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“What would you have preferred? That I allowed your expectations to become hers?”
“I would have preferred that you left room for either of you to change your mind.”
“Lady Lydia knows what she wants.”
“Then perhaps you should give her credit for being able to judge what you can offer.”
“I will not offer a marriage I do not want.”
“And yet you spent yesterday morning in the library with her.”
“She cut her finger.”
“Before or after you joined her?”
He turned toward the window. “That is irrelevant.”
“Not if you expect me to believe you have no wish to know her.”
A carriage had stopped outside. Through the glass, he watched a footman lower the step while its occupants waited to be received. His mother came closer. “Since you have no intention of marrying her, what do you hope to gain from spending time with her, Tristan?”
“Courtesy. Friendship, perhaps.” The word felt both insufficient and unsafe. “She deserves someone who wants the same future she does.”
“Then let her make her own judgment.”
“She has. I am respecting it.”
His mother did not move from his path. “Yet you seem dissatisfied with her judgment.”
In the hall, an arriving guest asked for the Dowager Duchess. Neither of them moved. “I know what I can offer her.”
“You know what you refuse to offer,” his mother said. “That is not the same thing.”
“I will not encourage expectations I have no intention of fulfilling.”
“Then consider why you keep seeking her out.”
Denial would have been wasted effort, and his mother knew him too well. Tristan opened the door, and she paused beside him before going to greet the new arrivals. He stayed in the sitting room a moment longer. That he wanted Lydia to revise her judgment of him was clear enough. What he would do if she changed her mind was another matter entirely.
From the hall came his mother’s voice, warm and welcoming. He straightened his cuffs and went upstairs to dress. At the ball, Lydia would be free to dance with anyone she pleased. He repeated the principle to himself because it sounded unassailable. She was free, and he had insisted upon that freedom. There would be men at the ball who wanted precisely what Lydia had said she wanted, marriage and children and a future that did not begin with refusal. Tristan had no moral objection to any of them. Some less reasonable part of him did.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lydia discovered the Duke of Ashcombe’s charm while watching him spend it on someone else. The discovery irritated her as much as the charm itself. On the day of her arrival, he had made civility look expensive. Tonight he spent it freely: a hand offered to an older guest, a private joke bent low enough not to exclude her husband. Watching him, Lydia felt a small, unreasonable pang of disappointment. His reserve was clearly a choice; one he made specifically with her. That should have cooled her interest. Instead, she found herself wondering what it would take to make him look at her with that same easy warmth.
She stood beside her mother near the ballroom doors, waiting for a woman with an elaborate arrangement of feathers to finish greeting the Dowager Duchess. Across the room, Tristan bent his head to hear an elderly guest. Whatever the man said made him smile. He answered, and the man laughed so heartily that his wife took his glass from him.
A drop of wine landed on Tristan’s cuff. He inspected it with such exaggerated resignation that the wife laughed too. Lydia looked away. Her mother adjusted the fall of her sleeve. “Is your finger troubling you?”
“No.” She had removed the strip of linen before dressing. Beneath her glove, the cut was scarcely visible. It had closed neatly.
“The gloves are not too tight?”
“They are quite comfortable.” Lydia flexed her fingers to prove it.
She had been asked three times whether she was comfortable. Her mother had also offered to change her necklace, her shoes, and the position of a curl which had resisted every attempt to secure it. Lydia suspected none of those things was what worried her. “I should like to enjoy myself tonight,” she said.
Her mother lowered her hand. “Of course, darling.”
