Thinking Out Loud to the Duke

The silk of my skirt was the first thing to betray me. I had chosen the pale blue because it looked meek, the kind of color a woman wears when she has never schemed against anyone in her life, but it rustled with every step, and in the hush of the Bellerose parlor it sounded like a scandal all on its own.

Sebastian Rutherford stood by the mantelpiece with one gloved hand resting on the marble, and I had approximately four seconds to take him in before decorum demanded I stop staring like a woman at a museum exhibit. He was tall in the specific way that made doorframes look personally offended, and his midnight-blue doublet had enough silver thread stitched into it to fund a small village, and his face had the exact expression of a man who had been asked to attend a tea party immediately after losing a war.

He did not smile. I was sure he had never smiled. I was fairly sure smiling was, for him, a crime punishable by exile.

Okay. Okay, Charlotte. You can do this. Sweet. Docile. A woman who has never once plotted a single thing in her entire life.

I sank into a curtsy so deep and so trembling that my knees audibly protested, and when I rose I made sure my voice came out breathy and soft, the vocal equivalent of a lace handkerchief.

"Your Grace," I said, "what an unexpected honor. I would have worn something finer had I known you intended to grace us so suddenly."

His gray eyes moved over me once, slowly, assessing, the way a man checks a horse for a limp before he buys it. He looks like he hasn't slept since the invention of fire. He looks like if I offered him a blanket he would stab me for the insult. Someone needs to sit this man down with a cup of chamomile and a weighted blanket before his jaw locks permanently into that scowl.

"Lady Charlotte," he said, in a voice so low and even it came from somewhere underground. "I apologize for the lack of notice. There are matters regarding our contract that require immediate clarity."

"Of course," I breathed, clasping my hands at my waist like a girl in a painting titled Innocence, 1850. "Whatever Your Grace requires. I only wish to be of service to you in this, and in all things."

Great. Very good. Very normal amount of groveling. Nobody suspects a thing. Meanwhile he is standing there radiating Victorian vampire energy, all broad shoulders and cheekbones you could cut glass on, and if he clenches that jaw any harder he is going to need a dentist instead of a duchy.

Sebastian went still.

It was a small thing, the kind of stillness a person might not notice unless they had spent an entire morning cataloging a man's every twitch for signs of imminent execution orders, but I noticed, because his hand had frozen halfway to the back of a chair and his eyes had gone from assessing to something closer to alarmed.

"Your Grace?" I said, aloud, sweetly. "Are you unwell?"

"I am," he said slowly, "entirely well."

He did not sound entirely well. He sounded like a man who had just heard a trumpet go off inside his own skull. He pressed two fingers to his temple, a brief and private gesture, as though testing whether his head was still attached to his neck, and I filed that away as Interesting But Not My Problem, because I had a script to follow and a countryside retirement to secure and absolutely no time to worry about whether the terrifying Duke of the North had a migraine.

"Please," I said, gesturing at the settee with what I hoped was gracious, nonthreatening warmth, "will Your Grace sit? I shall ring for tea."

"I prefer to stand."

Of course he does. Standing is very on-brand for a man who probably sleeps upright in a coffin lined with velvet and regret. Honestly the posture alone should be studied. Someone give this man a government grant.

His jaw ticked. Actually ticked, a small flex along the hinge of it, and his gray eyes snapped to my face with an intensity that made the room feel smaller, as though he were trying to read something written directly onto the inside of my skull.

"Lady Charlotte," he said, and his voice had an edge to it now, careful and probing, "did you say something just now?"

My stomach dropped straight through the floor and kept falling. Did I say something. Did I SAY something. Oh no. Oh no no no, did I call him a vampire out loud, is that what's happening, is this how I die in week one—

"I only asked if Your Grace would care for tea," I said, and I was proud of how steady that came out, proud in the specific way a woman is proud of a lie she delivers without her voice cracking.

"Before that."

"Before that I believe I only curtsied, Your Grace. Rather dramatically, if I recall. I do apologize, my knees are not what they once were." Lie. My knees are twenty-two years old. My knees are fine. My knees are not the problem. The problem is apparently that this man can somehow hear me think the word vampire and I need to figure out why before I accidentally call him something worse, like broody disaster or emotionally constipated war criminal—

Sebastian's eyes narrowed, and something flickered across that stone face of his, something that was not quite alarm and not quite amusement but sat somewhere uneasily between the two, like a man watching a house catch fire and realizing, against all sense, that he found the flames rather entertaining.

"You are," he said carefully, "a very strange woman, Lady Charlotte."

"I have been told so, Your Grace." By everyone. My whole life. Both lives, apparently, since this one is barely twelve hours old and I've already peaked.

He opened his mouth as though to say something further, then closed it again, his gaze dropping briefly to the heavy starlight silver ring on my finger, the one the maid had fussed over that morning and called an heirloom, before lifting back to my face with the wary focus of a man recalculating an entire battle plan.

"The contract," he said at last, his voice rough, as if he were dragging himself bodily back to the matter at hand. "I came to discuss its terms. I had intended to be brief."

"I would be only too glad to discuss it, Your Grace," I said, folding my hands tighter, the very picture of a woman eager to please. Please let this be the part where I get to suggest we call the whole thing off. Please let this be the part where I get my quiet cottage and my endless tea and my complete freedom from all of this. Please let him not be able to actually hear me, because if he can, we are both in enormous trouble and I only just got here.

Sebastian looked at me for a long moment, gray eyes searching my face with an intensity I did not understand and very much did not trust, and somewhere behind that unreadable expression, something in him had clearly, unmistakably, rattled loose.