Page 13 of Earl for the Summer
“Lord Windham,” she replied, voice calm, even while her insides were rioting.
He bowed, and there was something very precise in it, something almost careful.
“Might I trouble you for a moment’s conversation?”
Daphne blinked. Beside her, Ivy had suddenly become fascinated with a nearby portrait.
“Of course,” Daphne said.
He offered his arm, and she hesitated half a beat before taking it. His sleeve was warm, his muscles hard beneath her fingers.
They moved toward the far edge of the room, near a tall window draped in green damask. The sound of the other guests blurred behind them.
“I was hoping to see you again this evening,” he said quietly.
She glanced at him, but his expression remained unreadable.
“Did you? We didn’t exactly get on well last night,” she replied.
His mouth curved. “Yes, and that was entirely my fault. I was…not quite myself. Allow me to apologize if I was awkward or abrupt.”
“Apologies aren’t necessary,” she said. “You’ve never been unkind to me.”
He studied her a moment. “And yet I fear I left you unsettled.”
Daphne felt her throat tighten. That jolt came again, but more subtle this time. “You looked at me…strangely. As though you’d never seen me before,” she said under her breath.
“Perhaps I hadn’t.”
Her eyes flicked to his. Before either of them could say more, the dinner gong sounded from the corridor.
He offered his arm again. “Shall we?”
Daphne hesitated. Then she laid her hand over his arm once more and allowed him to lead her to the dining room.
Cassian had not meantto look at her so often.
But his gaze kept returning to where Miss Daphne Bridewell sat across the table, laughing lightly at something a too-friendly lordling had said.
It was maddening.
She wasn’t even speaking to Cassian, let alone paying him any mind, and yet her presence bent his attention toward her like the magnet of a compass needle draws towards north.
He sipped his wine and forced himself to glance away, to offer a cordial remark to the dowager countess on his right. She complained of card games and her dreadful luck. Nodding at the appropriate moment, he murmured something about fortune always favoring the undeserving.
Then Daphne laughed again.
Cassian stole another glance.
A lock of her hair had slipped free of its pins, and the soft curl brushed her cheek. The strand caught the light like it meant to blind him. Like the shimmer of sunlight on still water. He told himself it was just the gaslights that made her seem so bright.
But he couldn’t stop looking.
She was…vivid. So lovely and alive in a room full of people posturing and gossiping. And utterly unaware of the way her smile made him forget what he was here for.
Cassian felt a sting of guilt and gulped down more wine. The lie he was perpetrating on her, on everyone, bit at his conscience.
Another man leaned too close to Miss Bridewell during the fish course. Cassian's jaw tightened. She tilted her head, cool and polite, not charmed. Not the way she’d looked at him earlier.
