Page 83 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"Your mind," he continued, his hands tightening around hers, lifting them slightly between them until they rested near his heart. "The speed of it.”
He took a half-step closer, his boot-toe clicking against hers, his thigh brushing her skirts.
"The way you are with Poppy. The morning I told you she could only visit and not live with us, and you did not look up from your cup, you simply said'there is me,'without a single note of hesitation in your throat." He paused; his gaze fixed on hers until she could see her own reflection in his pupils. "I went upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed for ten minutes after that conversation."
Julia looked at him, her mouth parting slightly. She had recorded his absence that morning in her own mind, had noted it as a coldness, but she had not recorded the reason.
"You are honest," he said, "past the point where it is comfortable for either of us. And then you stop, and the silence tells me precisely what the words didn't." He leaned down, his face inches from hers, his breath warm against her cheek. "You told me,'they led me to you'on the study floor and then tried to ask about the Tavistock contact."
"It was a very relevant contact," she murmured, her heart beating against her ribs like a trapped bird.
He looked at her now with no desk between them, no formal hours, and no distance measured across the length of a drawing-room table. He looked at her the way he had in the damp chill of the chapel before they signed the register, before the manners had returned to his shoulders.
"I love you," he said. The words came out distinct, heavy, and separate from one another, like stones dropped into deep water. "That is the phrase. I have been looking for an alternative because I preferred to have the argument settled before I spoke it aloud in this hall, but the accuracy of it is not something I am prepared to negotiate."
Julia’s mouth curved.
She could not help it; the small, dry wit that had kept her alive through ten years of her father’s debts came back to her like an old friend.
"You are telling me you love me," she said, her voice dropping into her familiar, sharp rhythm, "and pre-empting my defense before I have even opened my mouth."
"I know how you manage an account."
"I was not going to balance this one," she said.
Leander went entirely still, his fingers stopping their small, restless movement against her wrists. "No?"
"No."
She held his gaze with everything she had kept behind her teeth during the long drive from Fleet Street, and through the cold mornings at the breakfast table when the silver had been too bright, and under the glare of the chandeliers at Lady Harcourt’s ball.
"I love you," she said. "I have been tracking the parameters of it for three weeks, and it is not a debt I intend to carry in secret."
Leander let out a short, sharp breath that was half a laugh and half a rough exhalation. Then his hand went to the back of her neck. His fingers tangled in the small hairs at her collar, his thumb catching her jawline as he lifted her up to his height.
He kissed her there in the middle of the entrance hall, under the high light of the fanlight, with the kitchen stairs well within hearing and neither of them looking toward the door.
When he finally let her feet touch the floor again, she stayed close. Her hand rested against the silver chain of his watch guard, feeling the steady, heavy work of his ribs underneath his waistcoat.
"I can imagine Henry would have been entirely insufferable about this," she said, her breath warm against his collar.
Leander laughed fully, the sound echoing off the high plaster walls with nothing held back, the last of the thirty years of quiet leaving the room.
"Completely insufferable," he said. "He would have mentioned it at every dinner for twenty years."
She smiled at him, her fingers tightening on his vest, and he smiled back, the lines around his eyes deep and clear.
Outside, the iron wheels of a dray cart rattled over the cobblestones of London, turning toward the river with its load.
Inside, the hall was warm, the grate in the parlor was ticking as the coals took, and the house held them both at the end of the long road that had begun with a broken axle and ended here.
Epilogue
ONE MONTH LATER
The opera had been Leander's idea, which still surprised her occasionally when she caught her reflection in the glass panels of the carriage.
The suddenness of the invitation, the private box, the particular care with which he had given her three days' notice so she might arrange a gown rather than a hurried hour. It was a small thing. She understood that it was a small thing. And yet she had stood in her dressing room when Ellen delivered the message and held it in her hands for rather longer than was strictly necessary, because nobody had ever given her three days' notice before.
