She Sat on a Stranger’s Lap to Hide From Her Former Love — Then Two Hundred Guests Fell Silent When Charlotte Realized the Man Beneath Her Was the Feared Duke Hosting the Ball.

PART 2

“You are ruined,” he said.

“Yes,” said Charlotte, without looking at him directly. “I have been in this chair ninety seconds, and you have watched me do the arithmetic. Now smile at me, because Lady Merchant is nine feet away and she has been staring since I landed.”

He did not smile, not exactly, but something in his jaw eased, the way a man’s face changes when he stops bracing for a blow that has already fallen.

“You have been in this room since nine,” she said. “You know the county, and you know precisely what is about to be said about you tomorrow, and you are letting me sit here anyway. Why?”

He looked at her for a long moment before he answered, and when he did, his voice had dropped to something rougher.

“Because the alternative is worse than anything they could say about you,” he said. “And I have had six years to grow accustomed to being cold. I have not yet had six years to grow accustomed to being pitied. I find I would rather be neither, tonight, than the second.”

Charlotte held his gaze. There was a whole life folded into that sentence — a man who had built a wall out of silence and had just discovered, in the space of four seconds, that a stranger had walked straight through it and understood the entire shape of the thing on the other side.

“You have not asked me my name,” he said.

“I have not needed it yet,” said Charlotte. “I needed a chair.”

A muscle moved at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but close enough that she felt it, absurdly, as a small victory. Then his hand tightened, almost imperceptibly, on her waist, and she felt the change in him before he spoke.

“It has not passed,” he said, very low. “Not yet.”

“How long, usually?”

“A quarter of an hour. Sometimes longer.”

“Then we have a quarter of an hour,” said Charlotte, “and I am going to spend it talking to you about absolutely nothing at all, and you are going to let me, and at the end of it we are going to stand up together as though none of this mattered in the slightest.”

He studied her — really studied her, for the first time, as though seeing past the crisis to the woman managing it. “You have done this before,” he said. “Not this. But — managed a room. Managed a man.”

“For twelve years,” said Charlotte, and heard, with some surprise, how bare that sounded once it was out of her mouth.

The steward arrived at five past the hour, took one look at the tableau, and said, with a composure Charlotte thought afterward was the single most professional thing she had ever witnessed, “His grace is engaged. We shall go in without him.”

His grace.

Charlotte kept her face entirely still and felt the last piece of the evening’s arithmetic drop into place, and it was a great deal worse than she had allowed for.

“You are the Duke of Renford,” she said.

“I am.”

“This is your house.”

“It is.”

“I have sat down on the host,” said Charlotte Ray, “in his own ballroom, in front of every person he has invited.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel Hail. “I had assumed you knew. I have just watched you find out, and I am extremely sorry.”

“Do not be sorry at me,” said Charlotte. “I have not anywhere to put it.” She was still smiling at approximately nobody, her chin steady, her voice level. “It does not change one thing, sir. It only means the number of people watching us is larger. Talk to me about something.”

He did. For twenty-five more minutes, in a room of two hundred people who had by then arrived, collectively, at a settled and devastating opinion of exactly what kind of woman would do such a thing — he talked to her, low and steady, about nothing at all, while something else entirely passed between them in the silences.