Page 87 of Mr. Cavendish, I Presume

“She’s miserable,” Thomas said.

“She doesn’t like me,” Amelia said.

“She doesn’t like anyone.”

“I think she likes Grace.”

“No, she just dislikes her less than she dislikes everyone else. She doesn’t even like Mr. Audley, even as she works so tirelessly to gain him the title.”

“She doesn’t like Mr. Audley?”

“He detests her.”

She shook her head, then looked back out at the sunset, which was in its death throes over the horizon. “What a tangle.”

“What an understatement.”

“What a knot?” she offered, feeling very nautical.

She heard him let out a little snuff of amusement, and then he rose to his feet. She looked up; he was blotting out the last shafts of the sun. Indeed, he seemed to fill her entire vision.

“We could have been friends,” she heard herself say.

“Could?”

“Would,” she corrected, and she was smiling. It seemed the most amazing thing. How was it possible she had anything to smile about? “I think we would have been friends, if not for…If all this…”

“If everything were different?”

“Yes. No. Not everything. Just…some things.” She began to feel lighter. Happier. And she had not the slightest clue why. “Maybe if we’d met in London.”

“And we hadn’t been betrothed?”

She nodded. “And you hadn’t been a duke.”

His brows rose.

“Dukes are very intimidating,” she explained. “It would have been so much easier if you hadn’t been one.”

“And your mother had not been engaged to marry my uncle,” he added.

“If we’d just met.”

“No history between us.”

“None.”

His brows rose and he smiled. “If I’d seen you across a crowded room?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” She shook her head. He was not getting this at all. She wasn’t talking about romance. She couldn’t bear to even think of it. But friendship…that was something else entirely. “Something far more ordinary,” she said. “If you’d sat next to me on a bench.”

“Like this one?”

“Perhaps in a park.”

“Or a garden,” he murmured.

“You would sit down next to me—”

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