"And why do you remain unmarried?" Margaret asked, then caught herself. "Forgive me, that was impertinent."
"It was honest," Sebastian said. "I find I prefer it to impertinence's cousin, which is everyone in that ballroom pretending not to wonder the exact same thing while asking me instead about my hunting lodge in Scotland."
He turned to look back out over the dark garden, his jaw tightening slightly.
"I remain unmarried, Lady Ashworth, because I have yet to meet a woman who wanted anything from me beyond the title stitched to my name. I have met a great many women who wanted the Duke of Ravensmere. I have met considerably fewer who had any interest whatsoever in Sebastian."
Margaret said nothing for a moment. She understood, with a sudden ache she had not expected, exactly what he meant. She had spent twenty years being reduced to a list of deficiencies—too old, too plain, too outspoken, too fond of her books—while he had spent a decade being reduced to a single gleaming asset. Different sides of precisely the same cruelty.
"That sounds," she said finally, "like a very particular kind of loneliness."
Sebastian looked at her sharply, and for a moment, something raw moved behind his eyes before he mastered it.
"Yes," he said quietly. "It is precisely that."
They stood together on the terrace for a long while after that, neither of them in any hurry to return to the noise inside. He asked her about the hospital in Cheapside, and she found herself telling him more than she had told anyone in years: about the leaking roof she had finally repaired last winter; about the physician she had personally recruited away from a much wealthier practice because she trusted his hands more than his reputation; about the particular satisfaction of building something with her own stubbornness that no one had expected her to build at all.
He listened. He did not once glance toward the ballroom doors, did not once check to see if anyone important was watching them speak. He simply listened, and asked questions, and listened again, as though there were nowhere else in the world he would rather be standing.
When the orchestra inside struck up the final waltz of the evening, Sebastian extended his arm.