Page 45 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
They worked without speaking. He turned the sliding mechanism on the second box's base, assessing the resistance at each increment, and in his peripheral vision, he could see her working through the symbol sequence with the same methodical concentration. The clearing was quiet. Somewhere beyond the hedges, other teams were still navigating.
He was aware of her in a way that had become familiar enough now that he had stopped arguing with it.
The second box yielded. He set it open on the table and reached for the third.
"You have been carrying something for a very long time," he said.
Her hands stilled for just a moment on the outer ring of her box. Then they resumed.
"I do not say that to be presumptuous." He kept his eyes on the rotating rings in front of him, giving her the space. "I say it because I have been watching you manage everything and everyone in your orbit since the moment we met. Your sister's nerves. Your aunt's expectations. The opinions of every guest in this house." He turned the first ring. "Your father's absence."
"I was not aware I was so transparent," she said.
"You are not." He set the third box down, and the mechanism released. "But I have been paying attention."
A soft click came from her side of the table. Her box opened.
She stared at three cards. He waited. He had learned that when she went still in that particular way, something was being decided.
"I have been my father's keeper since I was fourteen years old," she said. The steadiness in her voice was the kind that cost something. He knew the sound of it. He had used it himself, in rooms where he could not afford to waver. "He is not a bad man. He never was. But he is like a child in the ways that matter most, incapable of managing money, incapable of managing consequence. Someone had to do it. There was no one else."
She picked up one of the cards.
"I told myself it was temporary." Her thumb moved across the card's surface. "That eventually he would steady himself, or the debts would resolve, or something would shift, and I would be able to put the weight down. Nothing shifted. The weight only grew heavier. And now there is Poppy, and there is this Season, and there is you, and I am so very tired of being the only person who can see the full shape of a problem and the only person willing to stand in front of it."
She stopped.
He looked at her. She had not intended to say that much. He could see it in the slight tension at the corners of her mouth, the way she was looking at the card in her hand rather than at him. He thought of the morning he had stood in Henry's study, reading the inventory of what Norish had taken from a dying man, and of all the years he had spent feeding his own resentment on the certainty that the Norishes were one and the same, cut from identical cloth.
I have been wrong about this one.
"You have been very lonely," he said.
She looked up at him.
He watched the word find her.
He watched her careful composure—worn like a second dress—absorb the blow and almost hold. Then it faltered: her eyes brightened, and she looked away, pressing her lips together with the practiced control of someone long accustomed to containing grief in company.
She would not weep. He could see her deciding it through sheer determination.
Then a single tear escaped, and without conscious thought, he moved. He stepped around the corner of the table and put his arms around her, carefully, without hesitation, the way one steadied something that had been standing under too muchweight for too long. She went very still, the way she always went still when she was taking stock of something unexpected.
Then, slightly, she leaned.
He stood there and let her, and did not make it into anything more than it was. He had not held another person like this in an extraordinarily long time. He had told himself, over the years, that he had no particular need to embrace another person. He noted, now, that he had been mistaken about that also.
From the left-hand passage came the sound of approaching footsteps and a woman's triumphant voice announcing that she had known all along.
Julia straightened. One finger pressed to the corner of her eye, so practiced he would have missed it if he hadn't been watching. Then she turned back to the table and arranged the three cards in order with complete composure, as though nothing had happened, or as though she had decided that nothing would be made of what had.
"I believe that is the answer," she said.
He looked at the cards. "It is." He glanced toward the path. "We should record it before anyone arrives."
She was already writing, the pencil moving in her neat, precise hand. She folded the paper and tucked it into her glove. She did not look at him.
But he looked at her.
