Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Stop reading meaning into it, Effie. Stop.
Euphemia shut her eyes tightly and shook her head, hoping that she could shake off the widely intrusive thoughts that were circulating her mind like a flock of bothersome crows.
The silence inside the carriage was dragging, and it had settled between them the precise moment the ballroom doors closed behind them and the wheels began their roll against the cobblestones as they bid the Pembourne Ball goodbye.
For every single mile of the journey back to the estate she had been thoroughly, helplessly lost inside her own head.
She was spinning notions... elaborate, mildly absurd notions, and she could not seem to stop, no matter how firmly she reminded herself that she was a rational woman who did not build entire narratives out of a single evening.
A single dance.
A single hand warm and steady at her waist. A single look across a ballroom floor that had lasted perhaps two seconds longer than was strictly necessary and which she was almost certainly misremembering anyway, because ballroom lighting was notoriously unreliable and she had drunk two glasses of punch and she was not, she was absolutely not, reading meaning into any of it.
She was not that woman.
Should she be dwelling on the precise moment his breathing had hitched when they danced?
Or when he would not stop staring at her lips?
Was she a complete fool for reading a grand, soul-altering message into the deliberate, slow stroke of his thumb against her spine?
It was ridiculous, yet she couldn’t stop her mind from wandering down that perilous path, wondering if she should simply dare to ask him what that look in his eyes had meant.
She had spent the entire ride debating it, her heart hammering against her ribs, completely consumed by the lingering warmth of his touch.
“We have arrived, Euphemia.”
Euphemia gasped, her eyes snapping open as she practically jumped in her seat, utterly convinced for a terrifying second that he had somehow managed to read every single scandalous line of her thoughts right off her forehead.
Heat crawled up her neck immediately, which was ridiculous, because she had only been sitting there, perfectly still, thinking perfectly private thoughts that were her own business and that no one could possibly have access to unless they had somehow developed the ability to read minds, which she sincerely hoped he had not.
He was watching her from across the carriage with an expression that was, she felt, too composed for this hour of the night.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” The word came out slightly faster than she intended. “Perfectly.”
He did not look convinced. “You have had a worried look on your face for the entirety of the ride home.”
“I have not.”
“You have.”
“I was thinking,” she said. “People think. It does not mean something is wrong, Your Grace.”
A sudden wave of reality washed over her in that moment.
She had been thinking... but perhaps, not in the right direction.
What if all of it... the intense, unwavering pull of his gaze, the tightening of his hand against her waist, and that sudden, breathtaking friction between them had been nothing more than a calculated performance?
They had been surrounded by the sharp eyes and wagging tongues of the ton, and he had never once looked at her or touched her with such uncharacteristic heat in the privacy of their own home.
It was possible that Nathaniel was simply playing the part of the devoted husband to squash the persistent rumors that they had married out of sheer desperation or a lack of better options.
It was likely his pragmatic way of protecting his family’s reputation, ensuring that no whiff of a fresh scandal could ever touch his daughters or disrupt the resilience of his household.
Yes... a performance. What was I thinking?
“Euphemia,” Nathaniel called out to her again. “What are you thinking about so intensely?”
“Nothing,” she answered again. “We have arrived... it seems.”
“Indeed we have,” he answered, squinting his eyes just slightly as he studied her.
The carriage door was promptly thrown open by a footman waiting on the gravel driveway of the estate. Nathaniel stepped down first, leaving Euphemia to gather her heavy skirts and follow him out.
As her slippers touched the ground, she offered a soft, distracted greeting to the servant holding the carriage door open for her, her mind still hopelessly scrambled by the sudden cold logic of her own deductions.
She walked toward the grand stone staircase leading up to the residence, noticing that Nathaniel had not simply marched inside.
He was waiting, and as she crossed toward him, falling into step beside him she told herself, very firmly, that the evening was over.
She was going inside, going to bed and she was absolutely done thinking about any of it.
