‘Hal!’ She swung round, so relieved to see him that she almost took his hands there and then. ‘I thought—I thought you must have gone already. The French are advancing, are they not?’
‘Yes. You are packed and ready to go?’
She nodded and saw the tension around his mouth ease into a smile. ‘Good girl. Come, let’s go up to supper; there will be a rush as soon as the Scottish dancing demonstration is over.’
He seemed to assume she was his partner: Julia wondered what Hal would have done if she had said she was already engaged for supper. It was rather pleasant to be so masterfully swept along, although she knew if it had been anyone else she would have resented it.
The supper room on the first floor was only partly full and the noise of the pipes penetrated even there. ‘That table down there,’ Hal announced, pointing to one in a deserted corner. ‘I’ll bring some food.’ He came back to the table with a footman behind him carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
‘Right.’ He waited until the man had gone, poured the wine and looked at her. ‘We need to talk. About things.’
‘Yes?’ Julia enquired as his silence stretched on. Across the room, people were beginning to come in and the tables were filling up, although their gloomy little corner was ignored. A tall man with a beak of a nose strolled in, officers clustered round him. ‘Look, there’s the duke—’
‘I am a younger son,’ Hal said, ignoring Wellington’s arrival and making her jump.
She nodded, puzzled, dragging her attention away from the bustle around the great man. She knew that.
‘And I am a soldier. Beside that I have only a small estate in Buckinghamshire.’ He picked up his glass and drained it. ‘Julia—’
‘Yes?’ Perhaps he was going to ask her to take a message home if…if something happened to him. Her heart lurched and she felt herself go pale. Her hand trembled as she picked up her own glass and sipped, grimacing at the way the bubbles tickled.
‘I ought to ask you to marry me.’
Julia stared at him across the rim of her glass. Had he really said that? She opened her mouth, found no words and closed it again. Ought to ask?
‘I nearly ruined you, I’ve compromised you with two suitors,’ he said, his smile a little twisted. ‘I drove with you last night, after dark and un chaperoned. But I am utterly and completely un suitable as a husband for a lady like you, Julia.’
‘But—but why are you telling me this?’ she stammered.
This was not her dream, her fantasy. Everything was wrong. He did not want her, she should have accepted that, realized that he would have kissed her again before now, shown her how he felt, not treated her like one of his sisters, or a friend, if he did.
‘I realized last night that the idea rather appealed to me, but that I must not give in to such a whim.’ For all his so phistication, he looked suddenly both younger and bitterly un certain.
‘Rather appealed? Whim?’ At least Mr Smyth had managed a proposal, however unromantic. She realized the glass was still in her hand and tossed back the wine recklessly. ‘You mean you have a guilty conscience because you have lost me two suitors and you are worried about Hebden so you thought you ought to propose! But then you realized that your reputation makes you un suitable. How very convenient!
‘Do you know something, Hal Carlow?’ She grounded the glass with enough force to crack the stem. ‘I would rather you had not made this confession. I can do without a catalogue of the reasons why you are not about to make me an offer.’
Julia found she had lost her temper, rather comprehensively, and that under the anger, what she was feeling was disappointment. Bitter disappointment for the shattering of the fantasy that, because she loved him, he loved her too and only had to realize it.
‘I am sorry,’ he fired back. ‘But you don’t want to marry me, do you?’
‘How do you know? You haven’t asked me what I want. You have produced this confession to quieten your conscience, that is all.’
‘I know I want you, I know I want to keep you safe. And that means keeping you safe from me,’ he fired back, the hardness and the edge back in his voice and his face. ‘That’s the best apology I can come up with. Won’t that do?’
‘No, it won’t do!’ Julia grabbed her fan and reticule and jumped to her feet leaving Hal to catch her wildly rocking chair. She swept across the room, weaving between tables, and came up hard against a solid figure. ‘Oh. I am—Your G
race.’
The duke looked down at her, the hard, preoccupied eyes barely seeming to notice her. Then he stepped back, bowed slightly, and the hint of a smile touched his mouth. His reputation with women was terrible, Julia recollected hazily, and she could quite see why. He was formidably attractive.
‘Please—’ she gestured to the corridor ahead of them ‘—I am in no hurry.’
He bowed again and strode off trailing his retinue. Julia followed more slowly. Hal, it appeared, was willing to let her go.
Blank with confused misery and the acid seething of her anger, she passed a dust-covered soldier, incongruous as he slumped back against the wall to make way for the gorgeously dressed guests. A messenger perhaps.
The duke had vanished when she reached the ballroom, but there were eddies of movement all around, cutting across the grain of the dancing couples, the groups in conversation. Something was happening; her already painful stomach cramped. The Duke of Brunswick was sitting to one side, the young Prince of Ligne on his knee. An officer bent and spoke in his ear, and he leapt to his feet, sending the child sprawling.