Page 76 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
He set down the teapot. It was a minor adjustment, but she caught the brief, telling tightening at the corners of his eyes.
"There are certain unsavory parties in London who have formed some rather unfair, aggressive impressions of me. Old debts, mostly. Minor misunderstandings. You know how these things accumulate when one is managing large estates."
"I do," she said. "I have spent twenty-four years watching them accumulate."
He looked at her for a fraction of a second. Something crossed his handsome features that might, in another man, have been sharp discomfort or shame. In her father, the expression lasted less than two seconds before the easy warmth resumed.
"You were always the capable one," he said, leaning forward. "Always the practical child. That is why I knew you would find your way out of our little troubles. And look…" He gestured broadly at the fine wool of her coat, her silk gloves, and the deep red stones at her throat. "You have found it magnificently."
"Poppy nearly did not," Julia said, her voice dropping an octave.
"Poppy is perfectly well."
"Because of decisions I made." Her voice stayed perfectly level. "Not yours."
He reached for his teacup, refusing to answer that. He looked out the grimy window instead, a silent confirmation that he had heard the accusation and intended to let it pass without acknowledgment.
It was the exact behavior that had always made her father simultaneously impossible to confront or to trust. He did not argue with the truth; he simply declined to receive it.
"I need to ask you something," she said, cutting through his silence. "About a man named Henry Alcott."
Viscount Norish went perfectly still.
The freeze was brief, a mere glitch in his facade, and he managed it expertly. Within two seconds, he had reached for his cup, sipped, and composed himself back into an easy posture of paternal warmth. But she had seen the panic.
"I am not entirely sure I recall."
"You do," she said.
He looked at her, trying the old, charming smile again. It did not work on her the way it had when she was fourteen years old, a calculation she suspected he was only now realizing as he studied the hardness in her eyes.
"An acquaintance," he said smoothly. "Some years ago. Why do you ask about him?"
"He had an heirloom," she said, her heart beginning to beat a heavy, painful rhythm against her ribs. "An irreplaceable family piece. You were in possession of it."
A long, heavy pause followed. "Julia, there are always things like these in large business dealings; items frequently pass from one man to another while facilitating transactions."
"Where is it?" she demanded.
His expression moved through several rapid configurations.
She watched all of them. He picked up his cup, set it down, and looked back at the window before finally meeting her gaze. When he spoke, his voice had taken on the careful, measured quality it always acquired when he had decided that the full truth, properly arranged, would serve his purposes better than a partial lie.
"I had certain pressing, dangerous obligations," he said. "At the time. The item was…well, it was used to satisfy a debt. Some time ago now."
"You sold it," she said, the world shrinking down to the space between them.
"The terminology is not exactly so."
"You sold it."
Her hands were flat on the table now. She had slammed them there the moment he started speaking about pressing obligations, because she had learned at an incredibly young agethat flat, pressed hands did not betray a tremble. Her voice was even. Her face was entirely composed.
But somewhere underneath all of that armor, something had gone noticeably quiet in a way that was not calm. It was a cold, hollow deadness.
Henry Alcott was dead. He had died at thirty-seven, believing the one thing his family had trusted him to protect was gone forever, all because this charming, wretched man across the table had needed to satisfy a gambling debt.
What Lord Norish had done was something worse than theft. He had taken Leander's money, every penny of the fair price Leander had paid him to return the watch to its dying owner, shaken his hand, and disappeared. He had kept the payment and the watch both, and Henry had gone to his grave believing it lost, never knowing that Leander had already tried to fix it.
