Page 73 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
Julia stopped mid-sentence, her lips parting slightly.
"If she wanted," he continued, his voice steady as he looked toward the edge of the curtain. "If you both wanted it. There is more than enough room in this house."
She was staring at him now. He could feel the intense heat of her attention without turning his head to meet it.
"You said at the dinner table, you explicitly said…"
"I know exactly what I said at dinner, Julia." He turned his head, forcing her to look at him.
She looked at him for a long, heavy moment, and he let her look, refusing to pull his gaze away.
What moved across her face in those quiet seconds was not the careful, composed version of herself she offered to the judging eyes of London drawing rooms. It was something entirely underneath that armor. Unguarded, vulnerable, and specific.
Her eyes went briefly, brilliantly bright with unshed tears.
Then, she looked away, clearing her throat softly.
"I will ask her," she said.
He nodded. He looked back at the velvet curtain, and in the peripheral space of not looking at her directly, he allowed himself to simply exist in the warmth of the room. The morning was expanding around them, the gold light leaking in at the seams of the fabric, warming the woman beside him who had been reading his law books when he woke.
He thought, for no reason he had intended, about Henry at thirty-two. It was before the ruinous debts, before Norish’s claws had dug into him, back when Henry had still been the kind of man who laughed easily, and organized chaotic shooting parties.
Henry had wanted a life that accumulated—a house with more than one person in it who actually mattered.
Leander had told him, in the cold wisdom of their youth, that such things came in their own time and could never be forced.
But Henry had died at thirty-seven with the heirloom watch stolen, the accumulation undone, and none of his life in its proper order at all.
The warmth of the bedchamber shifted.
It was not a change in temperature. It wasn't anything an observer could see. But something cold and sharp movedthrough Leander’s chest, carrying the crushing weight of a thing he had been carrying for three brutal years. He had set it down this morning without noticing, and now that he picked it back up, he found it heavier than before.
Henry had been owed better than this. Leander had promised his dying friend better. Yet here he was, lying in a warm bed with his wife, while his solicitor’s last urgent letter sat unanswered on the desk in the study downstairs.
Viscount Norish was somewhere in this very city, and nothing had moved forward in four long days because Leander had chosen not to move it.
He had been here. He had been very much here, drowning in Julia's eyes, and nowhere near where his vengeance was supposed to be.
"I should get dressed," he said, his tone turning abruptly clipped.
Julia looked at him, her attention sharpening instantly. "It is only half past eight."
"I have urgent business to address."
The defensive quality of her observation locked onto him. He could feel it without looking at her face.
She was reading the sudden change in him; she was entirely accurate, and she would not press him on it because she hadlearned by now where pressing landed with a man like him. The absolute accuracy of her silence was somehow far worse than a question would have been.
"Of course," she said quietly.
He got out of bed. He found his clothes. He did not look back at the pillows and did not look at her face. He chose both of those omissions deliberately because he was not ready for the guilt he would find if his eyes met hers.
"The Scott," he said from across the threshold, his hand on the brass doorknob, not quite looking back at her. "I will have the volumes ordered from the bookseller today."
"Thank you," she said. Her voice was perfectly even, perfectly remote.
He left the room, the latch clicking firmly behind him.
