Chapter Three #2
She turned her head slowly, her dark eyes meeting his. “I assumed debits and credits were a matter for your man of business, Your Grace. Unless you carry your ledgers with you on morning calls to impress unsuspecting spinsters?”
“Most mothers of the ton have my ledgers memorized. I am accustomed to being thoroughly interrogated by this point in the tea.”
“Then you must be enjoying the holiday.” She took a sip of her tea, completely unbothered by his reputation. “If you are desperate to boast, you may tell my aunt about your carriages. She is very fond of carriages.”
Aunt Margery offered a startled, scandalized squeak.
Ash laughed, the sound escaping entirely genuine and stripped of the lazy armor he usually wore.
The room's ease was alarming. It was the simplest thing he had done all season, sitting in a shabby parlor drinking tea with a woman who demanded absolutely nothing from him. It was a terrifying sort of ease, because comfort had never been part of Devlin’s wager, and Devlin’s wagers were designed to end in ruin.
He stayed twenty-three minutes. He knew he had overstayed the acceptable limit by exactly three minutes because Aunt Margery had begun a frantic, silent campaign to evict him.
She shifted the sugar tongs from one side of the tray to the other, rearranged the charred biscuits into defensive formations, and cast increasingly desperate glances at the mantelpiece clock.
Imogen did not fidget. She sat with her back straight and her composure fully intact, betraying no sign that she minded his lingering presence. The utter lack of signaling drove him to distraction, winding a tight coil of tension low in his stomach.
He finally rose and executed his bow. She stood with him, escorting him to the drawing room door, and the proximity caught him entirely off guard.
The morning light filtered behind her again, illuminating the faint shadow of her collarbone beneath the muslin.
A tiny, previously unnoticed freckle rested at the very base of her throat.
He suspected he would spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forget it existed.
She smelled of lavender. He had filed the scent away upon entering, dismissing it as background detail among the furniture wax and garden daisies.
Now, standing close enough that they shared the same narrow column of air, the lavender became specific.
It belonged to her. His body, which had spent the last twenty-three minutes behaving with dutiful decorum, violently rebelled.
It informed him, with a dark and sudden urgency, exactly what it would be like to press his mouth against that single freckle and breathe her in.
He forced himself to take a deliberate half step back. “Thank you for the tea, Miss Goodall.”
“Thank you for the violets, Your Grace,” she replied, her voice remaining perfectly even. “They are very fine. I shall try not to read anything into them.”
He allowed his gaze to drop to her mouth before slowly tracking back to her eyes. “And if you did read something into them?”
“I would read carefully. I always do.”
He stepped out into the bright Tuesday morning, the brass-polished door clicking shut behind him.
The street noise rushed in, too loud and too close, but it did nothing to dispel the lingering warmth of her finger against his knuckle.
He adjusted his coat, signaled for his carriage, and climbed inside without allowing himself a backward glance, but the effort of keeping his eyes forward cost him far more than he cared to admit.
As the carriage rattled toward Grosvenor Square, the narrow street receding through the glass, he attempted to reconstruct his strategy.
He had arrived intending to deploy practiced charm, meaning to flatter a forgotten woman into a trap.
Instead, he had been dismantled by a lady who poured tea with steady hands and carried her four seasons of invisibility without a single ounce of bitterness.
She had accepted his violets, judged them against her own daisies, and found the hothouse blooms wanting.
He leaned his head back against the squabs and thought of Devlin.
Five thousand pounds and the Andalusian stallion.
The wager recorded in the betting book at White’s, Imogen Goodall’s name inscribed next to a sum of money, completely without her knowledge.
A cold, unfamiliar weight settled heavily in his chest. The sensation carried the distinct, unpleasant flavor of shame, an emotion he had successfully avoided for the better part of a decade.
Collins waited in the front hall when he arrived. The valet took one look at Ash’s face and maintained a disapproving silence, his rigid posture communicating volumes.
Ash stripped off his gloves, rotated his signet ring inward, hiding the cameo against his palm where it belonged, and retreated upstairs to his writing desk.
He sat for a long time staring at the blank parchment.
He could not write to Devlin without offering either a lie or a confession, and he possessed the stomach for neither.
He simply turned the gold band around his finger, acknowledging the foreign tension behind his ribs, a quiet realization that something new had taken root in the empty spaces of his life and was stubbornly refusing to leave.