As she reached his side and prepared to take the first step up, she could have sworn that she saw his arm move out of the corner of her eye.
A sudden, irrational panic flared in her chest...
the absolute certainty that his hand was about to seek her waist again, that his thumb would find her spine again and reawaken that terrifying, dizzying sensation she had no business feeling in the privacy of their courtyard.
Driven by pure, unthinking instinct, she flinched away, dodging his perceived reach.
It was not a graceful movement. It was a small, thoroughly undignified flinch, and the moment she made it her foot caught the edge of the step at the wrong angle.
With a breathless gasp, Euphemia lost her footing entirely, pitching sideways toward the hard edge of the stairs.
But before she could even register the incoming fall, Nathaniel’s reflexes took over with precision.
His hand snapped out, wrapping securely around her arm and pulling her back toward him with such commanding force that her body slammed directly against his broad, solid chest.
Her hands flew out instinctively, bunching the wool of his coat tightly in her fists to steady herself.
The impact was startling, the intense heat of his body immediately enveloping her as they stood locked together in the dim light.
Euphemia lifted her chin, expecting to see that same hungry, calculated gaze he had worn so effortlessly in the ballroom, the one meant to fool the ton.
But his gaze was different this time.
The burning intensity from the dance floor was gone, replaced by something dark.
She stared into his eyes, desperately trying to decipher the sudden shift, her mind spinning as she realized it wasn’t calculated at all.
She thought to herself that it almost looked like worry, but before she could fully process the depth of what she was seeing in his eyes, Nathaniel spoke.
“What is the matter with you?” he asked. His voice was low and serious. “You are too out of it, Euphemia. You could seriously hurt yourself.”
Embarrassed and desperate to put some distance between them, she attempted to take a step back, but the moment she shifted her weight, a sharp, white-hot flash of pain shot straight up from her ankle.
A small, involuntary wince escaped her lips, her body instinctively leaning back into his support as the joint buckled.
Nathaniel’s grip tightened, preventing her from retreating as his jaw set into a hard, frustrated line. He looked down at her foot, then back up to her pale face, his patience clearly wearing thin.
“You have to stop finding ways to hurt yourself,” he murmured. “What is the matter, Euphemia? Spit it out. I am not leaving this spot until you tell me what is wrong, because you are going to severely injure yourself if you continue like this.”
His eyes dropped again. Then came back up to her face.
“Do not...” he said. “...tell me you are fine.”
Euphemia swallowed hard, her chest pressing against his as a flurry of frantic thoughts flashed through her mind.
She could not possibly tell him the truth.
She could never admit that she was completely incapacitated by the memory of his touch, or that tonight was the first time in her entire life she had felt something remotely close to the grand, sweeping emotions she had only ever read about in her romance books.
It was the first time a strange, dizzying sensation had ever bloomed in her stomach like that, leaving her utterly lost. The entire experience was completely novel, a terrifyingly new territory that she was desperately trying to grasp but simply couldn’t.
She certainly could not explain that to him.
There was no way he would understand, and it was already embarrassing enough that she was feeling this way.
Instead, she forced her gaze down to his lapels, scrambling for a safer truth.
“I am sorry,” she whispered, her voice trembling slightly.
“I am just... I am a bit distracted. I was thinking about the ball. After our dance, and after everything else that happened tonight, I noticed that people were not whispering as much. They weren’t looking at me with such scrutiny anymore.
In fact, by the end of the evening, it felt as though everyone had totally forgotten about my existence.
It felt incredibly good. I suppose I was just wondering...
am I wrong to be so happy about that so soon? ”
Nathaniel let out a long sigh, the tension in his broad shoulders visibly relaxing as he accepted her answer. He looked down at her, his expression softening just a little.
“How many times must I tell you that you do not need to occupy your mind with such things?” he murmured. “You should not be worrying about the ton, Euphemia. Just leave it be, and stop worrying.”
“All right,” she breathed, offering a small, genuine nod.