Page 84 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
Nobody had ever stopped to consider whether she needed time to prepare. She had spent the better part of her adult life managing everything at the last minute because last minutes were what she was given, and the simple fact of being given more than that had done something entirely unreasonable to her composure.
He had learned by now the exact cadence of her days. Which mornings she needed quiet, which evenings she was tired before she admitted it, when to speak and when to simply hand her a cup of tea and leave the room. He had begun, without announcement, to make things easier. Not by taking things from her hands. Simply by standing close enough that she did not have to carry everything at arm's length alone.
She had worn the garnets. She always wore the garnets to the events that mattered.
The performance was Handel, which she loved, and he tolerated with the heavy, focused attention he brought to things he was determined to appreciate on her behalf.
She had watched him from the corner of her eye during the second act, noting the slight forward tilt of his shoulders and the way his fingers had gone perfectly still against the velvet railing. She had filed that stillness away with everything else she was still collecting about him.
The interval had been spent in the crowded corridor with Anthony and his companion of the evening. The four of them talked with the easy, slack rhythms of people who had accumulated enough shared history to no longer need the armor of performance.
Anthony had looked at them both over the rim of his champagne glass and said absolutely nothing, which, from Anthony, communicated a deeper satisfaction than most men managed with a speech.
The journey home was warm and dark, the smell of damp wool and roasted chestnuts filtering through the leather curtains.
Leander had taken her hand into his large palm. A habit he had formed over the last fortnight, as though the transition between the public street and the private room required some physical marking. Julia had decided she found the custom entirely acceptable.
"You were watching me during the second act," he said, his voice a low vibration against the rattle of the wheels.
"I was watching the stage."
"You were watching me watch the stage."
Julia looked out the window, where the amber glow of the streetlamps moved across the glass in regular, passing bars. "You were absorbing it," she said, turning back to him. "I wanted to see the exact moment the music took hold."
"And did you?"
"The third aria." She met his eyes in the shadows. "Your jaw relaxed."
He was quiet for a long moment, his thumb tracing the seam of her glove. "It was better than I expected," he said.
From Leander, the admission was the equivalent of another man standing to applaud.
She smiled against the glass, and he pressed her fingers.
The house was lit when the carriage pulled up to the curb.
Mrs. Hartley had left the lamps burning low in the entrance hall and the drawing room before retiring, an arrangement they had settled into without a single written order.
The household now ran itself smoothly around two people who no longer required managing each other, and the rooms felt, consequently, larger, warmer, and a great deal calmer than they had in the sharp drafts of October.
Poppy's room on the second floor was dark.
She had been asleep since nine, having declared over the morning tea that she was not an opera person with that cheerful, unapologetic directness Julia had always guarded in her.
Poppy had lived in the room two doors down for two weeks now, and the space already bore her unmistakable markings.
A row of mismatched teacups she had collected from Aunt Violet sat along the windowsill, a stack of worn music sheets waswedged under the vanity mirror, and three dried heather sprigs were neatly pinned to the bedpost.
She had already transformed the empty corners. Her traveling trunk sat open at the foot of the bed, half-filled with books, while her favorite charcoal drawings were propped against the baseboards, and a bundle of dried lavender hung from the window latch.
There was a small, pale watercolor of a Berkshire hedge on the plaster. There was a fat, half-wild tabby cat that had arrived from the stables, which Leander had encountered on the stairs and chosen not to remark upon, an omission Julia considered one of his finest qualities.
Julia unbuttoned her gloves in the drawing room while Leander crossed to the sideboard, the crystal decanter clinking softly against the lip of the glasses.
The fire had been banked for the night, the red coals glowing beneath a thin skin of white ash, and the low lamplight caught the deep grain of the mahogany tables.
It was, she thought, looking at the familiar slant of the bookshelves, simply home. The word had been arriving in her mind with increasing frequency and conviction, and she had entirely stopped being surprised by its presence.
