“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night,” the Duke of Orwater said, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured.” He forgot to add one thing: that neither of them would fall in love. He was wrong about that, too.

PART 4 

She did not see the Duke again until the dance lesson three evenings later. Held in the long gallery, because the ballroom itself was still half-dressed in dust sheets, its chandeliers not yet lowered for cleaning. And because, Anora informed her dryly, Peveral had never in his life consented to be taught anything in a room large enough for an audience.

He arrived precisely on the hour, dressed with the careless perfection of a man who had never had to think about his tailoring, and bowed to her with a formality that made the dancing master — a small, nervous man named Mr. Croft, imported from Sethbury for the occasion — visibly relax.

“Your grace has danced before, I trust,” Avisia said, because the silence wanted filling, and because teasing him seemed unaccountably easier than being formal with him now that she had knelt on his niece’s hearthrug and heard the child’s small, unhealed grief.

“I have danced at a great many balls I did not wish to attend, Miss Elfenstone, which I am told does not count as the same accomplishment.”

“We shall discover the truth of that shortly.”

Mr. Croft set them the figure, and the music began — only a single violin, thin and sweet in the high-ceilinged gallery. And Avisia discovered within the first turn that the Duke of Orwater danced like a man who had learned the steps by necessity and never once by pleasure. Correct. Controlled. Entirely without the ease that ought to have come naturally to a body so evidently strong and well-made.

His hand at her waist was light, almost cautious, as though he feared to hold her more firmly than the figure required. And when the turn brought them close, his eyes met hers for the length of a held breath before he looked deliberately past her shoulder instead.

“You are counting,” she said low, as the figure turned them again.

“I am ensuring I do not tread on your gown. Which I am reliably informed is your only good one, and which I would rather not ruin before it has even had the honor of being seen at the ball.”

“How do you know it is my only good one?”

“Because my aunt told me. And because I noticed the mend at the hem myself, three winters ago, the first week you came to keep the accounts. And I have thought of it every time I have passed you in a corridor since.”

He said it evenly, without any apparent awareness of how much the admission gave away.

And Avisia missed a step entirely.

His hand tightened at her waist to steady her, and for one moment — one full, suspended moment — the violin sustaining a long note above them, they stood closer than the figure required. His breath faintly warm at her temple. His eyes no longer looking past her shoulder at all.

“Your grace,” she said very quietly, “I believe that is a good deal more attention than a man pays to a woman’s mended hem — unless he means something by it.”

He released her at once, stepping back into the figure with a correctness so sudden and so total that Mr. Croft, watching from the corner, applauded the recovery as though it had been intentional all along.

“It means nothing more than that I am observant, which any man managing an estate must be. Shall we continue, Miss Elfenstone, or has my footwork already condemned me beyond hope of recovery?”

“Your footwork is adequate,” she said, matching his sudden formality, though her pulse had not yet steadied. “Your excuses want considerably more practice.”

He did smile then. Briefly. Involuntarily. Gone almost before it arrived. But she had seen it. And she carried the sight of it with her through the remainder of the lesson like a coal banked carefully against the cold.

It was Lady Imogen Fair Haven who arrived uninvited and unannounced, precisely as the lesson ended. Sweeping into the long gallery in deep violet silk with the particular grace of a woman who had never once in her life doubted her welcome anywhere. She was beautiful in the accomplished, weathered way of a woman who had spent a decade perfecting the art of being looked at. And her eyes went from the Duke to Avisia and back again with an assessment so swift and so complete that Avisia felt catalogued and dismissed within the space of a single glance.

“Orwater.” Imogen extended a gloved hand he had no choice but to take. “I had not heard you had taken up dancing lessons. How delightfully domestic. And this must be your Miss Elfenstone. I confess I had pictured someone rather grander, given the speed with which the whole county has been made to hear of your engagement.”

“Miss Elfenstone has no need of grandeur, Lady Rosemuir.”

The Duke said it flat and certain as a fact requiring no confirmation, and Avisia noted with a small, warm flare of gratitude that he did not so much as glance in her direction to check whether the compliment landed.

“No,” Imogen said, her eyes traveling once more, unhurried, over the mended hem of Avisia’s gown, the plainness of her hair, the ink stain still faintly visible on one finger despite a week’s careful scrubbing. “I dare say she has not.”

She smiled. It was a lovely smile. And there was nothing at all warm inside it.

“How did you and the Duke meet, Miss Elfenstone? I find I am quite consumed with curiosity.”

Avisia felt the trap close half a second before she saw its shape. A simple question asked before witnesses that she and the Duke had never troubled to agree upon an answer to. Because in the rush of terms and settlements, neither of them had thought to invent a courtship to match the fiction of their engagement.

She opened her mouth with no notion at all of what might come out of it.

And felt in the same instant the Duke’s hand settle at the small of her back — warm and certain — drawing her half a step nearer to his side.

“She kept my accounts for three winters before I troubled to notice what was in front of me,” he said before Avisia could speak at all. His voice carrying the particular flat conviction of a man stating something he had only just realized was entirely true. “I am not, as you may recall, Lady Rosemuir, a man given to noticing things quickly. I am told it is one of my chief faults.”

“Among others,” Imogen murmured.

But something in her composure had thinned very slightly. And her gaze, when it came back to Avisia, held for the first time something that was not quite contempt — something nearer to calculation. As though she had expected to find a fiction and had instead found a question she could not yet answer.