Page 80 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"Very well," he said.
He turned to the two men at the end of the pavement, his boots striking the wet stone with a regular, measured beat as he walked toward them.
Leander looked at Julia.
She was watching her father's back as he was led away, and her hands were at her sides. She was holding her chin high, her spine perfectly rigid, and her fingers locked together at her waist. Beneath the heavy wool of her coat, her chest rose and fell in short, shallow rhythms. She was trying hard to hide from the street.
The red stones of the garnets caught the flat gray light of the midday sky. He stood beside her, and he did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that the moment did not already contain.
After a moment, she turned her face toward him.
"The heirloom," she said. "He sold it. I am sorry."
"I know." He had known since Cuthbert's letter. A different avenue of inquiry, a different destination, but the knowledgehad been there before he left the Strand. "It was never about recovering it."
She looked at him, her dark eyes clear. "What was it about?"
"Henry," he said. "Making certain what happened to him happened to no one else." He looked toward the end of the pavement, now empty of the three men. "That is done."
She was quiet for a moment.
Around them, Fleet Street continued. Printers with ink on their aprons, coffee drinkers arguing near the thresholds, a boy selling papers at the corner who had noticed nothing of the Duke or the Viscount.
The carriage that had been standing with its door open had moved off into the traffic of the thoroughfare.
"He was waiting for you to leave me alone," she said. "He said you never did."
Leander looked at her.
Something crossed her face, quick and unguarded, a small tightening around the mouth before she caught it. She pressed her lips together and looked at the street.
"I left you alone this morning," he said.
"Yes." A pause. "And I left you a note."
He looked at her. At the arm she was still not favoring, the fingers tucked into the seam of her cloak. At the garnets at her throat. At the woman who had stepped between him and a fight she had not started because she had decided what mattered more than the closure of an old ledger.
"Julia," he said.
He had not finished the thought before he said her name. He finished it now, silently, in the space between them: that she had walked into that coffee house alone to confront a man who had never once put her first, and she had done it not for herself but to recover something that belonged to his dead friend, and she had stood her ground until he arrived, and she was standing here now with her arm still held carefully at her side pretending it did not hurt. That he had spent three years on Henry's watch and considerably less time understanding what was directly in front of him. That the ledger he had come to London to close was no longer the most important thing he was carrying.
"I know," she said. She turned, her shoulder brushing his chest as she looked up into his eyes. She didn't blink, her gaze locking onto his with a clarity that cleared the crowd and the noise of the street right out from between them. "I know."
He offered her his arm, his elbow square.
She took it, her hand slipping into the crook of his sleeve, her small and steady weight against him.
They walked back toward the carriage, and Fleet Street moved around them, and behind them, in a direction neither of them looked. The morning concluded its business.
Chapter Twenty-Three
She held herself together in the carriage.
She sat precisely opposite Leander, her ankles crossed and tucked back, her spine held a clear inch from the tufted leather cushions to avoid the swaying rhythm of the springs.
She kept her eyes fixed downward on the small, yellowed bone buttons of her gloves, tracing the raised line of the heavy linen stitching with the tip of her thumb.
One, two, three, four.
