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“I beg your pardon?”

“Woefully,” he repeated. “Though there is a slight streak of something rather unruly beneath all that propriety.” His gaze lingered upon her face. “Just enough, I think, to make you...truly intriguing.”

For several seconds, Cordelia could only stare at him. She could not decide whether she was shocked, insulted, or absurdly bemused. Perhaps all three. No gentleman had ever spoken to her in such a fashion. Indeed, no gentleman of her acquaintance would have dreamed of calmly informing an unmarried woman that he possessed sufficient familiarity with wantonness to recognize its absence in her.

And yet, beneath her astonishment, a maddening curiosity stirred.

Who was this man?

In Cordelia’s experience, gentlemen were governed by rules of conduct nearly as rigid as those imposed upon ladies. There were things they said and things they did not, subjects upon which they might converse and others they politely avoided. Sometimes she wondered whether boys of good family were instructed in the art of gentlemanly behavior with the same relentless diligence that girls were taught to sit properly, speak properly, smile properly, and never reveal too much of what they genuinely thought.

The whole business had always struck her as rather exhausting.

How was anything genuine supposed to exist between two people when simply being oneself was so frequently considered improper?

Mr. George, however, appeared to suffer from no such constraint.

Perhaps that ought to have made him alarming.

Instead, to Cordelia’s considerable annoyance, it made her want to know what he would say next. She stroked Sir Charles, grounding herself in the familiar weight of him as he purred contentedly in her arms.

Mr. George lifted one hand in a lazy gesture toward the small table set near the hearth. “Since you have already committed half a dozen social crimes this evening,” he said mildly, “you may as well complete the set. Will you play with me?”

“Play?”

“Chess.” He rose, his movements languid and graceful as he crossed to the table where the chessboard waited. His fingers rested briefly upon the carved pieces, the black and ivory gleaming softly in the low light. “Or do you not know how to play?”

The easiest answer would have been to claim she did not. Pride and honor, however, would not permit the lie. Cordelia could not understand why she was not fleeing when simply remaining in his music room placed her perilously close to ruin.

A small, unfamiliar ache stirred in her heart, whispering the answer she least wished to acknowledge. It was because of the way he looked at her. The way he spoke to her. As though she were someone singular, someone worth knowing, a mystery whose hidden depths he seemed determined to uncover.

More dangerously, he had looked at her body with unmistakable awareness, not at her uneven gait with the careful pity or swift dismissal she knew too well. Of course, he had not yet seen her walk properly. He did not know about her limp.

For one reckless instant, Cordelia wanted to remain the woman who had climbed through his window armed and disguised, the woman who had surprised him, before he learned the one thing society so often allowed to become the whole of her. She bit hard upon her lower lip, hoping the sharp sting would restore the good sense that seemed to have deserted her.

“Do I need to tempt you into accepting?”

She wrinkled her nose. “There is no one capable of pushing me to do something I do not wish.”

He regarded her for a beat, then said, “There, we have found common ground. I am very much the same.”

There was a ring of sincerity in his tone that surprised her.

“Why do you wish to play?”

It was such a perplexingly ordinary request. Somehow, she had expected there to be some wicked trap concealed within the invitation, though what sort of wickedness one might accomplish over a chessboard, she could not begin to imagine.

“I find chess an excellent way to pass the time, particularly with an opponent who has already proven herself capable of surprising me.”

Goodness, I want to stay.

Cordelia stared at the board as though it might suddenly spring to life and bite her.

“I cannot stay,” she said quickly, desperately grasping for the decorum that had been instilled in her since childhood.

The embers of it were barely there, but she reached for them with the desperation of a drowning woman. Entering so recklessly into this home had only ever been about retrieving Sir Charles. Yet the loneliness she so often pushed deep down behind walls of control suddenly slammed against its cage.

“I should leave,” she said softly, more to herself than to him.