Chapter 13 #3
His forehead rested against hers. His breathing was ragged. His eyes were still closed, and she watched him, this man who had been a stranger three weeks ago, this man whose family had spent generations hating hers, this man who had read her essays four times and still not put them down.
“Well,” she said. Her voice shook. “That was —”
“Don’t.” He opened his eyes. They were very dark, very close. “Don’t make a joke. Not yet.”
“I was not going to make a joke.”
“You were.”
“I was. But I have reconsidered.”
He laughed again, that unguarded laugh, and the sound of it in the small dark space made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with corsetry.
Voices.
They both heard it at the same moment, the sound of footsteps in the corridor, the rise and fall of conversation, someone coming closer.
Alistair stepped back. The movement was immediate, instinctive, the reflex of a man who had spent his life navigating spaces where discovery meant ruin.
His hand left her waist. His expression shuttered, the mask sliding back into place with a speed that made her dizzy.
She watched it happen. She watched him become Lord Alistair Cavendish again, the rake, the cynic, the man who was never flustered and never sincere and never, ever caught alone with an unmarried woman in a curtained alcove.
“The third door,” he said, his voice low and steady now, as if nothing had happened. “It leads to the terrace. Go that way. Circle around. Enter from the garden side.”
“Alistair —”
“Go.”
She went. Her legs carried her through the door he had indicated, out into the cool night air, where the sea breeze hit her face like a slap and the stars were very bright and very indifferent.
She stood on the terrace with her hand pressed to her mouth and her heart beating in a rhythm that had nothing to do with waltzes.
She had crossed a boundary. She had crossed it knowing what it was, knowing what it meant, knowing that the man on the other side was the one man she was not supposed to want.
And she did not regret it.
That was the worst part. That was the best part. She did not regret it at all.
Beatrice waited until the footsteps had passed. Two young women, giggling about something, their voices high and careless. They did not notice the curtained alcove. They did not notice the tall figure who emerged from it a moment later, smoothing his cravat with fingers that were not quite steady.
Alistair walked toward the ballroom. He did not see his mother, pressed into the shadow of the corridor’s curve, her fan held motionless in her hand.
Beatrice let him pass.
She had seen enough. She had seen the curtain stir. She had seen Miss Ainsworth slip out through the terrace door, her dark green gown catching the starlight, her hand at her mouth like a woman who had just been burned and was surprised to find she did not mind the pain.
She had seen her son’s face when he stepped back into the corridor. The mask was back in place, but it had been applied hastily. There were cracks. There were gaps. There was, beneath the careful composure, something that looked very much like terror, and very much like hope.
Beatrice opened her fan. The shepherdesses danced their eternal dance, frozen in ivory, going nowhere.
The situation had been interesting before.
It was more than interesting now. It was a problem.
It was a convergence. It was the slow collision of two families who had spent generations avoiding each other, brought together by a surveyor’s error and a young woman who wrote essays and a young man who read them four times over and still could not put them down.
She had told Miss Ainsworth, in the gallery, that she did not believe in coincidences. She believed in patterns. She believed in the slow accumulation of evidence.
The evidence was accumulating very quickly now.
Beatrice turned and walked back toward the ballroom. The orchestra was playing a quadrille. The dancers were moving through their figures with the precision of clockwork. Everything was exactly as it should be, and nothing was the same.
She found a chair near the wall and sat down. Her fan moved in slow, even strokes. Her face revealed nothing at all.
She would have to decide what to do. Not tonight. Tonight was for observation. Tonight was for gathering the last few specimens, pinning them in place, labelling them correctly. Action would come later, when she understood the full shape of what she was dealing with.
But she knew one thing already. She had known it since the gallery, since the Turner painting, since Miss Ainsworth had looked at a canvas that the Academy had called the work of a madman and said, I find it honest.
The girl was dangerous. She had always been dangerous. And now she was dangerous in a way that Beatrice could not simply observe and catalogue and contain.
Now she was dangerous to Alistair’s heart.
The quadrille ended. The dancers applauded. Lady Beatrice Cavendish sat very still, her fan moving in its slow arc, and watched the door for whatever would come through it next.