The Countess Conspiracy

She was aware of him throughout the train ride that followed—long and slow, stopping every few miles for one little hamlet or another. From her seat at the window, she watched the fields of summer grains. She tried to count the varieties of barley.

Easier than looking at Sebastian and remembering his words.

He glanced at her, catching her gaze momentarily, and he dropped her a lazy wink.

Her breath stopped. She turned away too hastily—and yet she wasn’t quick enough. The damage had been done. Ignoring her own feelings was easy enough; she’d done it for so long that it seemed second nature to her.

Ignoring his? God, he was a rake. And he wanted to…he wanted to…

No. She faced directly ahead and engaged the duchess in exclusive conversation for the remainder of the journey. Minnie was shy when you first met her—something that made people overlook her. But she was also clever, and once you got her talking, she could say a great deal. Enough to give Violet an excuse to avoid conversing with Sebastian.

It was only when they got to the other end of their trip that Violet realized how impossible the next few days were going to be.

New Shaling, the tiny village where Oliver hailed from and where his wedding was to take place, had only one inn. That inn had only one private dining room to be shared among all the visitors.

She wouldn’t be able to avoid Sebastian, no matter how hard she tried. So she did what she always did: She fell back on her mother’s rules.

Just because an endeavor is impossible doesn’t mean you should give up on it.

Sebastian didn’t look at her any more than he looked at anyone else. Nothing had changed—nothing, except that every time he glanced in her direction, she felt a shot of heat. She wasn’t going to stop feeling it any time soon; if she could make her unfortunate wants go away, she’d have excised them long before.

So while Robert was joking with the innkeeper about the quantity of beef they’d likely consume, while Sebastian was drawing Minnie out by asking her questions about the latest vote in Parliament, Violet slipped up the stairs and shut herself in her room.

What couldn’t be changed could be avoided.

Chapter Seven

NOBODY BUT SEBASTIAN SEEMED to notice Violet’s absence from lunch. Nobody raised an objection to a walk in the countryside with her whereabouts unknown.

She’d seemed distracted throughout the journey here—scarcely concentrating on Minnie’s words, always looking off into the distance. She had the look of a woman focused intently on a problem.

Sebastian knew what was plaguing her all too well. He felt the other half of her worry, a weight dragging down on him. I don’t want to lose you.

So he pleaded fatigue when Minnie and Robert left to go on a walk with Oliver and Jane. While his other friends stepped out, he ordered a tray from the kitchen and made his way up the stairs.

She did not answer his light rap, and—after glancing down the hall and verifying that it was, in fact, empty—Sebastian juggled the tray he was holding and opened her door.

The room was cozy and clean, the furniture simply made. A window looked out on an idyllic summer meadow, but Violet was not watching the view. She sat at her desk, her head bowed over a few sheets of stationery. She was writing at a furious pace. She didn’t look around, not even when Sebastian let the door shut with a bang. She had no idea he was even in the room. Typical. He found himself smiling.

He walked to her side, set down the tray, and pulled up a chair.

If he’d had any talent at drawing, he could have reproduced a picture of this from memory: Violet, unaware of her surroundings. Her lips were pursed; she focused on the paper in front of her with the singular intensity of a cat watching a butterfly. He’d seen her like this a thousand times—more than a thousand, actually. When Violet became engrossed in a project, she lost track of where she was and what she was doing. He’d often wondered if she found it disorienting to look up and discover half the day gone. One day, the house she was in would burn to the ground. When that happened, she would look up hours later, blinking, wondering why she was surrounded by charred walls and ashes.

He’d enjoyed the charade at first, in part because he’d enjoyed the work itself. But it had been more than that. When he’d been presenting her work, there had been moments when he’d had her attention. He’d practiced his presentations in front of her, and had found himself at the center of her considerable focus. She’d looked at him as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

He let out a slow breath. The only way he’d ever been able to catch her attention was when he’d talked to her about anything other than herself. Every time he’d hinted at more, she’d refused to see it—as if every aspect of Sebastian as a man was as irrelevant as…as…

As a building burning down around her while she was thinking about something else.

He could shout at her about it. He might as well shout at a kitten for having fur.

She was still writing furiously. Not just swiftly—now that he was watching her, he could tell that she was angry about whatever had caught her attention. Even from ten feet away, he could see the jagged lines her pen made, the grim set of her mouth. Her eyes narrowed at the page.

Maybe she was writing a letter about the cruelty of using steel traps to catch garden pests—one of the topics that occasionally occupied her time. Maybe she was writing a response to a fellow scientist.

That was the thing about Violet. You never knew what had caught her fancy, whether trivial or of the greatest importance. You only knew that she wouldn’t see anything around her until she’d finished with it.

Seconds of waiting turned into minutes. The light in the room shifted slowly; the shadow cast by his chair lengthened, inch by inch.

Her anger seemed to ebb as he watched, slowly changing into something he couldn’t quite place on the emotional spectrum. Resignation, maybe? Eventually, as he had known she must, Violet put down her pen and pushed aside her paper.

Watching her come back into a recognition of her surroundings was always something of a joy. She blinked as if she had just come out of a cave and her eyes needed to adjust to the light. She stretched: spine arching, arms extending, fingers spreading wide and then clenching into a fist. She drew in a breath and looked up.

Her gaze landed on Sebastian. For a few moments, she stared at him. “Oh,” she said in puzzlement. “I suppose I did hear someone come in. I should have known it was you when you didn’t disturb me.”

“I know better than to disturb you.”