Her sister murmured something to her. She turned then, gracefully, without hurry, and her gaze moved across the room and landed on him with neither the flutter nor the performance he expected. Simply, recognition. Or something that looked very much like it.
Your Grace. A greeting so perfectly measured it contained both courtesy and nothing else. He inclined his head. Miss Pemberton, you have recently returned from Bath, I understand.
10 years in Bath. A beat. Yes. Something snagged in him. 10 years. Pemberton, Lady Whitmore’s niece.
He turned the arithmetic over in his mind the way you turn a key that almost fits, feeling the resistance, the near catch of tumblers that haven’t quite aligned yet. He didn’t get there. Not yet.
Instead, he simply stood in the library of Whitmore House holding an unopened book while Ada Pemberton looked at him with 20-year-old eyes that seemed to be waiting for something he hadn’t yet understood he owed her. He thought about her for 3 days after that dinner.
This surprised him considerably. He was not a man who thought about people. They encountered each other seven times in the following 3 weeks. Maximilian counted and then was annoyed at himself for counting.
The Hargreave ball on the 1st of May, the afternoon concert at Mrs. Drummond’s house on the 7th, a chance meeting at Hatchards on the 9th, where he came in for political pamphlets and found her at the far end of the fiction shelf, deep in something she didn’t set down when he entered.
He had to clear his throat. She looked up without embarrassment and asked whether he had an opinion on Fielding. He did not, particularly, but found that he was formulating one.
He began to attend events he had previously declined. He told himself this was coincidence, then that it was curiosity, then that it was simply a reasonable expansion of his social obligations, and by the third lie, he had stopped telling himself anything at all and simply showed up.
The other women of the season noticed. His mother noticed. The gentlemen in his club made remarks he deflected with the skill of a man who has had 20 years of practice at deflection.