Page 82 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
His thumbs brushed over the small bones at the backs of her wrists, a steady, rhythmic pressure. "And that carriage led me to a woman who stood in four inches of grey mud, argued with me over the price of a dray horse in front of forty people, and still managed to get her sister and six trunks of iron-bound luggage to their lodgings before the noon bells had finished striking."
The words struck a familiar chord, echoing the loose pages they had gathered from the study floor weeks ago, when the ink bottle had turned over.
They led me to you.
"He knew you needed someone," she whispered, the realization settling like a physical weight between her ribs.
"I think he suspected I would spend the rest of my life behind the desk in the library if he didn't physically block the thoroughfare with an emergency." The humor was still there in the corners of his mouth, but his eyes had grown quiet, dark, and perfectly steady. "He was right. I wasn't looking."
Julia looked down at their joined hands, where his leather gloves met the grey silk of her own.
She thought of Henry Alcott. A man she had never seen, a name on a power of attorney, lying in a drafty bedroom in the north, deliberately constructing a three-year hunt through the backstreets of London just to ensure Leander’s carriage would cross her path at the exact moment she had run out of money for horses.
A strange, warm weight expanded beneath her breastbone, driving out the last of the cold Fleet Street air.
"He did not fail you," she said quietly.
The smile left Leander's face.
The Duke's posture, the manners he used like a shield against his own name, didn't just slip; it came away entirely.
His jaw unhitched, his brow cleared, and his features went flat and grey in the light from the fanlight, leaving him rawer than she had ever seen him, even in the dark of his own bedchamber with the curtains drawn.
"I failed him," he said, his voice dropping into a rough, low tone that sounded as though he hadn't used it since he was a boy. "I was so busy counting the miles and filing the depositions that I never stopped to ask what he was actually trying to give me."
He let out a long, heavy breath that stirred the small hairs at her temple. "He didn't care about the Alcott gold. He cared about whether I would spend the next forty years eating a solitary dinner at a table built for twenty."
Julia squeezed his fingers, her grip tight enough to leave a white mark through the leather.
"You did not fail him. You followed every line of his instructions with your boots on. You couldn't have known what he intended because he knew you well enough to know you would have boarded a ship for the colonies if he had told you the truth before the funeral."
She waited until his gaze moved back up to hers. "He trusted you to find the end of the path. You are here."
Leander remained silent, his chest rising and falling in a slow, deep cadence that she could feel against her own palms. The tension in his shoulders did not vanish, but it shifted, settling into the heavy, solid posture of a man who had finally dropped a pack he had carried through the mud for three long terms.
"I am proud of you," she said.
His dark eyebrows pulled together slightly, a small fold forming between them. "For what?"
"For saying that just now. Without the ledger between us." She held his gaze, her own chin rising to that familiar, stubbornangle. "I know how many locks you had to turn to let that out in a hallway."
Leander looked at her for a long time.
Julia did not shift her feet, nor did she reach up to smooth the hair that had come loose from her pins during the ride from the coffee house. She had stopped arranging her face for his benefit somewhere between the library shelf and the mud at Aldgate, and the lack of style felt as natural as breathing.
"I have been cataloging you," he said, his eyes tracing the line of her nose down to the small movement of her mouth, "since that first Tuesday."
She raised one eyebrow. "Have you?"
"Not by choice," he said, his voice regaining its dry, rhythmic clip, the familiar authority returning to his shoulders.
"You simply kept adding lines to the page. The way you look at a doorway before you enter a room to see who holds the corners. The way you walk directly into a conversation that frightens you and keeps your fingers from twitching against your skirts." He paused, his gaze dropping to her lower lip. "The way you laughed about the boring law book you were reading that morning."
"It’s not all boring if you care to know," she said, her voice dropping into her own quick rhythm.
"It is completely boring."
"Ok, maybe you are right," she agreed, her lips twitching.
