“Deserve it or not, she had it. When I carried your sister up those stairs, I didn’t feel even a shadow of desire.”

She frowned at him. “Georgie has a perfect figure. In fact, she’s perfect in every way.”

“It felt as if I were carrying a child up the stairs, all long legs and hair.”

“She’s elegant,” Olivia stated. “I would kill to have her figure.”

“Really?”

“Of course. I have always wished to look precisely like her. Though obviously, not enough to avoid food,” she added.

“That’s madness. You have everything she doesn’t.”

Olivia opened her mouth, ready to argue.

“Everything she hasn’t.”

She frowned at him.

“Including me.”

Eighteen

Madness, in All Its Forms

Quin’s last two words—spoken with the reasoned calm that characterized him—shook Olivia to her core. “What?” she whispered. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I care about you. Embarrassingly, I seem to care about you more than I did Evangeline. It may be that I am mad.” He paused, considering. “I don’t perceive any other signs of mental weakness, though, so I am inclined to simply acknowledge this as a human weakness. I am reluctant to label it a failing.”

She shook her head, dazed.

“It could be that I am merely the sort of man who is ruled by lust.”

Olivia took a deep breath. “I am honored by what you said. I assure you that no woman dislikes being told she is an object of desire. But you must listen to me, Quin. I will not betray Rupert by leaving him while he is overseas, in battle. More to the point, I will never betray my sister. You sat out there in the garden with her for almost an hour. You carried her up the stairs. You courted her.”

“I was no more courteous to her than I would be to any other young woman under my roof.”

“Sitting on a bench for almost an hour? I can’t envision you doing that with any of your other guests.”

“Your sister is remarkably intelligent; we talked about science. It is a pleasure to converse with her. However, a forty-five-minute conversation does not require that I marry her.”

“Put together with everything else, it means that she has a reasonable expectation of marrying you. And I will not, ever, stand in the way of her wish. If the two of you do not marry, for whatever reason, so be it. I will never have it be said that I stole her chosen husband.”

She stood up. “I must pin up my hair—”

He came at her in a low, silent rush, a surge of power and speed. “Don’t marry me,” he said, holding her tightly.

“I won’t!” But he heard the catch in her voice.

“Just don’t pretend that you don’t want to. That there is nothing between us that is far beyond what I shared with Evangeline, you with Montsurrey, or even you with your sister.”

Olivia’s heart pounded in her chest so loudly that she thought he must be able to hear it as well. “I don’t think it matters.”

“It doesn’t matter?” he bellowed it. “What matters more than that? What?”

“Hush!” she said sharply. “I’ll be forced to marry you if we’re caught here, and I shan’t forgive you for it.”

He jerked her a touch closer, so that her body was flattened against his. “You don’t know what I mean because you have never lost someone. There is nothing that matters more, not science nor mathematical propositions, not my title and my lands. . . . Nothing.”

“There’s honor,” she said, feeling pain arrow into her heart. “My honor. I can’t betray my sister or Rupert.”

Something changed in his eyes. “Your love is not so boundless as the sea, or so deep.”

“I never said that I loved you at all, let alone to the tune of those metaphors,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “I hardly know you.”

His fingers tightened on her hips, as if he were going to argue with her. Olivia felt a quiver deep inside. He knew what she felt for him.

But he let go. “My mother has always said that I’m a hopeless fool when it comes to emotion. I rarely feel it, and when I do it’s like a kind of madness.”

Olivia shook out her skirts, avoiding his eyes. She had the same madness, though she couldn’t say that. If she did . . . he would take her. She could see it in his eyes. He would bellow “Mine!” and summon the whole party to the room.

And she would have to live with wounding—and betraying—her own sister.

No.

“I am retiring to my chamber for a few moments, and then I’ll return downstairs,” she stated. “If you would be so kind as to return to the ball now, there is a chance that no one will notice that we were both missing.”

He bowed and she walked past him, closing the door quietly behind her.

Olivia’s pulse didn’t slow until Norah had pinned up her hair again, and she’d walked back to her sister’s room. “Georgie?”

Georgiana was sitting by the fireplace, reading a book, the very picture of serenity. “Has it been long enough that I can go back downstairs now?”

“I believe that you have rested your ankle sufficiently,” Olivia said, managing a smile.

“You don’t think that I must pretend to limp, do you?”

“No, of course not. You bathed your foot in vinegar and cool water—though naturally you won’t be so indelicate as to mention the particulars—and it felt well immediately. Perhaps you shouldn’t dance, though.”

“That will not be a sacrifice. I don’t like to dance.” Georgiana got up and smoothed her hair before the glass.

“You don’t like to dance?” Olivia asked, surprised. “I had no idea.”

“I am discovering that there are aspects to being a duchess that I do not enjoy,” her sister replied, turning about. “Dancing, for example. And I don’t enjoy chatting about embroidery either, as with Althea’s mother this afternoon. For two hours.”

“You chatted,” Olivia said. “I lapsed into something akin to a stupor.”

“If there had been a coffin available, I would have flung myself into it.”

Olivia laughed. “Georgie! You’re not yourself.”

“I think I am becoming myself.” Georgiana didn’t laugh. “In the garden, I talked with the duke about the composition of light.”

Olivia’s laughter dried up instantly. “Of course. And that was far more interesting than embroidery. Of course it was.”

“It’s not fair that I can’t go to university,” her sister replied, her eyes fierce as a falcon’s with a string on its leg. “I could do that, Olivia. I could do it as well as he. Maybe better.”

“Really?”

Her sister nodded, curtly. “I don’t know anything . . . nearly as much. But it would just be a matter of study. Like learning to be a duchess, but so much more interesting!” It was a cry wrung from her soul.

Olivia stopped short. “Are you saying that you learned how to be a duchess only because that was the available subject of study?”

Georgiana walked past her, into the corridor. “You’re always too emotional. We were given a task. We could do it badly or well. I chose to do it well. You allowed emotion to get in the way of achievement.”