Chapter 2
He almost choked.
Alice watched it happen. She watched the Duke of Langton, the Ice Duke himself, the most insufferably composed man she had ever met, lose his composure for a full second and then snatch it back.
His jaw worked. He looked away from her and toward the dance floor, as though the dancers had insulted him, then looked back. A flush had crawled up his neck.
Good. She had been having a very bad week. Let him be flustered for a moment.
“What—” He stopped and started again. “What the devil do you mean by that?”
“I thought it was perfectly clear, Your Grace.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Why, Your Grace. You are blushing?”
“I am not blushing.”
“You are. Your face has a pinkish hue. It is rather charming. I have not seen it before.”
“Lady Alice.”
“I do begin to suspect your imagination has run somewhere indecent.”
“My imagination,” he said, “is exactly where you put it, Lady Alice.”
Oh, that is unfair.
She looked away and busied herself with her fan. Her cheeks were warm. She was not going to be the one to look ruffled here. Not after the day she had had. Not after the night she was about to have.
“Explain,” he demanded.
“It is none of your business.”
“You just told me, so you made it my business. Out with it.”
“I do not see how it is your business.”
“You are standing in the middle of the Worthington ball, announcing your intention to ruin yourself in the next hour. I am the brother of your closest friend. I would say it has just become my business very much.”
“That is a stretch, Your Grace.”
“It is not a stretch.”
“It is.”
“Lady Alice.” His voice had dropped. There was an edge to it she had not heard before. “I will ask you one more time, and then I shall begin asking other people. Out with it.”
She glared at him.
He did not budge. Of course, he did not budge.
He remained at her shoulder like a stone wall in evening dress, and Alice, who had been planning her ruin for the past three days with the careful single-mindedness of a woman who had run out of options, felt the whole architecture of her plan begin to wobble at the edges.
“I did not mean what you think,” she said.
“Then explain.”
“I need to be seen kissing a gentleman tonight.”
“Absolutely not.”
She did not turn around. She did not need to. She had known the voice the moment it touched the back of her neck. It was low, clipped, every consonant set down in its proper place. The voice of a man who had never in his life misplaced a syllable.
She had first heard it two years ago from the other end of a rose garden at midnight, hissed at her across a gravel path while she had been innocently throwing pebbles at what she had taken to be his sister’s window.
He had used the same tone then. Stop trying to ruin my sister.
As though Alice were a contagion that had got loose in his house.
She turned her head an inch. Just an inch. Enough that he saw the corner of her mouth twitch.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”
“You will not.”
“Be ruined?”
“Be ruined. Be kissed. Be standing within ten feet of any of the men you have been pointing at with your fan. You will tell me what is going on. You will tell me at once, and then you and I will join your sister and stay there until your parents collect you.”
“You are not my parent, Your Grace.”
“I am thanking God for that fact, Lady Alice.”
“You do not get to tell me what to do.”
“I do if what you want to do is crazy. It is my duty.”
“And it is my duty to make my little sister happy.”
He stopped.
She watched the words land. She watched him try to fit them into the picture he had been making of her, fail, and have to start over.
He frowned. The frown went deeper than any of his frowns this evening. It was a different frown, careful and slow. She could see him reaching for a question, discarding it, and reaching for another.
“Your sister,” he said.
“Daphne.”
“What does your sister have to do with you ruining yourself in a ballroom?”
She breathed out.
She looked down at her gloves, at the spot where the white silk had begun to fray at the inside of her wrist, where she had been pulling at it all evening without meaning to.
She had not slept the night before and the night before it.
She had not slept properly since that dinner a week ago, and she could feel that fact now in the way her thoughts kept slipping their moorings, in the way her tongue had become slightly too loose, in the way that telling the truth to Cassian Arnolds had begun to seem, against all her better instincts, like a thing she might do.
“You must have heard about my betrothal to the Marquess of Dowton,” she muttered.
“What, does your betrothed not make your heart beat faster?” he mocked.
“No,” she sai, very simply. “But he makes my sister’s.”
He went still.
