Eloise walked back up the alley pleased as Punch. She had just won over the notoriously difficult Madame Z in under an hour, and she intended to use the woman as her eyes and her ears in the capital — and later, when the time came, as a bridge to help Diana.
The weather was far too lovely to waste.
"Let's take a stroll around the neighbourhood before we head back," she said. "The air's good today."
Bibi nodded eagerly, delighted.
It was a long outing.
Back in her room at the end of it, the exhaustion arrived all at once. Eloise covered her mouth with a tired yawn and wanted nothing in the world except to climb straight into bed. Perhaps she had lingered too long at the bookshop — she looked at the enormous haul of books she had hauled home with her, stacked in the hall in three towers, and realised only now how quickly the hours had gone.
She was about to sneak off to bed early and leave the unpacking entirely to Bibi when she froze.
Ian was standing in the stairwell.
Their eyes met across the spacious hall. She was momentarily flustered; he simply stared at her with an expression she could not read at all.
She decided to ignore him. Pretend not to have noticed. Quicken her pace up the stairs and be gone before this unwanted encounter could develop into an event.
Our relationship isn't close enough to warrant polite greetings, she told herself, and swept past him like a cold breeze, leaving him standing there in silence.
"Have you only just got back?"
She startled so badly she nearly missed the step. She froze, and turned around with her eyes wide, genuinely stunned that this block of ice had opened a conversation of his own accord.
"I stepped out for a bit."
"It's gotten rather late."
It was an incredibly clumsy way to open a conversation. She glanced at the pendulum clock in the hall, saw that the hands were well past midnight, and finally understood why her eyes had been feeling so heavy for the last hour. She nodded along with his extremely obvious observation.
Ian's fist closed at his side. He was clearly holding something back — and clearly assuming that she must have been swamped with work indeed, to skip breakfast and then vanish until this hour of the night.
Ah, Eloise thought, remembering. Breakfast. That's right, I skipped it.
She laughed at him inwardly. This husband of hers held a grudge considerably longer than she had budgeted for.
"I really was busy," she said calmly, while studying his sour, awkward face. He looked like a man who had bitten into a mouthful of bitter melon and was too proud to spit it out. All because his wife had stood him up at a table.
Then he could not hold it in any longer.
"We had an agreement." His voice came out sharp. "One you set yourself. That we would see each other at breakfast and not otherwise. You've broken it. Which rather hands me an excuse, doesn't it." And then, muttering, accusingly: "What on earth have you been doing until this hour?"
Eloise blinked. That was a great deal of concern. And underneath the concern, unmistakably, ran a thin cold current of jealousy.
He recovered himself and switched to lecturing.
"Whatever scheme you're cooking up, you should remember that you are a duchess. Maintain your duties and your image as you always have. Breakfast is the one time we can discuss household matters, so I expect you to—"
"I don't feel like it."
She said it ice-cold, straight through the middle of his sentence.
Ian froze completely. His face went blank as a goose's.
"Excuse me?"
"Why should I bother?" Eloise said. "The Grand Duke standing right in front of me doesn't seem to care about his own wife in the slightest." She let that land. "It's your indifference that wrecked my reputation. So tell me why I should be the only one carrying the weight of that — and of that damned promise — entirely alone."
He had no answer.
"While you've been neglecting your wife," she went on, "I have been busting my back fulfilling every duty a duchess has, this whole time, without once being thanked for it."
The guilt struck him visibly, like something landing.
She turned away from him with her chin up, the moonlight coming in cold through the tall window on the landing, and tossed the last of it over her shoulder.
"In this whole game, I seem to be the only one taking the losses."
Then she made her position plain.
"So I'll pay you back in kind. Whatever you do to me, I'll return exactly the same treatment. And the more you suffer, eating alone at that enormous table, the more satisfying I intend to find it."
Half-smiling, she thought: whether I'm an angel or a devil to you depends entirely on your attitude. This was, she had decided, a child who needed raising all over again, and she was fully prepared to do the raising.
She laughed brightly and closed the argument with a truth simple enough for even him to follow.
"Tit for tat, Your Grace."
Ian stood rooted to the spot. His usually cold expression had been entirely overtaken by sheer bewilderment; he could not produce a single word in the face of his wife's dizzying transformation. Caught completely off guard, all he managed, weakly, was:
"Go inside."
Eloise turned back and asked, with mocking calm, "Oh, really?" She spread her hands. "Do voice any objection you like, Your Grace, if you're unhappy. Feel free."
Then she turned on her heel and walked off without so much as a glance back at her husband's helpless face — silently cursing that detestable man the entire length of the corridor, and wishing him a stumble and a bloody nose out of pure spite.
She shut the door behind her with a bang, thoroughly satisfied at having won the war of words.
Night settled over the estate. Cold moonlight lay across the still gardens and the still roofs, a sharp contrast to the fiery confrontation that had just taken place on the stairs.
In her room, Eloise sat up in bed with a reference book propped against her knees and yawned at it.
The theories inside were far too idealistic. Every one of them assumed a subject with feelings already installed, waiting to be coaxed out. They were completely hopeless when applied to that particular block of wood and stone.
She looked at the cover of the sappy romance guide in her hands — Symphony of Love — sighed, and shut it.
Reforming Ian's emotions was not going to follow a rigid, formulaic approach. She should have known that. Nothing about him was standard issue.
She reaffirmed her noble mission anyway: to turn that cold-blooded jerk into a man with a warm heart, before the heroine came home.
Even though the task felt next to impossible, she patted her own cheeks with both hands and told herself to push through the difficulty and not lose heart. Not over this. Not over a single impossible case named Ian Cloud.