Page 71 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“You hadn’t so much as said good evening?—”

“I find that I always notice where you are, Anna. I have done so all evening. I expect I have done rather longer than that, if I’m honest about it… Does that answer your question?”

She turned to look at him properly then, and could not help it. He was watching her with an expression she had no frame for—not the dry composure she knew, not the careful distance he’d maintained across the better part of a year. Something underneath all of that, something she had glimpsed before only in fragments and never quite like this: unguarded, in the dark of a moving carriage, with nowhere left to redirect it.

“You’re always watching me?”

“It would seem so.” He didn’t look away, which he usually did, eventually, when she looked at him too long. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend you to know that.”

Anna was quiet for a moment, turning the admission over, feeling its edges. She thought about every time this Season she had felt his attention like a pressure across a room, the ball, the dinner, the market before that, and had told herself she was imagining it, that she was projecting her own unseemly fixation onto a man who had told her plainly, more than once, precisely where he stood.

“Before was different, you were under my protection. But now, with you out…”

“Thank you,” she said, because there was too much else she could not say yet and yet the words fell short as they always hadwith him. “Thank you for coming after me. I don’t know what would have…”

“You needn’t thank me for that.”

“You’ve saved me twice now it seems. However will I repay you?”

The carriage rocked gently over the cobbles as her words hung in the air, more heated than she intended them to come out. She studied him in the dim light, this man she had spent a year in the country determinedly not thinking about and failed at considerably. He was looking out the window now, and she regarded the straight line of his nose, the particular tension in his bearded jaw that never entirely left him, the hands resting loose on his thighs that had, not an hour ago, hauled a man twice her size off her by the back of his coat.

I have told myself a hundred times I was past this.

She had sat in Lady Oldbarrow’s company and spoken very sensibly about finding a man she liked, about being practical, about not giving her heart to someone who had told her clearly he did not want it. She had danced with perfectly agreeable men this Season. She had reminded herself after each dance that agreeable was sufficient, that warmth and mutual regard were a foundation most women would envy.

She told herself she would be a fool to throw over for the sake of a man who had told her, plainly, he would not be marrying anyone.

And yet, he had reached for her in the dark garden.

None of it made sense.

“Why are you angry with me?” She asked suddenly, not realizing until the words had already escaped her lips.

“I’m not angry with you. Why would you think that?”

“You are. You have been, I think, since we bumped into each other, at the market.” She felt her chin lift, old stubbornness surfacing through the evening’s residual fright, and did nothing to suppress it.

“I was perfectly cordial?—”

“You have barely acknowledged, and never danced with me all Season. You watch me as though I’ve personally wronged you and won’t say how. If I have done something, Frederick, I would rather you tell me plainly than continue looking at me like that.”

“I am not angry with you, Anna.”

“For someone so intelligent, you are terribly confusing. What is it then?” She leaned forward, closing some of the distance the carriage’s narrow bench had never offered much of to begin with. “Tell me. Please.”

She watched him open his mouth, watched the careful structure of whatever answer he’d begun to assemble collapse before it could reach his tongue.

There was something almost painful in it that pulled at her.

Frederick, who was never at a loss, who could hold a dinner table in dry wit for an hour and redirect any conversation in the known world, was entirely without words. She would have found it satisfying, once, to have rendered him speechless. She found now that she only wanted him to say the thing.

“You captivate me in ways you cannot imagine, Anna.”

“Then tell me?—”

“I can’t,” he said, low and rough. “I can’t tell you. It is not… it would not be fair to either of us, for me to say it.”

“Why not?”