Page 25 of A Duke in Disguise
Ash blinked. “The chophouse it is, then. Let me get on a clean shirt.” He gestured to a few ink stains on the white linen.
“Oh don’t. I’m probably covered with ink myself. In fact, you ought to do something about your hair. Make it messier.” She pulled at the strand that had come loose from its pin. “That way we match.”
Ash gave her the sort of laugh that was really just a smile and an exhale. She felt her cheeks heat. Forced awkward friendliness was even worse than forced awkward civility and Verity wanted to run back down the stairs and hide in her study. “I’m covered in cat hair,” he said. “If that helps.”
“That’ll have to do,” she said with the air of making a great concession. “I’m impressed that you’ve used your manly wiles to get the cat to come close enough to leave hair on you.”
“I haven’t. She just likes to sit on all my furniture when I’m out. When I’m in, she perches on the bookcase and stares at me.” Sure enough, there was the cat, staring at them from atop the bookcase with an expression of concentrated malevolence. “I think she’s making up her mind whether to murder me or let me pet her. My strategy is to pretend that I haven’t noticed that she’s there. I think she’s a bit depressed about finding my rooms more comfortable than the street this autumn and consoles herself by acting like we’re enemies.”
“A sound plan.”
“All right,” he said, and slipped into his coat. “Chophouse or oyster room?”
“Ooh, oysters.”
Ash shrugged into his coat while Verity attempted to wrangle her hair into a pin. “No matter how many pins I use in the morning, it’s all over my shoulders by the afternoon. I could use five hundred pins with quite the same result. I think my hair simply opposes order. It’s anarchical.”
“It’s not all your hair,” Ash said, digging through his pockets. “Just that one strand. It’s the Jacobin wing.” He held out a hairpin.
“When did you start carrying those in your pocket?” she asked, recalling that this was not the first time he had produced a timely hairpin.
A very faint blush darkened Ash’s cheekbones and Verity felt her lips curl upward in response. “I find them all over the house,” he said. “You ought to consider what conditions you’re subjecting your hairpins to if they’d rather plummet to their death than work for you. Here,” he said, lifting a loose tendril of hair. “You expect your pins to do the work of subjugating the masses. It’s oppression. Your hair clearly wants to be free.”
“I think you’ve lost track of which party is the oppressed working class—the pins or my hair.”
“Both, Plum,” he said, and leaned close to pin the loose strand of hair in place. “There. That’ll do.”
She expected him to step back, but he stayed where he was, one hand still on the side of her head, his expression grave but wanting. This, she realized, was not about her. Whatever had stopped him from kissing her again had nothing to do with the strength of his feelings for her. He wanted to, body and soul. And he knew she wanted the same. But he was holding back, for whatever reason, and she needed to respect that. She needed to let him know that she was his friend, kisses or no. For God’s sake, he had lost two-thirds of his closest friends in the past month alone; the least she could do was assure him that he wasn’t going to lose her, no matter what.
“Come, Ash,” she said, stepping back and flashing him as bright a smile as she could. “Say good-night to your surly cat and let’s go out to supper.”
“Can’t do that,” Ash stage-whispered. “Then she’ll know we’ve noticed she’s there.”
“Silly me.”
The oyster room was crowded with people having supper before heading to the theater, so Ash and Verity had to make do with a small table in a dark corner.
“Do you think Nate could have written it?” she asked without preamble, trusting Ash to know she referred to the Perkin Warbeck book. “There are parts where the handwriting is terribly like his. And since he left, my letters to the writer have gone unanswered.”
“Ordinarily I’d say your brother is capable of anything, but perhaps not writing a three-volume novel that more or less upholds hereditary rule. All bad handwriting has a way of looking the same. However...” He tapped his fingers on the white linen table cloth. “He may have written the explicit scenes. I ought to have recognized his writing myself.”
“Why wouldn’t he have just told me?”
“Presumably because you would have insisted on knowing who wrote the rest of the book. And say what you will about Nate, but he’s not one to spill another person’s secrets.”
She held up her glass of wine and he tapped his against it in a silent salute to Nate.
After they had eaten and there was nothing left on the table but dishes of empty oyster shells, and the main room had more or less cleared out except for a handful of men and some women Verity supposed were prostitutes or courtesans, Ash cleared his throat. “Lady Caroline Talbot thinks I’m her brother’s natural son. She hasn’t said it in so many words, but she’s hinted strongly.”
“Is this some odd fancy of hers?” she asked hopefully, because from the look on Ash’s face he did not think being related to his lady botanist would be a good thing.
“No,” he said, with a grim shake of his head. “I’m afraid not. I keep thinking I ought to be glad to have blood family. To know where I came from. But I’m really not.”
She slid her hand across the table and took his. “You don’t need to be.”
“I wish I had never gone there. I feel like fate or God took away Roger and Nate and instead gave me these awful people. Well, she’s not awful. But that house.” He visibly shuddered.
“You don’t need to go back. It doesn’t matter that you might be related to them. In fact, that’s all the more reason to wash your hands of them, since they hardly did right by you.”
