Free Teresa Grant by Imperial Scandal

which they had spoken a quarter hour since. He wondered if it felt as much an eternity to her as it did to him.
    He held the French window open for her, then pulled it to behind them and nodded at the door to the ballroom. “I’d best not go in. There’s no way to explain the state I’m in. I can arrange for a carriage—”
    “Thank you.” Cordelia’s voice was level though it trembled a bit. “I need to find Caro.”
    “Caro?”
    “Caroline Lamb. I’m staying with her.”
    Of course. Caro Lamb was a childhood friend of Cordelia’s. Harry had never been quite sure what to say to the quixotic Lady Caroline, though he’d got on well with her husband, William. Which perhaps was not a good omen, given what had become of William and Caro’s marriage.
    Cordelia put up a hand to her cheek. “Is there—Do I have blood on my face?”
    He took a step closer so he could see her better in the candlelight. “No. Just a smudge on your jaw. To the left.” He started to wipe it away for her, as he would once have done unthinkingly, but his own hands were so filthy he’d do more damage. And despite the way she had clung to him in shock, he couldn’t imagine she’d want him touching her.
    Cordelia opened the steel clasp on the reticule that hung from her wrist and took out a silver-backed mirror. He studied her as she wiped the smudge from her jaw, pushed loose strands of hair back into their pins, rubbed at the blacking that had smeared below her eyes. To his shame, he could still trace the bones of her face from memory. But her skin was stretched more tautly over those bones, and there were fine lines he didn’t remember about her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. The eyes themselves still held the wounds of this night’s revelations. And perhaps other scars as well.
    He had thought a ridiculous number of times—in a camp bed, hidden in prickly bracken, wading through icy streams, bored at a regimental ball—of what he’d say to her if he saw her again. How she’d look, how he’d respond, what he would and wouldn’t admit. Julia’s death rendered that all completely trivial.
    Cordelia returned the mirror to her reticule and snapped the clasp shut. “More or less in order. At least able to go back onstage.”
    He shifted his position, resting his bad arm on a chairback.
    “You are hurt,” Cordelia said, her gaze going to his arm.
    “No. Not tonight.” He’d been unaware he was favoring it. “Bad break at Salamanca. Didn’t set properly.” And was a constant, gnawing pain. Like other things. “Bit of a nuisance.”
    Cordelia watched him with a frowning gaze he couldn’t interpret. He’d got used to reading people. He forgot she’d always been a cipher. He started to reach out a hand to her, then let it fall. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in Brussels. If you need—”
    “Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
    He gave a twisted smile. “I’ll do my best to stay out of your way.”
    “That’s not what I meant. But I’m rather good at looking after myself.”
    Her life was elsewhere, she might as well have said. Which was true. As was his. And yet—He might never see her again. A battle loomed in the not-so-distant future, and like any battle it could well prove to be his last.
    Perhaps that was what drove him to speak, when every instinct of rationality called for silence. “Cordy.”
    She was already reaching for the door handle. She turned over her shoulder to look at him.
    A few brief lines in one or two letters. Unthinking words from an acquaintance who didn’t know the true state of his marriage. How many times had he told himself it didn’t matter? Which it didn’t. Shouldn’t. “How is ... the child?”
    Her fingers tightened round the door handle. “Surely you know her name, Harry.”
    “How’s Livia?” The name felt odd on his lips. Had he ever voiced it before? Most people were careful not to speak to him of her.
    “She’s fine. She’s at Caro’s with her