Page 85 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
He brought her the glass and sat down beside her on the green sofa rather than taking the wingback chair across from her. That, too, had changed incrementally and without announcement;one afternoon, she had simply looked up from her accounts and realized he had stopped choosing the opposite side of rooms.
"I want to say something," she said, her fingers curling around the cold stem of her glass.
He looked at her over his wine, his eyes dark and receptive.
"I have been trying to say it for several weeks," she said, her voice dropping into that precise, deliberate rhythm she used when an account needed settling. "And I keep waiting for the proper moment, and I have decided there is no such thing as a proper moment in this house, so this will have to do."
She kept her gaze fixed on the glowing embers of the grate.
"You gave Poppy back to me. You moved us to London, and you told me it was an operational necessity for Cuthbert's sake, and it was, partly. But you knew what the distance was doing to me, and you changed your plans anyway."
She turned her head to look at him squarely. "You took me to Lady Harcourt's ball, and you danced with me in the center of the room, in front of every person who had spent the Season deciding what to think of my father's daughters. And you said…" She stopped, her throat tightening around the memory.
"I remember what I said," Leander murmured.
"Yes." She looked back at the fire. "And you found me on Fleet Street. You had spent the morning at Cuthbert's, and you came home to find my note on the desk telling you where I had gone."
She felt the steady weight of his attention on her profile. "All of it. I want you to know that I have recorded all of it, Leander. I am not good at gratitude. I have had little practice at receiving things without looking for the cost on the back of the page. But I am trying."
Leander set his glass down on the small table, the wood ticking under the weight.
"It is my privilege," he said.
He did not say it quickly; he spoke with the heavy, unhurried care he gave to pieces of text he intended to stand by for twenty years.
"I told Anthony, before I had the honesty to say it to myself in the study, that taking care of you did not feel like an obligation. That was the word I used to him.Privilege." He reached over and took her free hand, his palm rough and solid against her skin. "The balance has not changed."
Julia looked down at his long fingers woven through hers. He looked back, steady and direct, and there was nothing deployed between them. No Duke's posture, no composure used to keep the room at bay. Just the man.
"Good," she said, her mouth softening. "Because I intend to give you ample opportunity to continue the practice."
The corner of his mouth moved upward, a dry crease forming in his cheek. "Is that a warning, Julia?"
"It is an observation."
He picked up his glass again, and she lifted hers, and between them the fire settled into the grate with a small, soft sigh of falling ash.
"There is something I want to give you," she said.
He went still.
She set her wine aside, stood, and smoothed the silk of her skirts. Leander watched her cross the carpet to the escritoire in the far corner. The small, slender-legged writing desk she had claimed during her first week in the house.
It had the settled, slightly crowded quality of a surface that belonged to someone who intended to stay. There was her blue ink bottle, her bone-handled scraper, and a small stack of letters that had been from Poppy.
She opened the deep lower drawer, her fingers reaching beneath the blotting paper. She lifted out a small object wrapped in a square of dark green wool, came back to the sofa, and sat downclose enough that her skirts lapped over his boots. She held the package between them.
"I want to explain before you touch it," she said, her voice dropping an octave.
Leander looked down at the cloth. His hands remained flat on his knees, his shoulders rigid.
"I spoke to Cuthbert," she said, her eyes tracking the fold of the wool. "Several weeks after Fleet Street. The week you went north to see the estate manager at Pridewell and left me with the ledgers. I asked him for every scrap of documentation he had regarding the heirloom. The names of the buyers, the dates of the transfers, and every clerk who had witnessed a signature for my father."
She looked up at him, her dark eyes wide and unblinking.
"He had records, though it took some weeks to pull them from the vaults. The man who purchased it from my father in 'twenty-two had sold it to a silversmith in York, and that man had sold it on again to a collector in Lincolnshire. By the time we traced the movement, it had passed through four separate sets of hands."
She paused, her breath catching slightly.
