Page 38 of Love Unraveled
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Madeline”
Gaston was fullyaware Sophie was playing a game. She was clearly baiting the duke. What did he care? From what he’d seen of the man so far, he deserved to be dangled and dallied with. He was a self-centered boar, barreling in late with no sense of courtesy for the audience or the musicians. Not to mention how he’d spoken to Sophie the other night at the Bennets’ ball. For that alone, Gaston would as soon punch the man as look at him.
Of course, he did neither. Instead, he returned Sophie’s smile and turned his attention to the orchestra. His ears tuned in to the harmonic melodies, but his mind was fixated on holding Sophie’s willing hand, tracing circles, her slight tremble passing on to him. She had always responded to his touch. The violins surged toward the crescendo. He closed his eyes, letting the power in the strings strum through him. Memories of their one night together, images of Sophie’s beautiful body, open and giving, crashed through his mind with the final notes.
“Your smile leaves me wondering,” Sophie said as applause broke the moment.
“Does it?” Gaston shifted, inadvertently drawing Sophie’s attention to the uncomfortable rise in his trousers. “And your smile leaves me with no questions whatsoever,” he said at her triumphant grin. “I find music stirs my blood,” he added, but he knew he wasn’t fooling her. She understood well her power.
“And mine,” she said huskily as the next set launched with a cello concerto.
Gaston relaxed back in his chair, getting lost, once again, in the music and his reminiscence. When the orchestra began a piece from Cherubini’sLodoïska, Sophie gripped his hand tightly. The summer she’d turned eleven, Gaston’s father had treated Sophie and her family to a performance of the opera at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. He remembered well her joy in it, her tension when the castle wall had exploded onstage, and her happy tears when the young lovers Floreski and Lodoïska had been reunited at the end. Sophie had always been a romantic.
He squeezed her hand to let her know he, too, recalled the performance. He watched her face while the soprano sang as Lodoïska had from the tower, and he did not miss the tear clinging to Sophie’s bottom lashes as the last notes hung in the air. The audience erupted in applause, but Sophie sat, staring at the stage, as stiff and still as a mannequin sheathed at a dress shop. Her beauty and her agony made his chest ache. He wanted to pull her into his arms and soothe away her pain.
Lady Thornwood said something to her, and it pulled Sophie from her reverie. A smile lit her expression, and she whispered to her friend, waving her fan in front of her face, her response too muffled for Gaston to understand. But her melancholy had lifted, so his worry lightened along with it. Sophie was not as shallow or vacuous as she wanted this world to believe. She felt the full spectrum of her emotions deeply. Not for the first time, he pondered her pretense. Did she think it her only way to land a duke?
He glanced toward the Duke of Salinger only to find the man staring at Sophie. Gaston’s good mood diminished instantly. The duke was far more shallow and vacuous than Sophie’s appearance as such, yet he offered her an enviable position in society. What did Gaston have to offer? Gaston Armand, the Marquis de Lyon, existed no more. His family had been stripped of the title when his father had refused to return to the new court. It was a decision Gaston supported, but it had left him adrift. Only Sophie had anchored him. For years, she had been all that mattered. And now?
Sophie cast her smile on him, and he knew the answer. It was embedded in his soul. The darkness that had driven him since she’d married the count no longer thrived in Gaston. His heart had come full circle. She was his reason for being. Now if only he could once again be hers.
“This evening has created a craving in me for more entertainment. More…” Sophie twirled her hand in the air, looking for a word. “Vita,” she said, snatching at the air as though she’d caught the word.
Life.It was the essence of Sophie’s appeal, had been since she’d pulled him along the streets of Paris that fateful day. She delighted in all things.
Gaston smiled in return. “And what would you suggest, Sophie?”
“Sophia,” she corrected but continued, unbothered. “Richard has offered to secure tickets for the theater tomorrow evening. There we will find our joie de vivre, even if it is only upon the stage.”
“I would be honored to escort you,” he said slowly, not entirely sure she was not informing him that her plans did not include him.
“Of course, my dear Gaston,” she said, briefly touching his cheek.
Gaston would have been bursting with renewed hope were it not for her surreptitious glance toward the duke and her smirk indicating she had accomplished exactly what she wanted—her triumph lay with inciting the duke, not inviting the commoner. Well, he would not be so easily deterred. May the better man win and,mon Dieu, let him be the better man in Sophie’s heart.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
And I meant to make you jealous. Are you jealous of me now?
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Happy”
Sophia knew sheshould not have done it, but she could not seem to help herself. The duke had treated her like a possession, and she wanted to make it clear no one owned her. Besides, it was fun to prick the air out of his inflated sense of self—stampeding in with not so much as a glance of contrition to the orchestra or the audience. It had irritated her.
She’d also needed a distraction. The soprano’s song had shifted something inside her as memories of her first opera had rushed in. It had been at the special invitation of the Marquis de Lyon and had been issued at the insistence of Gaston. Her mother had been thrilled, as it had been years since she’d sat in a private box at an opera. They’d attended with great excitement.
The theater had been newly built and had been remarkable to an eleven-year-old, as had the performance itself. Gaston had held her hand as the wall had unexpectedly exploded onstage, revealing soldiers fighting. It had caught her off guard and been far too real a reminder of what was happening in the streets and around the country. The royal family had been arrested and only recently returned to Paris, and the unrest had been growing, not ebbing.
It wasn’t until much later she learned the theater had been used by counterrevolutionaries, including Gaston’s father and, eventually, her own. If her father had maintained his neutrality, perhaps he would be with her now. But after her mother had been dragged away by a mob of revolutionaries, he was decided. As was she. She understood the plight of the underprivileged, but the cause did not justify the ways and the means. Her mother had been an innocent, a woman who had chosen a mundane life with a scholar over the glamour and excitement of the Italian court. She’d been no threat to their cause. But, eventually, Sophia had become a threat. For her mother. For her father. And for Gaston.
She glanced at him sitting quietly across from her in the carriage, looking out the window into the darkness. If only a miracle could return the other two to her too. She sighed. She must be grateful for the one. For surely his appearance was a return for her and not for any reprehensible reasons. He had lived what she’d lived and more. Or so he said. Why was he in England, and why had he not come to her sooner?
“You are lost in your thoughts, Gaston,” she said.
He turned to look at her. “As are you.”
“Perhaps a little. Did you enjoy this evening’s performance?”
“Which one? The one on the stage or the one in our box?”