She kept her eyes on the dancers and slowly turned her fan in front of her chest, nodding toward the long windows on the far side of the room.
“Look at them, Your Grace.”
He did not turn at once.
She felt him hesitate. She felt the weight of his attention on the side of her face, the sharp intake of breath when he was about to disagree with someone, and then she felt him look.
He looked for a long time.
She did not need to look with him. She had been looking at her sister all evening. She had watched Daphne come down the stairs at home in the afternoon with her hands clasped at her waist and her cheeks already pink because she had known Isaac was attending.
She had watched Daphne arrange her hair in front of the mirror in a way Daphne had never arranged her hair before.
She had watched Daphne stand in the carriage door for a full second before climbing in and smoothing her skirts the way a girl smoothed her skirts when she knew somebody was about to see her.
Now Daphne and Isaac were standing near the long windows with a polite gap between their bodies and a distance between their hands of perhaps three inches.
Isaac was speaking. Daphne was nodding. Daphne had her glass of lemonade clasped in both hands, the way she clasped her teacup when she was nervous, the way she had clasped Alice’s hand when their dog had died when she was eight years old.
Anyone in the room could see it. Anyone with eyes.
“They are smitten with each other,” the Duke noted, his voice low.
“They are.”
“Plainly.”
“Yes.”
“And your sister has not said as much?”
“My sister will never tell me. She thinks it would hurt me, so she will not tell me. I will marry him this autumn, and she will spend the rest of her life watching me ruin them both, and I… I cannot.”
Alice had said too much. She heard the catch in her own voice and tried to smooth it, but it was too late. He had heard it.
“So, you would ruin yourself to give your sister a chance,” he said.
She nodded.
She had never said the reason aloud before. She had told Joanna she meant to be ruined tonight but had not told her why. She had said it to her pillow at three in the morning. She had said it to her own face in the mirror, very softly, to see if she could. She had not said it to a person.
“It might sound silly to you,” she began. “But—”
“It does not.”
She looked at him.
It was the way he said it. Not flippant. Not cool. But quiet, with a finality that caught her low in the chest and held. As though, in the space of one short sentence, he had decided that she was a person he had perhaps not quite met yet.
The Ice Duke, the man who had stood in a dark lane two years ago and forbidden her from coming to his house, was now looking at her with something so unlike the coldness of that night that for a moment she did not know what to do with her face.
“You do not think it silly,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He did not answer at once.
He had a way of waiting before he spoke that she had, over the past two years, found maddening. He used it as a weapon. He used it as a wall. He was using it tonight at her shoulder in the middle of the Worthington ball, and she watched his profile in the candlelight and waited.
“I had a brother,” he revealed.
She did not know what to do with that.
She did not know he had ever had a brother.
She knew he had a sister, and she knew his father was dead.
She had never asked anything of him beyond what was required by her friendship with Joanna because asking things of the Duke of Langton had never seemed a useful way to spend a conversation. She had not known about his brother.
Had a brother. Past tense.
“Your Grace…”
“I know what it is like to do impossible things for a sibling, Lady Alice.” His eyes had not left her. “I would not call it silly.”
She felt the ground shift slightly under her slippers.
It was a small thing. It was a small, plain confession of three sentences in the corner of a ballroom, and she felt herself open like a hand.
She closed it again at once. She had to. The Duke of Langton was not permitted, by any of the rules she had been operating on for two years, to be a person who had loved a brother enough to mention him to a stranger.
She looked away. “Well then,” she said, her voice almost steady, “you understand. Please excuse me, Your Grace. I have a viscount to find.”
“You are not going anywhere near a viscount.”
“You cannot stop me.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“Look at me.”
She did not turn her head. Somehow, she knew that if she turned her head, she would lose.
She was already losing. She could feel her pulse hammering at the base of her throat, could feel the heat flaring under her gown.
The room was somehow too bright and too quiet at once, and the Duke of Langton had just told her about a brother she had not known he had, and she could not—would not—turn her head.
“Lady Alice,” he said again, his voice softer.
She turned her head.