Cassian was paired with Daphne.
“Lady Daphne.”
“Your Grace.”
“You will have to carry me, I am afraid. My sister has correctly identified that I am the worst whist player at this party.”
“Are you really, Your Grace?”
“I am afraid I am.”
“Then we shall be very poor together. I am also a very poor whist player. My governess despaired of me.”
“Then we are well matched.”
Daphne smiled. She smiled, grave and careful. Cassian, who had been spending the past week trying to decide what he thought of his future sister-in-law, found that he liked her very much.
The first hand was dealt and was, on Cassian’s side, extremely badly played. Daphne, who had been right about her own whist skills, was no better. They lost the first hand in under fiveminutes. They lost the second in under six. By the end of the third, Joanna had begun to laugh openly at them from the next table.
“Cassian, you have lost three hands in a row.”
“I am aware.”
“Lady Daphne will have to forfeit.”
“On the contrary,” Cassian countered, “Iwill have to forfeit. The cards have been almost entirely mine. Lady Daphne has been heroic in her efforts.”
“A gentleman,” Daphne said, very softly. “Your Grace is a gentleman.”
“What is the forfeit, Joanna?”
Joanna gave the same bright, dangerous smile she had when she had walked into the drawing room. Cassian, who had grown up with that smile and had learned before he was nine that no good ever came of it, leaned back in his chair and waited.
“You must tell us,” she said, “the moment at which you fell in love with Lady Alice.”
The room fell quiet.
It fell quiet in the way a room of fourteen people went quiet when one of them asked a question everyone had been wanting to ask. There was a small ripple of interest at the third table. A fan dropped at the fourth. At the second table, Victor, who had been holding three cards and a small steady expression, lifted his eyes.
Cassian set his cards down. He could not refuse to answer. To do that would be to confirm in front of fourteen people, including his future wife and his oldest friend and a man he was beginning to wish he had not invited, that there had been no moment. He had not been told that he would be asked. In fact, he had not even asked himself.
He looked across the room at the first table where Alice was seated with Matthew. She had glanced up and was now looking at him steadily. She was holding her thirteen cards in her hand, and her face was very composed as it had been on the walk back from the lake. But at the base of her throat, where the pendant should have been, a pulse beat quick and visible, betraying everything her composed face did not.
He looked back at Joanna.
“At the dinner table,” he said.
“Which dinner table, Brother?”
“Mine. A week ago, on Tuesday. The dinner I hosted on the occasion of our engagement.”
“What about the dinner?”
“She was sitting on my right, wearing a green dress. The soup spoon was shaking slightly in her hand. She was nervous, which surprised me because I had not before that moment believed her capable of being nervous about anything. I pressed my thigh against hers under the table to steady her. She looked up at me briefly, then looked away again, and said something to Matthew about my scowl.”
“Your scowl?” Matthew echoed, watching the exchange with sharp attention.
“She said it,” Cassian continued, “in answer to your question about what she liked best about me. Everyone laughed. Even she laughed. But I did not. I was not able to laugh. I had been sitting at my own dining table at Langton House with a bright young woman of five-and-twenty making polite conversation about my face, and I understood that I had been a fool about her for two years.”