Page 58 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"My father abandoned Poppy and me when it suited him. You also had a choice, but instead you chose to marry me, so no. I will not choose father."
After a moment, she added, "Thank you for being so clear about what this is." Her voice was the same as it had been all evening. Even, composed, giving nothing away. "It is useful to know where one stands."
She reached for her wine glass and held it without drinking from it.
"My father has written to me again," she said. "Since the last note. There was nothing specific about it. He says only that he will be in touch."
Leander was very still.
"I thought you should know," she said.
She drank her wine and set the glass down, and the dinner continued.
He had wanted clarity. He had it.
Julia was courteous at breakfast and again at dinner. She asked appropriate questions about the estate. She remembered the names of everyone he introduced to her. She thanked Mrs. Hartley for things before being asked. She was, by every observable measure, doing everything correctly.
Knowing how frank she was about her mind and passionate her opinions, he found her aloofness deeply irritating.
On the second morning, he came down to find she had already eaten and gone out to the gardens, which was her right and which he had no grounds to object to. He sat at the table with his coffee and the morning paper and stared at neither of them for a considerable amount of time.
The paper had a paragraph about the wedding. He had expected that.The Duke of Pridewell and Miss J. Norish, daughter of the notorious Lord N., united in a quiet ceremony at the Pridewell chapel.The tone was the particular tone of apublication that found the situation interesting enough to cover and insufficiently scandalous to condemn outright. He read it once and turned the page.
She was being careful with him.
He had asked her to be careful with him. He had sat across a dinner table and laid out the terms with the flat efficiency of a man drawing up a contract, and she had received every word of it with composed grace.
He should be satisfied. The arrangement was functioning exactly as designed.
He turned another page of the paper and read nothing on it.
The issue, which he identified, was the banter. He missed it the way one misses a season when the seasons changed — not dramatically, but constantly, in small ways that accumulated.
He reminded himself that sentiment was not the point. The point was the plan. Norish would come, and when he did, Leander would be ready. Then Henry would have what he had been promised.
He reminded himself of that quite firmly.
He thought, despite this, about the dinner table. About Julia sitting across from him with her wine glass held and her voiceeven, asking him, with perfect composure, whether he intended to abandon her once she had served her purpose.
He had not slept especially well since that question.
Not because he lacked an answer. He had an answer. He had given it:“You are my wife, that does not expire.”The answer was correct, and he stood behind it.
What he had not expected was the anger that had arrived alongside it, sitting just beneath the surface, waiting for him to examine it. He had been carrying anger for three years, a specific and purposeful anger directed at a specific and purposeful target, and he knew its shape and weight so well that he had stopped noticing it the way a man stopped noticing a scar.
This was different.
Norish had taken Henry's money, heirloom, and last years of ease, and that was what Leander had built his plan around and from which he would not deviate. But Norish had also taken something from Julia. He had taken the ordinary childhood of a girl who should have been reading novels, attending assemblies, and being insufferable about it, the way girls of that age were entitled to be, and had given her instead an accounting ledger and a set of responsibilities that belonged to an adult. He had taken the last twenty-four years of her life and turned them into a continuous exercise in handling consequences that were never hers to manage.
And she was still protecting him.
That was what sat beneath the irritation, hot and specific. She had not answered the question at dinner.
If it came to it, would you choose him?
She had looked at him with those steady eyes, and she had said nothing, and he had not pressed her, and the silence had answered anyway.
She would not choose her father. He believed that. But she would not condemn him either, and the difference between those two things was the length and breadth of what Norish had cost her, laid out plainly in a single unanswered question.
