“No, I’m quite well,” she mumbled.
“What is your full name?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your full name,” Alex repeated. “What is it?”
“You can’t be serious,” she scoffed.
He took her face in both his hands and leaned down closely, too closely. Really, they were in a crowd of people. Most of them were beginning to disperse, but all the same what could he be thinking? She saw his eyes catch on her forehead for a moment before his gaze met her own.
“Your full Christian name, Sophie,” he prompted.
“Oh for the love of—Sophia Marie Rose Everton, Countess of Pealmont, if you want to be fastidious about it. Are you quite satisfied?”
She saw his eyebrows raise and he straightened up an inch. “Countess?”
“She was speaking in a foreign language earlier,” Kate supplied in a low whisper.
“I’m perfectly lucid,” Sophie insisted. “And I do happen to be a countess. I received the honorary title as a child for fishing King George out of my father’s pond, but it was so silly, and he’d only fallen in because I’d…never mind, may we leave now?”
She placed the question to Kate, but it was Alex who answered.
“We’ll take my carriage. Fetch your abigail, Kate.”
Sophie almost argued, but the last thing she wanted to do was continue standing on the crowded sidewalk covered in horse dung. She could suffer through one carriage ride with the high-handed Duke of Rockeforte to get away from the scene of her embarrassment, even if it was the second-to-last thing she wanted to do.
Once in the carriage, Kate seemed to sense that something was amiss between her two friends. After her few attempts at friendly conversation were greeted with monosyllabic answers, she gave up and took to studying her companions as they tried very hard not to look at each other. She must have come to some sort of conclusion, because when she alighted from the carriage with her maid at her mother’s home she turned and gave Sophie a kiss on the cheek and a reassuring smile. “I’ll send your driver behind you.” Alex, on the other hand, received a suspicious glare for a farewell.
Alex watched Kate go into the house. Apparently, he had moved down the pecking order of Kate’s friends.
“You told her,” he said to Sophie, knocking on the roof to start the carriage.
“Oh, yes,” Sophie drawled, keeping her eyes firmly trained on the passing scenery. “I can think of nothing more sensible than regaling Kate, whom I’ve only very recently gotten to know, with tales of my humiliation at the hands of one of her oldest and most beloved friends. A cunning plan indeed.”
Alex grimaced. It had been a ridiculous assumption. “My apologies,” he mumbled.
Sophie’s head snapped around. “For what, exactly? Treating me like a common doxy? Laughing at me? Insulting me now? You’ll need to be a bit more specific, I’m afraid.”
“If you’ll grant it to me,” he began in what he very much hoped was a properly conciliatory tone, “I should very much like the chance to apologize for all of it.”
Sophie made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat. “You’d need more contrition than you could fit into the duration of this carriage ride, Your Grace. In fact, we could go straight through to Dover—”
“Sophie.”
“It is Miss Everton,” she said peevishly.
“I thought it was Lady Pealmont.”
“As I’ve no interest in speaking with you, I can’t see how it matters.”
Alex took a deep breath and decided to ignore that. “I am sorry,” he said clearly. “I am well and truly sorry. I behaved terribly last night, but I had no intention of insulting you in any manner.”
“Then why did you?” she cried.
“I didn’t!” Alex bit off before he could stop himself. He took another deep breath. “Insult you on purpose, that is. My behavior last night was, without doubt, offensive, but not intended as an insult.”
“Well, you did a remarkable job disguising that rather pertinent fact,” she grumbled.
“You should have given me the chance to explain,” he snapped.
“You shouldn’t have behaved in a manner that required explanation,” she rejoined.
“I am aware of that. But as much as I might like to, and I very much would, I cannot undo the past.”
“Would you really?” she asked quietly.
“I…really what?”
“Undo the past, if you could? At least this one part of it?”
“Only part of the one part of it.” Good Lord, had he really just said that?
“Oh.” Sophie seemed to consider this for a moment. “Which part?”
“You know very well which part.”
“No,” Sophie stated clearly. “I don’t know. At least not ‘very well.’ I could assume from our conversation that you are referring to your laughing, but since you did laugh, and I certainly hadn’t seen that coming, I think it best I assume nothing where you’re concerned.”
“Then don’t assume my guilt.”