What moved through him was not comfortable. It was not something he could address with composure or deflect with a well-constructed sentence. It sat in the center of him like something struck by flint.
He played cards on the other side of the room and spoke to people and smiled when it was required. And every 10 minutes, he looked across and Lord Hereford was still there.
And Ada was still laughing. And the thing in his chest did not improve. He left at 11:00 without speaking to her.
He walked home through the June dark and arrived at Ashvale House in a temper he was too proud to acknowledge and too intelligent not to understand. And went to his study and sat in the chair behind his desk and thought, for the first time without flinching, about what he was actually doing.
He was 40 years old. He had told his mother, told himself, told anyone who asked, that the time had passed. He had built a very comfortable architecture of resignation around himself and lived in it for years and had been, if not happy, at least insulated from the particular kind of unhappiness that wanting something you cannot have produces.
And now, there was Ada Pemberton, 20 years old, with a 10-year-old’s declaration still somewhere in the room between them. And a young viscount who was not complicated and not guarded and would give her a straightforward life with straightforward warmth.
He wanted her, not as an abstraction, not as a pleasant diversion in an otherwise predictable season. He wanted her specifically, precisely, the way she tilted her head at books and chose her words and looked at wisteria and refused to give him anything he hadn’t earned.
He had been circling that truth for 6 weeks. He was done circling. The question was what he was going to do about it.
And whether he had, in his decade of careful inaction, already run out of time. The Pemberton household received the news on the morning of June the 15th.
Lord Edmund Hereford had sent a formal letter of interest to Ada’s father, who was traveling from the country and expected in London within the week. Nothing was official. Nothing was decided.