Chapter 4 #2
“This is the last. It is the most important.” He turned to face her fully. The breeze lifted the edge of her bonnet ribbon, pressing it against her throat. “We must be honest with each other. Completely honest.”
She studied him. The look was long, searching, stripped of the defensive humor she wielded so effectively. He had the unsettling sensation that she was seeing past the surface he had spent a decade polishing.
“Why does that rule matter to you so much?” she asked quietly.
The answer sat in a place he did not open.
A corridor, a closed door, a household built on silence where honesty was as dangerous as disobedience.
He had grown up inside a marriage constructed from lies dressed as civility.
He would not build another structure on the same rotten foundation, not even a temporary one.
“Because arrangements survive on trust,” he said. “Nothing else holds.”
She held his gaze for a beat longer. Then she extended her hand.
He looked at it. Her glove was slightly too large for her fingers, the seam at the wrist mended with stitches so small they were nearly invisible. The Fairchild fortunes, stitched together where they had begun to fray.
He took her hand. Her grip was firmer than he expected. Warm, even through the cotton.
“Agreed,” she said. “Honesty between us. Performance for everyone else.”
“Then we have a deal, Miss Fairchild.”
“We had a deal last night, Your Grace. Now we have terms.”
He released her hand. The warmth stayed against his palm, faint, stubborn, unwelcome.
They walked back along the Serpentine in the kind of comfortable silence that had no business existing between two people who had known each other for all of three days.
“I must confess,” Louisa said, “that I nearly did not come today. I told my mother I was visiting my cousin to help organize her collection of stamps.”
Oliver raised a brow. “A noble pursuit. Very convincing.”
“It has served me well on several occasions. Last month it spared me from Lady Hartley’s afternoon tea. The month before, a musical where Mrs. Draper intended to sing.” She glanced sideways at him. “My cousin does not actually collect stamps. She finds the entire fiction enormously amusing.”
“I admire the commitment. My own excuses tend to lack supporting characters.” He stepped around a puddle that the morning’s earlier rain had left in the gravel.
“My valet, however, has been providing enough theatre for the entire household. When he discovered I had given away my best evening coat at the Bancroft ball, he sat down on my dressing room floor and refused to speak to me for the better part of an hour.”
Louisa’s eyes widened. “I refuse to believe that.”
“Perkins has been with me since I inherited the title. He considers that coat a personal achievement. I believe he may have loved it more than he has ever loved another living soul.”
She laughed at that until her eyes watered, pressing her gloved knuckles to her mouth. Oliver found himself steering the conversation toward topics that might produce that sound again.
The nursemaid on the bench had packed up her charges. The riding set had thinned. The park was emptying as the morning gave way to the business of the day.
“Tuesday, then,” Oliver said, as they reached the path that led toward the Park Lane gate. “I shall call at three o’clock.”
“My mother will have questions.”
“I welcome questions. I have excellent answers.”
“You have excellent deflections. It is not the same thing.” She paused, adjusting her bonnet against the strengthening sun, her fingers quick at the ribbon. “Your Grace. Thank you. For this. I realize I have not said it.”
“No thanks are required. We are trading favors. This is commerce, Miss Fairchild.”
“Commerce.” She tested the word, her head tilted. “Is that what this is?”
“What else would it be?”
She looked at him. The sun caught the loose curl at her temple, turning it copper. Her expression held a quiet amusement that he could not decode, layered beneath caution, beneath years of expecting disappointment.
“I shall see you Tuesday,” she said. She curtsied, turned, walked toward the gate where the Fairchild carriage waited on the street beyond, its paint faded, its horses patient.
Oliver watched her go. Her stride was different, looser. Her shoulders had dropped from their usual position near her ears. She crossed the gravel with the unhurried ease of someone who had spent an hour laughing without meaning to.
He reached for his pocket watch. Opened it, then closed it without reading the time.
The terms were set. The arrangement was clear. Everything was proceeding according to plan.
Then why, as he turned toward Mount Street, did his hand still carry the ghost of her grip, persistent as a question he had not thought to ask?
He shook it off. Commerce, he had called it, with the steady confidence of his own conclusions.
He had always been good at conclusions. They were safer than curiosity.
More reliable than whatever restless pull had settled beneath his breastbone during that laugh of hers, the second one, the soft one, the one she had offered without defense.
The Season, Oliver reminded himself, was temporary.
But as he reached Mount Street, he glanced once more over his shoulder toward the Park Lane gate, where the faded Fairchild carriage was pulling into the traffic of a city that did not yet know what was coming.