The Duke of Ashcroft played better than her granny ever had, Emma decided as she half-listened to the duchess’s dance instructions and the duke’s meandering tune. Violin tucked against his collarbone, chin resting on the glossy wooden lip, he looked a prime piece standing there, body swaying as he moved through the song. One of those men who was big and broad but still somehow managed to look elegant.
A neat trick, that.
Rather like Simon and his flash of elegance.
To a degree that made her mouth water.
Simon was leaner than the duke but retained a muscular frame his fine clothing couldn’t hide. Lanky, even, a new word in her vocabulary, thanks to Dickens. Restless, his hands in constant motion. Reserved, his emotions sealed. However, she wasn’t fooled. He was passionate beneath that exterior he worked hard to polish smooth as glass. He’d shown his true self to her a few times. While jamming Jonesy’s face into the dirt and for a flaring, hot second when she’d spontaneously spoken to his ghost. Something about that gesture had struck him deeply.
In a place she didn’t think too many people had reached.
Emma peeked from the corner of her eye as the duchess gave her directions she didn’t for a moment hear.
Not when she could watch him.
Standing before the window, hands braced on the ledge, staring out at nothing of interest that she could see. People slinking down a busy London street. Overloaded carts, posh carriages, burdened hackneys. Coachmen in liveried attire. Folks in plain dress, folks in stylish. It wasn’t like it was dark and the lane lit with those incredible streetlamps one could stare at all night. He flipped a farthing between his fingers, defying gravity, not looking down. Muscle memory, the gypsies called it. An effort to calm himself, she’d come to believe. She’d seen hawkers at carnivals who couldn’t do what he could.
It made her wonder, in a mysterious little nook that lit up when she looked at Simon Alexander, what else he could do with those hands.
“He’ll forgive you. If you’re patient…and you play your cards right. As women for centuries have had to. Don’t feel it’s dishonest; it’s simply the mathematics of love.”
Emma flinched and turned to the duchess, her breath catching to realize she’d been caught ogling what accounted, in a distant, supernatural family way, to this woman’s brother. “Play my cards…”
With a groan, Delaney slid gracelessly into the chair her husband had directed a footman retrieve for her. The duke was the height of care and consideration with regard to his duchess, which Emma found a most adorable—and sickening—thing to watch. “He’s the sensitive one in this family. Julian, Finn, Humphrey, Sebastian, none as painstakingly constructed as Simon. As guarded. Still holding on to such a substantial slice of who he was before. So many secrets. Too many secrets. Finn and Julian worry about his struggle, like brothers should. But I”—Delaney took a sip of tea from the cup the duke had snapped his fingers and had superciliously delivered to her—“think he’ll talk to someone, when he finds the right someone. What he’s doing, with these women, I imagine doesn’t require much talking. And is only an effort that brings more loneliness, not takes it away. But men have to figure that out for themselves, now, don’t they? Uncomplicated creatures.”
“Forgive me for what?” Emma asked, the snag in her voice apparent. Anger and…understanding flooding out. Simon was scamp, a rogue, a bounder. And she’d been right in thinking he was upset with her. But she was upset, too. Nevertheless, if he trusted her enough to share his secrets, she’d likely be weak enough to fall right into that trap and share hers back. “What did I do?”
Delaney paused, the teacup halfway to her lips. “You left.”
Emma glanced over her shoulder to confirm the man they were discussing hadn’t moved from his contemplative spot by the window. “I couldn’t come back. My mother was ill, dying. And, then, when I could, after she passed, even with the Soul Catcher, I messed up, over and over. Arrived once before Simon was even born. The other time, in Oxfordshire, but he was a baby in London. Once, I even ended up in Scotland in the dead of winter. Horrible. And then…” Emma glanced at his gloves, still clutched in her hands. She’d lifted them to her nose in the privacy of her bedchamber this morning and breathed his scent into her soul. He hadn’t forgiven her—but he hadn’t waited, either. “I made it back. Five years after I left, maybe six.” She glanced into the duchess’s smoke-gray eyes, the scene coming back to her, a rough pinch to her heart. “There was a woman. Older. A countess or something close to it, I figured. I stepped into a performance I shouldn’t have, then stepped out as quickly as I could. Landed in the wrong year on the way back, which I fixed after a bit of experimentation.”
Stepped back—but not before he’d broken her heart. What she’d always wanted to share with him, those intimate things she’d seen other couples doing in dank alleys and hidden nooks of public houses. Saved herself to share with him. An experience Simon had thrown away on one of a thousand. Just another toff getting his dangly-bits off.
She’d vowed then and there to never come back.
