"I have stayed single by choice, Your Grace," the young woman said with a smile that did not reach for his approval in the least. "And I confess I find it a very restful arrangement. You needn't look so alarmed."
Lucian Marable, seventh Duke of Vernham, was not accustomed to being told that he looked alarmed, chiefly because he was not accustomed to feeling it.
He had spent 15 years being the most sought-after and least catchable man in three counties, and in all that time, no woman had ever spoken to him in that particular tone—the tone one uses with an amusing but slightly tiresome nephew.
He had approached her expecting the usual thing: the fluttering, the sudden interest in whatever he chose to discuss, the careful angling of a face toward the best light. Instead, he had got this: amusement. Faint, well-meaning, thoroughly unimpressed amusement.
"I am not alarmed," he said.
"You have the look of a man who has just discovered that his horse can talk," she said, "and does not care for its opinions. But I dare say it will pass."
She turned back to the long windows of Lady Ashcombe's music room, where the last of the afternoon light lay gold across the lawns, and appeared to consider the conversation concluded.
It was not concluded. Lucian did not permit conversations to conclude before he had finished with them.
"You have the advantage of me," he said. "You know my name, and I do not know yours."
"Everyone knows your name, Your Grace. That is rather the difficulty with dukes. They are terribly easy to identify and terribly hard to be rid of." But she relented, and there was warmth beneath the dryness, which was somehow worse than if there had been none. "Beatrix Callowell. My aunt is Lady Ashcombe. I keep her house and read to her in the evenings, and when she has a party, I stand at the window like this and watch clever men make fools of themselves. It is one of the great pleasures of my situation."
"And I am the clever man making a fool of himself?"
"You are trying very hard not to be. It is going about as well as these things usually do."
Lucian Marable was 39 years old. He had been pursued, flattered, schemed after, and openly bid upon by the mothers of the realm since he was two and 20. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the whole business of courtship had curdled in him into a kind of weary contempt. He knew every move before it was made: he knew the sigh, the dropped glove, the sudden faint, the arranged encounter in the shrubbery.
He had grown so expert in the choreography of being wanted that he had stopped believing any of it was real, and had privately concluded that no woman had ever wanted him for anything but his name, his houses, and the 12,000 a year that came with them.
And here was a woman leaning on a windowsill, watching the light on the grass, telling him plainly that she wanted none of it and found his efforts faintly comic. He should have been offended. He should have bowed and walked away and forgotten her by supper.
He did not walk away.
"Why," he said, "have you stayed single by choice?"
She glanced at him, and for the first time, something serious moved behind the amusement.
"Because I watched my mother marry for advantage and spent 20 years regretting it," she said simply. "Because a woman who marries surrenders nearly everything and is thanked for it. Because I read a great deal and think a great deal, and neither of those is considered an asset in a wife. And because—" The smile came back. "—I have yet to meet a man whose company I prefer to that of a good book and a quiet window. You are welcome to try to be the exception, Your Grace, but I warn you: the book is Marcus Aurelius, and he is very good."
Lucian, who had not read Marcus Aurelius since he was 19 and had found him tedious, said, "He is a Stoic. Stoics disapprove of pleasure."
"Stoics disapprove of being ruled by pleasure," she corrected. "There is a difference, and it is precisely the difference between a man who enjoys a fine dinner and a man who lives for the next one. I should have thought a duke would know it." She tilted her head. "Or perhaps not. You have the look of a man who has been given too much of everything and enjoys none of it. That is not stoicism. That is only surfeit."