Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 3

He walked farther into the room, past the long table where the atlas lay open, past the globe that his great-grandfather had carried home from Vienna in a ship’s crate. The fire had burned low; the coals glowed like tiger eyes. “Was I truly that obvious?” he asked.

“About the tiredness?” She considered him with a frankness that made him feel looked at in a way he had not been looked at all week. “Not particularly. You hide it very well.”

“Then how did you know?”

“Because everyone else was watching to see whether you noticed them,” she said simply. “I happened to be watching you.”

Something moved in his face. She seemed to hear how the sentence had landed and added, too quickly: “Not in the way that sounded. I only meant—” She stopped, and made a small sound that was almost a laugh. “That is unfortunate. I am usually better with words.”

“Stay with ‘I happened to be watching you.’ I liked it better.”

She shook her head, but she was smiling, and the smile was completely unlike the smiles he had been swimming in all week. It did not ask for anything. It was just a smile.

He came closer and leaned against the edge of the atlas table, folding his arms. “You understand why you were invited here.”

“Of course. I am one of eight cows being shown to a bull.”

He blinked. No one had ever— “That is not quite how my mother describes it.”

“I imagine she doesn’t.” She turned a page of her book, though he suspected she wasn’t seeing it. “You have spent most of the evening at the opposite end of every room, Your Grace. I simply concluded you had seen all the cows before, and were not impressed by the field.”

“My mother would be horrified to hear you say that. Herself, the Dowager, she believes the field is unusually strong this year.”

“Remind me to compliment her breeding program.”

He laughed. He did it without permission, the same unguarded laugh from dinner, and the sound of it startled him again. “You must know, Miss Linden, that this is the most honest conversation I have had since arriving here.”

“That is either a compliment to me or an indictment of the house. I am uncertain which is safer to accept.”

“Both. Accept both.”

She looked up at him then, and for a moment the amusement left her face, and what was left was something harder and more genuine: a clear, undecorated regard, the look of a person who had stopped performing even the friendship of small talk. “I never expected you to choose me, Your Grace. I want you to know that I didn’t come here hoping.”

The words sat between them like a dropped glove.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Look at me,” she said, and there was no self-pity in it, only arithmetic. “I am not the richest woman here, nor the best connected. Lady Amara knows half of your family by first name. At least three of tonight’s guests could describe your childhood to you and you’d believe them before you believed me. No one has ever described me as an obvious future duchess. I am simply—” She gestured helplessly. “The one in blue.”

“And does that disappoint you?”

She answered slowly, as though testing the truth of it as she spoke. “No. Not in the least. I didn’t come here expecting my life to change because a duke looked across a table and decided I was suitable. And if he did”—she lifted her eyes to his, and there was that smile again, wry and unafraid—”I should hope he had a better reason than my position in a seating chart.”

A better reason, he thought. Like noticing you first.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor—boots, brisk, the footman’s measured tread coming to chivvy the stragglers back to the drawing room. Miss Linden glanced toward the door, and the evening called her back to itself.

“I should return,” she said.

“So should I.”

Neither of them moved.

Then: “May I walk you back, Miss Linden?”

“If you like.” She slipped the book onto the shelf and straightened her skirt. “Though I warn you—it is only a corridor, and there will be people at the end of it, and they will draw enormous conclusions from the sight of us arriving together.”

“Let them.”

She paused, and something in her unsettled look pleased him in a way he did not care to examine. “You are not what I expected, Your Grace.”

“Nor you. I am not certain which of us should be concerned.”

“I am not certain it matters,” she said, and led him out into the corridor, where the portraits of his ancestors hung in a long double row, staring down at them like a jury.

That night, after the guests had retired and the house had settled into its small creaks, Marcus stood at the window of his dressing room in his shirtsleeves, watching the moon pour silver over the lawn. He had not thought about his mother’s gathering once in three hours. He had thought only about a pale blue dress, and a steady voice, and the way one quiet woman had managed, in a single evening, to make him feel more like a person and less like a property.

Only she asked whether I was tired, he realized, and the thought arrived without armor.

Eight women had spent hours trying to make themselves memorable.

One had simply watched him.

He reached for the bell pull, then stopped himself. It was half past eleven. He had no business summoning his secretary at half past eleven to draft a letter he had not yet earned the right to write.

Tomorrow, he told himself. He would find her, and he would not pretend, and he would see what other questions lived behind her eyes.

Down the long corridor, in the guest wing, Miss Eleanor Linden lay wakeful in the dark, replaying her own words with rising horror. I happened to be watching you, she repeated to the ceiling. I might as well have sent him a love letter on lavender paper with a wax seal shaped like a heart.

She pressed her pillow over her face.

And, because she was alone in the dark and could lie to no one, she admitted to herself what the smile had already betrayed: that of the eight hopeful women at Marnfeld Hall, she was no longer certain she was the least hopeful of them all.