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W illiam was waiting at the breakfast table the following morning, just as he had promised.

Arabella took the seat opposite his. It was strange to feel so nervous about seeing him.

They took their meals together all the time.

It was just that she was usually on her own for breakfast, so this was a break in the usual routine.

“I trust you slept well,” William said, looking up at her.

She nodded. “Very well.”

It was a lie. She’d hardly slept at all, wondering if he would be here this morning, wondering if he would turn things around on her or let her down once again.

He hadn’t. He was here. He was watching her as if she was something he had a great interest in.

“How did you sleep?” She remembered her manners just in time.

“Very well, thank you,” he said. Amusement danced in his eyes. “You’re different first thing in the morning, did you know that?”

“Different? How am I different?”

“Not as clever. Oh, don’t look shocked. I’m not insulting you. Lots of us aren’t at our best in the morning. I’m not.”

“You don’t seem to have any trouble with your wit,” she pointed out.

“It isn’t like that for me. It’s that I have trouble with patience,” he explained. “The staff will tell you they get the worst of my temper before noon.”

“Ah. Should I be preparing myself for the worst of your temper, then?”

“No,” he said. “You never do seem to provoke my wrath, no matter the time of day.”

“Well, that isn’t true,” she said. “What about just yesterday evening, in your study? Before you started laughing, I thought you were going to take my head off, you were so angry with me.”

“I wasn’t really angry with you,” William said.

“I was angry with myself. I shouldn’t have let you see all that.

I should have maintained my calm. What you said was completely right—you did nothing wrong, nothing worthy of my anger.

I didn’t like seeing you dance with someone else.

That was the problem. And for that, I have no one to blame but myself. ”

It was a bit disconcerting that he had given in so quickly.

Had he never intended to argue with her for very long?

Perhaps not. Perhaps the whole thing had been a charade intended to provoke her, to see whether or not he could get her to a point of confronting him.

If that had been his intention, it had worked, and it embarrassed her that it had.

“I can’t understand you,” she admitted.

He flashed her a winning smile—that winning smile that had always made it impossible for her to see a thought through to conclusion when he looked her way. “You’re hardly the first to find me difficult to understand,” he told her.

“But shouldn’t it be easier for me? Even if our marriage doesn’t adhere to conventional standards, it makes sense that I should know you well as your wife.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” he said. “Perhaps that’s what you would like more than jewelry—the chance for the two of us to really get to know one another.”

Arabella didn’t know what to say. It seemed too good to be true, for of course, that was exactly what she wanted. He couldn’t really be offering it, could he?

“I don’t have anything to do today,” he said. “What if we spend the day together, just the two of us?”

“You would do that?” She didn’t like how needy that sounded, as if it was so hard to believe that he might devote a single day to her.

She wished that she could take it as a matter of course that he would.

But that wasn’t the kind of thing she could simply rely on, and she knew it.

Though he had never been unkind to her, he wasn’t open with her either.

But that isn’t true , she thought suddenly.

He had been open with her. At the ball, he’d opened up to her, telling her about his relationship with his father when he had been young.

And it had been right after that disclosure, she realized suddenly, that he had gone cold, walking away and refusing to speak to her again until he had suddenly rushed over to stop her from dancing with Lord Marbury…

Oh.

It was hard to believe, but suddenly she knew for certain that she was right—the distance between them that night had occurred not because of anything she had done but because he had felt uncomfortable about what he had shared.

He had been embarrassed about it, and he’d wanted to step back from that awkwardness.

That was why he had avoided her the following day. That was why he had forgiven her so quickly, too—he knew she hadn’t done anything wrong. He had always known that. He was the one who’d taken an action he found fault with.

She needed to let him know that opening up to her hadn’t been a mistake, and that she was worthy of being taken into his confidence. But there was no way to simply tell him that. She would have to prove her worth to him gradually over time.

“I would love to spend the day with you,” she told William. “What did you have in mind?”

“After the past few days, I could really use a quiet day indoors,” he said. “If you’d be happy to just sit and talk, spend some time in one another’s company, that would be ideal for me.”

“Of course.” Arabella was surprised to realize that her heart was beating more quickly at the suggestion. “That sounds lovely, William. I would like that very much.”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Why don’t you go take a few moments to yourself, and I’ll do the same, and we can rendezvous in the library? Do you like to play chess?”

“Oh, yes,” she told him. “Very much.”

“Are you good at it?”

She was, as it happened, but perhaps he wanted to teach her to play himself.

