Page 53 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"Yes."
"That was very fast."
"It was a straightforward question."
Anthony looked up. He had the quality, which Leander had known since they were boys, of watching a person with the full attention of someone who was not going to be satisfied with the first answer they gave. He was one of the very few people Leander had ever met who could do that without making his expression feel like pressure. It felt, instead, like being seen by someone who was not going to use what they saw against him.
"All right," Anthony said. He returned to his shot. "Is this still the plan?"
Leander set down his glass. "What plan?"
"Come on, Leander."
The fire in the grate shifted. Neither of them looked at it.
"It was the plan," Leander said. "This marriage is something else entirely."
Anthony potted the ball and straightened. He turned the cue slowly in his hands, end over end, and looked at Leander across the table with the careful expression of a man choosing his next words with real intention. "Then what is it?"
Leander looked at the table. He scrutinized the remaining balls, the angles, and the geometry of what was left. He had been asking himself the same question since approximately the moment he had stood in a hedge maze clearing and watched twelve people reorganize their understanding of what they had walked in on between him and Julia.
"She is treated as though she is responsible for what he did," he said. "She walked into that party, and every door was closed to her before she opened her mouth. She has been managing consequences that are not hers to manage since she was a child." He picked up the cue. "That is not something I am willing to watch continue."
Anthony said nothing for a moment.
"That is a significant thing," he said, "but is Miss Norish’s resilience enough reason to want to get married?"
"I am aware of that."
"Is it the only reason?"
Leander did not answer that. He walked to the table and lined up his shot. He played it. The ball went where he intended.
Anthony accepted the non-answer with the equanimity of a man who had been doing so for twenty years. He moved to refill his glass. "Her father," he said. "What happens to him?"
"He will be brought to justice."
"After the wedding."
"When the time comes."
Anthony turned from the sideboard. His expression was not accusatory. It was the expression of a man who cared too much about the outcome to soften what needed to be said. "She cannot see it clearly," Leander said before Anthony could speak. "She is too close to him. He is her father, and she has been protecting him by instinct for so long that she cannot separate the man he is from the role he holds. She knows what he has done. She does not know yet what he deserves."
"And you are going to make that determination for her."
"Someone has to."
Anthony set down the decanter. "Leander."
"Henry is dead," Leander said. The words came out flat and final and without heat, the way they always came out when he said them, because he had said them so many times in private that they had worn down to their bare essential shape. "He died at thirty-seven with nothing left of the life he had built, and before he died, I made a promise to him."
"I know what you promised him."
"Then you know I intend to keep it."
"I know you do." Anthony crossed the room and stood at the end of the table, not playing, just standing, and he looked at Leander with the directness of a man who had made a decision about what needed to be said and was now saying it. "I also know that you are about to marry a woman who is not her father. Who has, based on everything you have just told me, spent her entire life paying for what her father is. And I am advising you, not as the man who agreed with your plan at the start of this, because I did agree, I am not pretending otherwise, but as someone who has been watching you this week." He paused. "You cannot do both. You cannot give her a husband and then become someone she does not recognize the moment her father walks through a door. That is not a marriage. That is a different kind of trap, and she has lived in enough of those."
The room was quiet.
