debt he would not repay because gratitude implied warmth, and he did not feel any.
He looked back across the room. Lady Alice was still feigning interest. She had her fan up and was using it, to his growing disbelief, to point at men. His sister was standing beside her now.
Joanna finished her dance, then.
He watched, with the stillness of a man witnessing a slow-moving disaster, as Lady Alice angled her fan toward a young viscount in a green coat and raised her eyebrows.
Joanna squinted and shook her head. Lady Alice then pointed her fan at a baron, and Joanna shook her head again.
When the fan moved on to a tall captain in regimentals, Joanna paused, considered, and grimaced.
Lady Alice laughed, and Joanna followed.
They were rating gentlemen.
In the middle of the Worthington ball while Cassian watched, his sister and Lady Alice Lockwood were standing at the edge of the dance floor and rating eligible bachelors with a fan and a series of facial expressions. The worst of it was that no one else seemed to notice.
He set down his glass.
Joanna spotted a friend across the room and walked off, leaving Lady Alice alone at the wall with her fan still half raised.
She had not seen him. Her eyes were busy as she made her way through the crowd with a slow, careful sweep, looking, evaluating, dismissing.
He had no idea what game she was playing, and he was tired of not knowing.
He crossed the room.
He did not announce himself. He walked along the wall behind her, slow and unhurried, until he was at her shoulder, close enough to speak into her ear, close enough to smell her hair.
Lemon.
Two years, and her hair still had the same scent.
Of course.
“May I ask why you are drooling over gentlemen in my sister’s presence? I thought I forbade you from being friends?”
She went very still.
She did not turn. He saw her throat bob and her shoulders tense, and he watched, with what he refused to think of as enjoyment, the shiver that ran down the line of her neck.
“That is not how human relationships work, Your Grace.” She kept her voice low, conversational, gaze still ahead. “But it is all right that you do not understand, given that you do not have any.”
“I have relationships.”
“Of course. The butcher delivers your beef, and you nod at him. I am sure he treasures the connection.”
He stepped around her so that they were facing the same direction, side by side, like any two acquaintances making polite conversation while watching the dance. He could see her profile now. She was trying very hard not to look at him which he found he wished to make difficult for her.
“You are using your fan to rate men,” he remarked.
“I am not.”
“You absolutely are.”
“I am identifying which of them I am acquainted with. There is a difference.”
“There is not.”
“There is a great difference, Your Grace, and I shall not have it impugned.”
She had not denied it a second time. She had moved past denial and on to defense which was a tactic that he had used on his solicitors more than once. He was not entirely pleased to see it deployed on him.
“Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
She did glance at him then. Just once, just the smallest flicker of green. She caught his expression and looked away again, and he saw the corner of her mouth move and crush itself flat.
“I see your scowl is well, Your Grace. Pray, give it my compliments.”
“My scowl is your fault.”
“Your scowl is your face’s fault, Your Grace. I have nothing to do with it.”
He had spent a long time training himself not to laugh in ballrooms. The training held.
What did not hold was the awareness that she had managed, in the space of three sentences, to put two insults to his face and one to his face’s character in a tone no chaperone in the room could have flagged as inappropriate.
Until tonight, he had not considered that he might have been opposite her at a bargaining table.
“You are remarkably free with your opinions for a young woman on her third Season, Lady Alice.”
“I am remarkably free with my opinions because I have had three Seasons in which to discover that nobody listens to a quiet woman. It is a survival instinct, Your Grace, like wearing a cloak in winter.”
“And the gentlemen you pointed at with your fan?”
“What about them?”
“Do you intend to share your opinions with them, too?”
“I intend to be civil to them.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is what I am answering.”
He angled his head just enough that she would feel it without seeing it, and he saw her shoulders rise an inch and resettle.
“Your Grace, as lovely as your company is, I have a mission, and I cannot complete it with you around.”
He went still.
It was the way she said it. Not flippant. Not quite. There was something underneath the lightness in her voice that pulled at his attention like a hook.
He turned his head to look at her properly, and for the first time tonight, she looked back.
Her eyes were tired. He had not noticed it from across the room. There was a fineness around her mouth, a tightness that he had assumed was caused by the heat.
It was not the heat. She had been laughing with his sister all evening, and now, looking at her up close, he could see that she had not slept.
He had not, until that moment, considered that something might have happened to her. He had assumed, with the long-practiced cynicism of a man who had been watching the ton for too long, that whatever Lady Alice was doing tonight was mischief and nothing else.
The look on her face was not mischievous. It was a thinner, harder thing, set just behind the brightness. He had spent enough years around his sister to know what a young woman looked like when she had spent the night before a ball not sleeping.
“And what mission might that be?”
She held his gaze. For a long beat, she did not answer.
He watched her decide. He watched her take a breath, let it out, and lift her chin in the way he remembered from the lane two years ago when she had told him she did not particularly care what he believed.
He understood dimly that whatever she was about to say was going to be the last thing he wanted to hear, and he was going to hear it anyway.
“If you must know, Your Grace, I must be ruined tonight.”