Chapter Seven
“The figure stands at three-eighths of the way to the deadline, Ravenhurst. I expect detail.”
Devlin was leaning against the wall of the Asquith side hall with a glass of port in one hand and the particular expression he wore when he was enjoying himself at someone else’s expense; a smile that sat on the surface of his face without reaching anything underneath it.
The side hall was narrow, lit by a single wall sconce.
From the half-open door to the main corridor came the muffled hum of the dinner gathering, voices and laughter spilling faintly into the quiet.
Ash was trying to reach the front entrance unnoticed.
Being seen would mean conversation, and conversation would demand composure, which was a quality he had abandoned in the conservatory some twelve minutes earlier, along with any ability to think about anything other than the lingering warmth of Imogen Goodall’s hand against him.
“The wager is progressing,” Ash said. His voice came out flat and uninflected, which was the only safe register available to him, because the alternative was the register in which his voice had said feel what you do to me, and that register was not for Devlin’s ears and never would be.
“Progressing.” Devlin swirled his port. “That is not detail, Ravenhurst. That is a report from a man who has nothing to report, or a man who has a great deal to report and would prefer not to. Which are you?”
Ash should have walked past him. He should have said good evening and continued down the corridor and left the Asquith manor.
He should have gone home and not spoken to anyone until his body had stopped thrumming and his mind had stopped replaying the sound she had made when his hand found her breast, the small gasp that had gone through him like a wire pulled taut.
He did not walk past. He was still half-undone from the conservatory, his mind scattered, the taste of her still on his lips, and Devlin’s question landed on him at the worst possible moment, when his defenses were down and his rehearsed indifference was nowhere to be found.
“The lady has surprised me,” Ash said, and walked past Devlin without explaining what he meant, because what he meant was that Imogen Goodall had rearranged something inside him that he did not have language for and was not prepared to discuss with a man whose smile did not reach his eyes.
He heard Devlin set his glass on the hall table. A faint note of amusement followed and then something quieter, darker. Ash didn’t turn because he already knew Devlin’s look.
He had just told Devlin, without intending to, that the spinster was more than a wallflower, and that the Duke of Ravenhurst was not behaving as the wager demanded, and Devlin, who missed nothing and forgave less, had filed it.
The front door closed behind him. The night air was cold, and he stood on the Asquith steps for a long time, his hands in his pockets, the watch in his waistcoat ticking against his ribs, and tried to locate the part of himself that had walked into the conservatory intending to advance a wager and had walked out of it no longer certain the wager existed.
He could not find it. That part of himself appeared to have been replaced by a man who was standing on the Asquith steps in the dark with his lips swollen, his member still half-hard in his breeches, and the ghost of her hand printed against him like a brand.
The man who was standing there was not the Duke of Ravenhurst the ton had known for eight years.
The man standing there was someone he did not yet recognize, and that was the most unsettling thing that had happened to him all evening.
He went home, but he could not sleep.
***
He arrived at Henry Frost’s lodgings at ten, which was an unreasonable hour by most standards.
But Frost kept unreasonable hours. As a viscount’s second son, he’d been given modest means and expectations, and had filled both with coffee and good sense instead of brandy and poor choices.
Frost’s rooms were in a decent set of chambers on the second floor of a building on Jermyn Street, comfortably furnished, the bookshelves full, the coffee pot always warm, the general atmosphere that of a man who had decided to be civilized and was willing to do the work required.
Frost opened the door himself. He was in shirtsleeves, his hair still damp from the basin, a cup of coffee in his left hand. He looked at Ash, who he could see had not slept, and stepped back without comment to let him in.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
The coffee was hot and strong and tasted of nothing, because everything tasted of nothing when you had not slept, and your body was still running on the fumes of a conservatory encounter that had ended twelve hours ago and had not, by any measurable standard, ended at all.
Ash sat in the chair by the window and drank it but did not explain why he was there.
He did not even know why he was there, except that Frost’s rooms were the only place in London where he could sit without performing and the not-performing was the thing he needed more than coffee.
Frost sat across from him, poured his own cup and waited.
He was very good at waiting, better than any man Ash had ever known, because he did not fill silences with noise as the rest of the wager set did.
Frost let silences exist because he understood that silence was where most people kept the things they were not ready to say, and pressuring a man to speak before he was ready was the surest way to get a lie instead of the truth.
The silence lasted four minutes. Ash counted them on the mantel clock because counting was easier than thinking.
“You called on her on a Tuesday,” Frost said, setting his cup down.
His voice was calm, factual, the voice of a man delivering observations rather than accusations.
“You danced her two waltzes, and you have not played the wager set’s game with anyone for a fortnight.
You have not been to Aurelie’s since before the Marchmont.
You arrived at my rooms this morning looking as if you have not slept, wearing yesterday’s coat, and you have been staring at my bookshelf for four minutes without reading a single spine. ”
“I am capable of staring at bookshelves, Frost. It is not a diagnostic.”
“I am asking you a question, Ash. Not making an accusation.” Frost leaned forward.
His eyes were steady, but it was not performance.
This absence of performance in Frost’s face was the reason Ash had come here this morning instead of staying at Grosvenor Square, where the silence would have been the wrong kind.
“Have you fallen in love with the girl?”
The question landed on the room and sat there.
It was very different from the way questions usually sat in rooms where Ash was present, because usually questions were things he could deflect or redirect or charm his way around.
This question was not deflectable, not redirectable and not charming; it was simply true in the way that Frost’s questions were always true.
Ash laughed. The laugh was not the real laugh; it was the one he had been using for eight years: the polished dismissive sound of a man who found the question amusing because the only alternative was to find them devastating.
Frost did not laugh with him. He sat in his chair and regarded Ash across the coffee pot, and the regard was patient and undeceived, because Frost had never been in love himself but had spent a lifetime watching other people stumble into it.
He understood, clearly and without judgment, that some truths needed to be arrived at by the person they belonged to, not delivered by a friend over coffee.
The silence that followed the laugh was not awkward.
It was simply full, the way a room is full when two people are thinking the same thing and one of them is waiting for the other to say it.
Ash did not say it.
“You do not have to answer,” Frost said, picking up his cup again.
“But you should know that the question is not going to go away. And you should also be aware that whatever you have told Devlin, he is not going to stop asking either, and Devlin’s version of the question will not be as kind as mine. ”
Ash set his cup down, stood, walked to the window and looked out at Jermyn Street, which was bright and busy and full of people who were not in love with anyone and were therefore capable of walking in straight lines and purchasing their morning newspapers without incident.
“I do not have an answer for you, Frost.”
“Yes, you do. You are simply not ready to say it out loud.”
Ash left Frost’s lodgings without answering. He walked out onto Jermyn Street, turned south, and the morning light hit him full in the face; bright, warm and excessively cheerful for a man who had not slept and who was carrying a question he could not answer.
He walked the entire length of the street without his hat.
He had left it at Frost’s, or possibly at Grosvenor Square, and the absence of it meant that the sun was on his face and the wind was in his hair.
He looked, to any of the half-dozen acquaintances who passed him, like a man who had either gone mad or fallen in love, both of which produced the same symptoms and neither of which responded well to treatment.