you have never been in love for yourself, Your Grace, have you?”
“I have generally tried to govern myself by reason,” he said with a solemnity at odds with his disheveled hair and unbuttoned shirt. “I’ve always tried to avoid being ruled by my passions.”
“If you can say that, Your Grace, then you simply haven’t met the special one who’ll convince you otherwise,” she suggested. “I know that must be the case with me. I have yet to find any gentleman that pleases me enough to love. But I shall. I know it.”
“Ah, and so we are back where we began,” he said softly, his half smile now unexpectedly bittersweet. “Here we are, with your heart able to recollect more than your head.”
“I suppose we are, Your Grace.” She drew the coverlet more tightly around her shoulders. Ordinarily she would have laughed and tipped her head to one side in the well-practiced way that gentlemen found so charming.
Yet this time didn’t feel ordinary. Perhaps it was only the bruise on her forehead, or perhaps it was the moonlight addling her wits and making her see things in his expression that weren’t truly there. This time, just this once, she wished she didn’t have to do what she’d practiced. She longed to be able to explain what he said, to ask if that bittersweet half smile meant that he, too, still longed to find the love that didn’t seem to exist.
But he was the grand Duke of Strachen, while she was no more than an invented girl named Corinthia, not even real. Her sole purpose in being here in this house—and only from purest luck at that—was to be pleasing enough that the duke would think kindly toward whatever scheme Rob would decide to invent. Tonight’s moonlight would never matter as much as the money—a loan, an investment, or a gift—that Rob would coax from the duke’s pocket, especially not after she and Rob vanished one morning, off into the next set of false names and identities.
No, better to smile than to dream, and far, far better to keep her wits sharp and keen than to go longing for something that couldn’t be changed. The moment she began thinking with her heart, instead of her head was the same moment the luck would end, and she and Rob would find themselves taken up and tried as common criminals, with transportation or the gallows as their final reward.
That is, if Rob ever did return to find her….
“You are cold,” the duke was saying with concern. “You’re shivering.”
“No, Your Grace,” she said quickly, forcing her smile to be winning even as she began inching back toward her window. If she’d shivered, it had been from the reminder of the gallows and her fears for Rob, not a common chill, and certainly not from anything that he could remedy. “Only…only more weary than I first thought.”
He took a step toward her, his hand gallantly outstretched to offer support. “Then let me guide you back to your rooms. There are, you know, easier paths than hopping through the window.”
“The window does well enough for me, Your Grace.” Tonight she was the one running away, not him, but it was the wisest course—the only course, really—before she blundered and said or did something that couldn’t be undone. Far better to retreat now, until morning, when she could meet him with a clear head in the bright, unmagical light of day.
Lightly she pulled herself up onto the windowsill before he could stop her, the coverlet billowing around her bare legs.
“You were right before, Your Grace,” she said breathlessly. “We should say good evening now and part. Good night, and pleasant dreams. Good night!”
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