Page 78 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
The coffee house was the kind of establishment he clocked in three seconds. Corner location, two exits, the clientele minding their own business. The corner table where he guessed Julia had been sitting was empty. The pot was still on it, a faint line of steam rising from the spout.
He went back outside.
He spotted Julia and her father twenty feet along the pavement, a shadow against the brickwork which he saw before he had fully processed the scene: Norish had his hand on Julia's arm above the elbow. The carriage door was open, but Julia's feet were planted wide, and her body angled back against the direction he was pulling.
Her posture was entirely unyielding, and the expression on her face was not fear.
It was fury.
Leander crossed the pavement.
"Let go of my wife."
His voice came out flat and low, the way it came out when volume was unnecessary because the alternative to compliancewas worse than anything a raised voice could communicate. It was the tone of a man who had spent three years calculating this encounter.
Norish turned.
He was a handsome man. Leander had known that from the descriptions, and the face confirmed it, the kind of face that had always opened rooms and excused things that should not have been excused.
He looked at Leander and, in the half-second before he arranged his features, something moved through his expression that was the closest thing to calculation Leander had seen in a face that ran almost entirely on instinct.
He did not let go of Julia’s arm.
So, Leander hit him.
It was not a powerful blow. It was the blow of a man whose hand had already moved before the thought completed, the heavy leverage of his shoulder carrying through the rain.
It connected with the side of Norish's jaw and knocked him into the carriage door, which swung on its hinge and struck the frame and swung back.
Norish's hand released Julia's arm. He straightened, slower, and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, his fingers comingaway dark with a thin smear of blood. He looked at Leander with an expression that had moved past calculation into something that recognized it had miscalculated the nature of the bargain.
Leander stepped forward.
Julia moved between them.
Her hand came flat against his chest, right over the steady thump of his heart. She looked up at him with an expression that was not a request. He stopped. He was breathing hard. Not from exertion, twelve minutes on Fleet Street had nothing to do with it. He looked at her, and the fury was still there, right behind his eyes, looking for somewhere to go.
"He is not worth it," she said.
Her voice was firm. Her hand was steady against his chest, the small weight of her palm the only thing anchoring him to the stone. Behind her, Norish was straightening his coat with the small, twitching movements of a man reconsidering his morning.
"Julia."
"You must not behave this way." She held his gaze, her brown eyes perfectly wide and fixed on his. "Not here. Not like this."
He looked at her for a moment. At the arm Norish had been pulling, which she was not favoring, which meant she wasnot going to let him see that it hurt. At the line of her jaw and the composure she was wearing like armor, and the thing underneath it that she was not going to let out on a Fleet Street pavement in front of her father.
He took a breath, the damp air clearing the heat from his throat. He stepped back one pace. His hands were still closed, the leather of his gloves strained across the knuckles. He looked at Norish over her head.
"My wife," he said, "is the only reason you are not already in a cell." He kept his voice below the hearing of the street, not for Norish's benefit but because Julia had asked him not to do this here, and he was choosing to honor that.
"Three years. I have spent three years building the case that takes you to prison, and today I had every piece in place, and it was Julia who gave me the last one."
He looked at the man's face, the handsome face that had opened rooms and excused everything and felt nothing for it except cold clarity. "You should be grateful to her. I doubt you are."
Norish adjusted his cuff, the silk slightly frayed at the edge.
"Dramatic," he said, and his voice was steady enough that Leander understood he had been in worse corners and talked his way out of them and believed he would do so again. "My daughter is a married woman now, perfectly well situated. I came only to see how she was doing. She is my daughter after all."
