Eloise was so furious she nearly snapped the flower stem she had been turning between her fingers. If he were not a swordsman, she thought, he would already be lying on the lawn.
She swallowed it.
"Greetings are not for exchanging information," she said, with enormous patience. "They're for building a connection. And you have never once done it with me. Not in two years."
Ian lifted his teacup.
"It's pointless."
The fragile spark they had just built went out as if a window had been opened on it, and the mood went with it.
Eloise reached over and picked up the sheet of gossip notes she had brought with her and laid it flat on the table.
"If you refuse to cooperate," she said pleasantly, "I'll begin reading your entire list of scandals aloud. Right now. Starting from the top."
Faced with his wife's stubbornness, Ian let out an exasperated sigh and surrendered to the blackmail.
"Did you sleep well," he said. "The weather looks nice."
He delivered both lines mechanically, in the flat tone of a student reciting a memorised answer, and Eloise noted that he had simply parroted back the exact two examples she had given him a minute earlier, word for word, in order.
Still. Something was better than nothing.
She smiled and answered with the proper social script. "I slept very well, thank you. The weather is lovely today, and so are the flowers."
Then she seized her opening.
"You see flowers every day," she said. "But how you feel about them can be different from one day to the next. That's the whole point." She tilted her head at him. "So — do you feel anything at all, looking at all this? Even the slightest stirring?"
Ian turned and looked out at the vibrant garden.
"I don't."
Two flat words, and any budding romance in the vicinity died where it stood.
Eloise felt a vein come up on her forehead, and forced a strange smile onto her face.
"Really? Not even a little?"
Stay calm, she instructed herself. Do not resort to violence. You are a duchess.
Ian was still looking at the roses. The vivid red of them filled the whole end of the garden, and he studied them intently, with an expression as serious as if he were analysing a battle map for a weakness in the line.
He opened his mouth. Hesitated.
"The flowers—"
Eloise held her breath. Here it came. Something poetic. Something with a heartbeat in it.
"—are red."
Her spirit shattered on the spot.
She sat there wondering, genuinely, whether it was possible to reform a man this emotionally dry inside one year, or inside ten, or at all.
"Your Grace," she said at last, in a tired voice. "Do you know something important?"
"What?"
"Women like men who know how to communicate well. That's a fundamental truth of the world."
"And?" Ian asked innocently, entirely failing to grasp the point.
Eloise fairly glowed. She smiled at him and reminded him of an extremely obvious fact.
"I am also a woman."
Ian's face twisted into an expression of pure, unfiltered disgust.
She cursed him silently and at length. That was possibly the most off-putting reaction she had ever received from a human being.
"What women want," she said, having swallowed her anger again, "is for a man to appreciate the beauty of the flowers with them. Not for some man to stand there coldly analysing their colour like a lab specimen." She set down her cup. "Try it like this. Say the garden is pretty. Say you're happy to be having tea with me on such a sunny day. Something. Anything. With a bit of feeling behind it."
"Is it really necessary," Ian asked, "to say such empty phrases?"
Eloise had a full internal meltdown, at the end of which she once again swore that if he were not a swordsman she would have punched him already. Her face darkened. Her hand closed on a fistful of her own skirt beneath the table, and she recited her mantra — one moment of patience saves nine disasters — over and over to hold back the urge toward violence, and wondered exactly how many more times she was going to have to hold her tongue in this garden.
She lifted her teacup and drank to cool herself down.
"I think," she announced calmly, "I need to add one more rule to this course."
She set the cup back onto the saucer with a sharp clink.
"From now on, you are banned from asking unnecessary questions."
That shut down his habit of talking back before it could start, and, feeling better, she brightened up and carried on with the lesson.
"Next. Try saying something the other person actually wants to hear. There is no woman in the world who hates sweet words. None. It has never happened."
She cleared her throat.
"Watch closely. This is a model demonstration from your teacher."
She extended one slender hand toward him and struck a graceful, coy pose, her eyes going soft and dreamy, and delivered the line in the sweetest, most theatrical voice she could produce.
"No matter how lovely the flowers are, they could never compare to the man standing before me, my lord."
It was a line dripping with romance-novel flair, and she was rather proud of the delivery.
Ian's whole face twisted with visible discomfort. A shiver of disgust ran through him, exactly as though he had swallowed a live insect and was deciding what to do about it.
Eloise buried her face in both hands to hide her embarrassment and her total defeat, and sighed heavily into her palms. This case was simply too hopeless.
Ian drank his tea, apparently to settle his stomach.
It wouldn't kill him to say one sweet word, she grumbled privately. One. And he's behaving as though he's being tortured.
She looked away, avoiding his eyes, and told herself that at least he had been willing to comment on the flowers at all, which had to count as some kind of progress —
And then she remembered the other matter.
"The blank cheques," she said.
Ian nodded. "I heard you'd used them."
His attitude toward money was as indifferent as ever; he might have been confirming the weather.
"I also heard you visited a clothing shop."
"I did," Eloise said calmly. "I feel I've neglected myself for far too long. I intend to start attending more social gatherings from now on."
Privately she was calculating. To help Diana later she would need as many allies as she could gather, and gathering took time, and time was the one thing with a hard edge on it.
Ian had gone very quiet.
She wondered, since he seemed to be listening, whether this might also be a good opportunity to promote Madame Z's shop — and then paused, because his expression had changed.
He was radiating a dark, ominous aura across the tea table.
Eloise was baffled. Why had he suddenly gone so sour? Surely not the money. Was it the money?
"I had assumed," Ian said quietly, "that you'd lost interest in that sort of thing after we married."
"I've had a change of heart." She smiled confidently. "I can't hide away in this estate forever. Meeting people feels important to me now."
Ian lowered his gaze. His expression was thoughtful, and faintly displeased.
"Meeting more people," he repeated, and the phrase came out carrying rather more weight than it had gone in with.
He looked up and stared at her, plainly suspicious that something must have happened for her to develop an interest in socialising overnight.
Eloise lifted her teacup and declined to elaborate.
"I don't believe the Grand Duke needs to know the reason," she said. "Or is there something else I'm obliged to report to you?"
Ian gave a small, dangerous smile, and his sharp eyes pressed her.
"Oh. So you're looking for someone new to meet. Is that it?"
A spark of jealousy had begun to smoulder in him, low down and out of sight.
"Yes," Eloise agreed innocently, nodding. "That's exactly my intention."
She was thinking about recruiting allies to support Diana. She and her husband were on entirely different wavelengths, in entirely different rooms of the same conversation.
His teacup came down on the table with a dry, sharp sound, and Eloise wondered why his tone had turned so suddenly bitter.