Page 71 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
He did not move immediately. She could see him deciding whether to speak, how much of the truth to hand over, and whether handing it over would cost him more than staying silent already had.
"Now," he said, "I am standing in a room at midnight with my wife, who came in here and told me the truth, and I find that I have run entirely out of reasons to do anything other than the same." His voice was low and even, but the evenness was costing him something. "I told you not to fall in love with me. I said it because I believed I was incapable of the alternative. I am no longer certain that was an accurate assessment."
She held very still. "That is still not an answer."
"No." He looked at her steadily. "What I feel for you is not something I have a clean word for yet. What I can tell you is that it is not convenient, it is not part of any arrangement, and it has been making itself known for considerably longer than I have been willing to admit." He paused. "That is as honest as I know how to be tonight."
Julia looked at him for a long moment. The clock marked the silence.
"That," she said quietly, "is enough."
He kissed her.
It was entirely different from the desperate collision in the study; that had been the action of a man running out of resistance.
His large hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs sweeping across her cheekbones, and he kissed her with the absolute, consuming attention he gave to everything he meant to conquer.
Julia kissed him back with the pent-up frustration of four days of careful removal, her fingers tangling deep into the linen of his shirt.
The candlelight from the desk threw their long shadows across the floorboards as she reached blindly past him, her knuckles catching the edge of the heavy oak door, and pulled it shut until the latch clicked firmly into place.
Chapter Twenty
The curtains were still drawn when he woke up.
The bedroom was dim and warm, smelling faintly of lavender and tallow. Julia was already sitting up against the mahogany headboard; her silk dressing gown pulled securely back over her shoulders. His heavy leather copy ofBlackstone's Commentariessat open in her lap.
She was reading the dense legal text with the exact same fierce, focused attention she had given toFieldingthe previous afternoon, which suggested she either possessed much broader intellectual tastes than he had originally assumed or was determined to find the driest, most impractical reading material available purely to make a political point.
He watched her for a quiet moment. She had not noticed he was awake yet. He looked at the ceiling and acknowledged, privately and without drama, that the marriage was no longer one in name only. What had begun with honest words had continuedwith the particular, unhurried honesty of two people who had run out of reasons to hold anything back, and the version of this arrangement he had described to Anthony in the billiard room two weeks ago bore no resemblance whatsoever to what it had become.
He was not sorry about that.
He became aware, in a realization that arrived softly rather than all at once, that this was the very first morning in longer than he could accurately count that his first conscious thought had not been of Henry. Or the court case. Or the ruin of Viscount Norish. The brutal, necessary sequence of things to be done had always been his waking companion.
This morning, his first thought had been the strawberry-blonde woman reading his law books in his bed.
"Blackstone," he said, his voice raspy from sleep.
She looked over, her brown dove eyes adjusting to the dimness. "You have an interesting library, Your Grace."
"You are reading a legal commentary, my Lady."
"I am entirely aware of what I am reading." She turned a page with a crisp, deliberate snap of the paper. "You have very few novels."
"I have novels."
"You haveFielding. You have exactly one volume ofRichardson." She lowered the heavy book slightly, looking at him over the top of the leather spine. "Do you have anyScott?"
"No."
"We should rectify that immediately."
Leander sat up, the linen sheets rustling as the mattress shifted.
Outside on the cobblestones, a dray cart was moving slowly along the street, the driver calling out something unintelligible into the foggy air. The ordinary London morning was assembling itself piece by piece beyond the heavy velvet curtains.
He looked at her, and she looked back at him. The heat of the previous night sat between them in the quiet room without either of them forcing it into something that required an awkward discussion, a mutual restraint he found himself deeply grateful for.
