Chapter One #2
“I made it a long time ago, and I have never once regretted the warmth I gave up for it.” He turned the glass slowly by its stem. “What is your Christian name?”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy.” He said it as though testing whether it would bear weight. “It is a poor fit for a wallflower.”
“I was not always a wallflower.” The fire put a log down into itself and she watched it do so rather than look at him. “The condition is recent, and I am told incurable.”
“Most conditions are curable with sufficient rudeness. You are speaking to living proof.”
“And what is it you are so tired of tonight, Your Grace, which causes you to hide in a library of your own?”
“The same thing you are. A room full of people performing sincerity. Yours performs pity. Mine performs admiration. Neither is worth the candles they burn to light it.”
“You make excellent company for a man who claims to prefer none.”
“I prefer good company. It is merely so rare that I have learned to travel without it.”
“That is either very sad or very arrogant. I have not yet decided which.”
“It is both. The two are frequently the same coat turned inside out.”
“Why are you telling me any of this?” The question came out sharper than she had meant it, and she did not soften it. “You do not know me at all.”
“Precisely because I do not know you. By tomorrow you will be a story someone tells at breakfast, and I will be a story someone tells at breakfast, and neither of us will ever be obliged to be honest with the other again. Tonight is the only safe hour the two of us shall ever have, and it seems a waste to spend it being untruthful.”
“You are a very strange man, Your Grace.”
“So I am reliably informed. I have stopped taking it as an insult and started taking it as a description.”
“You are laughing at me,” she said.
“I am laughing near you. It is a different thing, and a rarer one.” He said the rest of it to the fire irons. “I have not done it in company for longer than I care to admit to a stranger in a borrowed library.”
“Then either I am very amusing, or you keep very poor company.”
“Both, I begin to suspect, though only one of the two failings is your doing.”
“You have not once asked me about Mr. Ashwick,” she said. Her thumb had found the seam of her glove and was working at it. “Everyone asks. They arrange their faces into concern and mean appetite.”
“I have no appetite for Ashwick. I have watched him at cards. A man who shaves the odds at whist for stakes he can well afford will do worse for the stakes he cannot, and there is nothing left in him worth the asking. The whole of the man is written face up on the table.”
She looked up, past the dark hair shadowing his brow and directly into his piercing grey eyes.
The ballroom had missed the more interesting thing about the Duke of Wycliffe entirely.
They called him cold and they were wrong.
He was banked, like the fire at his elbow, giving off far more heat than the low flame promised anyone unwilling to sit close enough to feel it.
“You are not what they say you are,” she said.
“I am considerably worse. They merely lack the imagination to guess the details.” He set the glass aside. “Tell me the truth, since we are being honest. When Ashwick stood on the far side of that shrubbery and said his charming little sentence, what did you wish to do to him?”
“Nothing a lady may admit to in company.”
“We are not in company. That is the entire charm of a dark library.”
Her hands tightened in her lap. “Then I wished to make him feel, for one single hour, precisely as small as he has made me feel for three whole weeks.”
“That is not so difficult as you imagine. Small men are easily reminded of their size. It wants only someone unafraid to do the reminding.”
“And you are unafraid?”
“I am bored, which serves the same purpose and lasts a good deal longer.” He watched her for a moment. “You still have not told me what brought you to my library. Not the shelves. Not the air. The truth this time, for the novelty of it.”
“My cousin dared me to ask you for a kiss.”
“And why should your cousin trouble herself over Ashwick at all?”
“Because she watched him court me in April, when he believed there was eight thousand behind my name, and watched him discover in May that there was not.” Lucy said it to the fire, in the flat voice of a thing rehearsed alone too often.
“He could not be seen to have chased a fortune and missed it. So he began telling the drawing rooms that I had chased him. It is the only version in which he is not a fool, and he has been very diligent about it.”
“Ah,” said the duke, and something in the syllable had gone cold.
“He is not ruining you out of malice, then. He is ruining you because his own account requires it. That is a great deal worse, and a great deal harder to stop, because a man will abandon a spite long before he abandons a story that keeps him respectable.”
The fire ticked into the silence, and somewhere beyond the door a violin found the end of a set.
“Your cousin is either very foolish or very perceptive,” the duke said.
“Which?”