Men could be like that, she knew. Sometimes they wanted the pleasure of demonstrating their abilities.

Or, at least, that was true of the men in the books she liked to read.

She couldn’t say for certain whether William would be the same, and so perhaps she should withhold the truth of her skills until she understood exactly what he hoped for from her.

“I know how the game is played,” she said which was true but also sold her a bit short.

“That sounds good,” William said. “Why don’t we have a game today? Would you enjoy that?”

“I’d like that very much.” She smiled at him.

William returned the smile. The expression seemed to fill his whole face, and he looked so joyful that Arabella could hardly believe she had been the cause of it. Surely, he couldn’t be smiling that way because of her?

But he was.

And that knowledge made her feel as if her heart was about to lift right out of her body.

“All right,” William told Arabella kindly. “It’s your move. Now, remember, once you touch a piece, you’ve got to move it, so don’t lay a finger on it until you’re sure of what you want to do.”

“All right.” Arabella was virtually certain that William wouldn’t adhere to that rule if she protested, but she had no intention of arguing.

She would beat him at this game on his terms—for she had decided, up in her room before coming down to join him, that she would not pretend to know less about the game than she did so that he could have the pleasure of thinking he had taught her.

She would play her very best game. William claimed to admire her wit, and if that was true, he would like to know that she was clever enough to do this well.

And if it turned out that he couldn’t appreciate this about her…

well, that would mean he wasn’t the man she’d believed him to be.

That seemed unfathomable to her at the moment.

It felt as though the two of them were cocooned in warmth, insulated from the rest of the world.

It felt as though they were the only two people who existed in all of London.

She was able to forget about society, about the people gossiping about their marriage and her parents, for whom she had never been enough.

All that seemed to matter was the roaring fire, the gentle look of concentration on William’s face, and the soft glow in Arabella’s heart every time she looked at him.

She let her hand hover over the chessboard for a moment, peering up at him through her eyelashes.

She felt extraordinarily aware of her own body, almost as if she was watching herself in a looking glass.

She felt as if she could choose her posture like an artist arranging a model for a painting to present exactly the picture she wanted him to see.

She had never in her life been so preoccupied with what someone saw when they looked at her. But now, suddenly, every gesture seemed very important.

She didn’t know exactly why that was. Maybe she wanted to distract him from the game? But that wasn’t right. She could beat him without resorting to such tactics—at least, she was fairly certain she could.

Glancing up at him, she saw that he was watching her instead of the board. That was a good thing. The warm glow in her stomach spread.

She rested a finger on the bishop, almost teasingly, and glanced at him.

“You’ve got to move that piece now,” he warned her.

“I know,” she agreed. “Because I touched it.”

“Do you remember how the bishop moves?” He hadn’t told her how it moved.

He had asked her at the beginning of the game whether she wanted to go over the way the pieces moved, and she had pretended to think for a moment—well, no, she had really thought for a moment because it would have been fun to hear him explain that.

But she had told him the truth, that she didn’t need the refresher and that she was ready to play.

“I think I remember,” she told him, giving him what she hoped was a winning smile.

Then she moved the bishop across the board and captured his rook.

He blinked at her as if he was unsure of what had just happened.

“Did I do that right?” she asked innocently.

He burst out laughing. “You held out on me!”

Arabella laughed too—this was too much fun, much more than she had anticipated. “I’ve been playing for years,” she confessed. “I used to play against Prudence all the time. She’s very good.”

“So are you, apparently. Who taught you?”

“No one.”

“ No one ?”

“We couldn’t let our parents know that we were playing,” Arabella explained. “They wouldn’t have found it a suitable pastime for young ladies, and we’d have been ordered to stop.”

“But then how could you have gotten so good?”

“I read about it in a book,” Arabella explained.

“You learned chess from a book?”

“Yes, my father had a book about it in his collection. I used to sneak it out, which wasn’t hard because I don’t think Father ever took any real interest in chess.

He probably wouldn’t have noticed if it had gone missing permanently.

Anyway, I read up on the strategy, and then Prudence and I would play together to try things out.

We couldn’t conceal the fact that we spent time at the chessboard from our parents, but since they never realized we had any skill at the game, they let us get on with it. ”

She smiled up at William. “It’s your move,” she added.

“There’s a lot more to you than I anticipated,” he told her.

Arabella’s heart fluttered. He was looking at her as if she was an intriguing puzzle that he couldn’t wait to solve—and she wanted to be solved by him.