Chapter 2 #2
“You all laugh when I make a muddle, and I laugh too because it is easier,” she said. “But the truth is that everyone enjoys me best when I am decorative and harmless. The moment I insist upon mattering, people begin to look alarmed.”
Woodmere stood utterly still. His severity and composure did not seem to help him now.
“I did not say that.”
“No,” she said. “You did not. You merely imply it with devastating efficiency.”
Something in Alexandra’s face softened with alarmed sympathy, as though she had not realized the depth of the wound until that instant.
Perhaps Genny herself had not realized it.
It was one thing to laugh when one was dismissed.
Quite another to discover how much it hurt when a particular man did it.
For one moment longer Harrison said nothing. Then, in a voice quieter than before, he asked, “Do you truly think that is what I meant?”
Genny almost laughed, though there was no humor in it at all. “I think, my lord, that you prefer people who may be sorted into ledgers and categories, and I have never in my life fitted tidily anywhere.”
To her horror, the words made the back of her throat burn.
She turned away before anyone could see too much.
It was Alexandra who came first, laying a hand against her arm, and Louisa who pressed a handkerchief into her fingers without comment. Genny did not cry. She simply stood very still and loathed the fact that the room had gone tender around her.
When Harrison spoke again, his voice had changed.
“Lady Alexandra. Lady Foxmere. May I have a moment with Miss Moreland?”
Genny looked back at him at once. “I beg your pardon?”
Alexandra glanced between them, plainly uncertain. Louisa, who had always possessed an inconveniently accurate instinct for romance, looked far too interested for the circumstances.
Niall straightened from the mantel. “Should I remain on hand in case either of you decides to commit murder?”
“You may leave,” Woodmere said.
“That was not a denial.”
Louisa took her husband by the sleeve and, after a final searching look at Genny, guided him toward the door.
Alexandra followed more slowly, squeezing Genny’s hand before she went.
Mrs. Wexley, who had no intention of being left out of any dramatic development, had to be drawn away by Lord Penworth when he returned a moment later.
The butler closed the doors behind the last of them, and then the great drawing room, so noisy moments ago, felt unexpectedly vast.
Sunlight still spilled across the floorboards, catching on overturned ribbons and gilt-edged cards. The scent of crushed roses lingered in the air. Somewhere deeper in the house a door closed, muffling the hum of servants and distant preparations.
Genny stood near the window with Louisa’s handkerchief twisted uselessly in one hand. Harrison remained by the writing table, the distance between them filled with scattered papers, fallen petals, and far too much awareness.
“Well,” she said at last, because silence in the presence of Harrison Jones was a peculiar torment. “This is hardly improper at all.”
His mouth moved. Not enough to be called a smile, but enough that the tension in the room shifted. “Would you prefer witnesses?”
“Only if they are sympathetic to me.”
“I suspect you generally command a favorable audience.”
“Not today.”
The words came out more honestly than she intended. She saw at once that he noticed.
He came around the table then, not all the way to her, but near enough that she had to tilt her chin slightly to hold his gaze. “Miss Moreland,” he said, and there was nothing dry in his voice now, “I owe you an apology.”
She blinked. This, she had not expected.
“You questioned whether I believed you capable of theft,” she said carefully.
“I did. And I should not have asked as I did.” His expression tightened, as though the admission cost him something. “The ledger was missing. You had been at the center of the confusion. I was thinking as a man attempting to contain damage, not as,”
He broke off.
“Not as what?”
His gaze held hers, steady and unflinching. “Not as a man speaking to someone he knows.”
Genny looked down at the handkerchief in her fingers, then back at him. “Do you know me, my lord?”
It was reckless and foolish, but once spoken, it could not be called back.
Something unreadable passed over his face. “I know,” he said slowly, “that you are impulsive. That you interfere. That you are capable of creating confusion where none existed before.”
Her brows rose. “A devastatingly flattering portrait.”
His gaze sharpened. “I also know that you are kind where others are merely polite, generous where others are careful, and brave enough to step into difficulty when most people would retreat and pretend not to see it.”
The breath left her before she could prevent it. It escaped in a thin, unsteady rush, and for one dangerous instant her eyes burned. She blinked hard.
He continued, quieter still, “Which is precisely why I ought to have known you would never stoop to spite.”
For a moment Genny could only stare at him.
Heat rose beneath her skin, reaching the place inside her that had felt thin and foolish and hurt a few moments earlier.
She had wanted, absurdly and against all good sense, for him to see her clearly.
Now that he did, or claimed he did, the effect was far more unsettling than she had imagined.
She did the only thing she could.
She made a joke.
“Well,” she said, with rather less steadiness than she would have liked, “that is nearly romantic. You must take care, or society will think you are courting me.”
To her astonishment, he huffed a laugh.
Not a polite almost-smile or a twitch, but a real, startled laugh, low, brief, and entirely transforming.
Genny stared.
The severity of his face softened in an instant. It made him look warmer, younger, and so handsome she nearly forgot why she had been upset.
Good heavens.
He seemed to realize at once what he had done, because the laugh vanished and composure returned, though not before she had seen it.
“You are staring,” he said.
“I am recovering from shock.”
“Surely my laughter cannot be so rare a phenomenon.”
“Esme will swoon dead when I tell her. I shall have to send flowers.”
One of his brows rose. “You may refrain.”
“I may not.”
Some of the ease faded, though not all. He glanced toward the note still lying on the table. “We have a more urgent matter.”
We.
There it was again, that leap in her chest.
Genny cleared her throat. “Yes. We do.”
He studied her a moment longer, as though deciding whether to continue the conversation they had almost begun or retreat to safer ground. Naturally, being Harrison Jones, he chose retreat.
“The note was left where you would find it,” he said. “Or where it would be found after you were gone. Either way, the message was deliberate.”
Genny nodded, drawing herself back into focus. “Whoever did it wished to direct suspicion toward me, not merely profit from confusion.”
“Precisely.”
She paced once more, though this time with purpose. Movement helped. If she stood still, she would have to feel the tremor in her knees and the ache his apology had left behind.
Woodmere watched her for two turns of the room. “You are shaking.”
“I am thinking.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
She stopped and gave him a look that ought to have scalded paint. “If you are about to suggest I sit down, my lord, I advise you to choose another sentence.”
A flicker of amusement warmed his eyes. “Then I shall ask what you have concluded.”
“Better.” She drew one breath through her nose and steadied herself. “It must be someone who knows my reputation well enough to understand that people would believe I meddled.”
“Or someone who observed enough this morning to reach the conclusion quickly.”
She glanced at him. “That is less comforting.”
“It is also more probable.”
“Probability,” she said, “has a distressing tendency to wear sensible shoes.”
Genny considered the morning in rapid fragments, but now, with the room quieter and her humiliation cooling into anger, details sharpened.
“Mrs. Wexley’s maid passed through twice,” she said slowly. “Lady Dorring’s maid arrived at the steps. The florist’s boy had no reason to know me, unless he has made a study of ladies who upset committees. And Lord Penworth’s secretary’s clerk looked too frightened of everyone to scheme so neatly.”
Woodmere nodded once, as though approving the line of reasoning. “Good.”
The single word warmed her more than it ought.
She ignored that with determination.