Page 106 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“That Annabelle laughed in all the right places, asked after Charlotte, and never once said your name unless someone else had said it first.”
Dominic took that standing. There was no chair in the room he wanted.
“I handled it badly from the beginning,” he said. “The garden. The wedding. Every week that followed. You asked me at White’s how she settled, and I gave you the household inventory, the lessons, the boy, how well she was managing, because the inventory was true and reciting it saved me from answering the question you had actually asked. You knew it. I watched you know it.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ll answer it.” He held Lucien’s eyes. “I love her.”
The coals shifted in the grate. Lucien did not move.
“Completely. I have loved her a great deal longer than I was willing to admit, and I let her live in my own house, believing otherwise, because I was terrified of ruining her life. You were never the thing I feared, Lucien. I have never once believed myself capable of being a good husband. Or a father. Every model I was given taught the opposite lesson, and you knew my father’s reputation well enough to guess at the curriculum. I decided years ago that the decent thing was never to attempt it. When I found it attempted anyway, I did what I have always done.” His voice came out level, and he kept it there. “I put a door between myself and the thing I could not afford to lose.”
Lucien had gone still against the mantel. When he spoke, the edge had come off his voice, though none of the weight had.
“I’ll not argue the quality of your models,” he said. “But fear does not excuse hurting people. It never has. My sister did not marry your father. She married you.”
“I know it. Fear explains the cowardice; it excuses none of it. That is why I am standing in your study instead of sitting at my club constructing reasons not to be. I am finished running. I have told her everything, and I mean everything, and I intend to spend whatever time it requires repairing what my caution broke. I came to say so to your face, because you are her brother.” He paused. “And because for these past few years, you’ve been the nearest thing I had to one of my own.”
Lucien looked at him. He pushed off the mantel, crossed to the window, and stood with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him. Dominic let him have the time. Out in the square, a coster was crying his wares; a carriage went past, and its sound faded up toward the park; the clock in the hall ticked through the better part of a minute. Dominic did not sit, and did not fill it.
When Lucien turned around, he had the look of a man who had finished an accounting.
“One question.” He came back to the desk and stood behind his chair with both hands on it. “Do you intend, truly, to spend the rest of your life making her happy?”
“I do.”
The answer was out before the question had fully finished. Lucien studied him a while longer. The breath he let out waslong and audible, and he drew back the chair and sat down in it properly at last, his shoulders coming down an inch as he leaned into the leather.
The knock came before either of them had found the next thing to say.
“Are you finished in there,” Annabelle’s voice arrived through the wood, “or shall I send in tea and a surgeon?”
Lucien’s eyebrows went up at Dominic.
“She was at breakfast when I left,” Dominic said. “I told her nothing.”
“She has never in her life needed telling.” Lucien raised his voice. “Come in, Annabelle.”
She came in dressed for walking, bonnet ribbons already loose at her throat, and stopped two steps inside the door. She looked at Lucien seated behind his desk, and at Dominic upright on the carpet, and the corner of her mouth curved.
“No blood,” she said. “I’m encouraged.”
“You followed him,” Lucien said.
“I finished my chocolate first. He put on his good coat for a Tuesday morning and told Mrs. Howell he would be out anhour.” She untied the bonnet and set it on the shelf of books nearest the door as though the shelf had been installed for the purpose. “There is exactly one call in London fitting that description.”
Lucien watched her do it. “Since you’re here.” He set both hands flat on the desk. “Have you forgiven him?”
The lightness went out of the room. She looked at Dominic while she answered her brother. “Yes.”
“You have?”
“Yes, Lucien.” She turned to face him fully. “I love him. I have loved him for longer than either of us managed to say aloud, which I begin to think is a failing of the whole family. And he has shown me, not told me,shownme, that he will be there. This past week, he has done things that cost him more than I am able to explain to you, and he did them unasked. He did them for me and for James.” Her chin came up. “I am not forgiving him to keep the peace. I am forgiving him because he has earned it.”
Lucien looked at his sister through all of it without interrupting. Whatever ledger he was keeping, he closed it; he rose, came around the desk, and stopped in front of Dominic with a yard of carpet between them.
“Then hear this while she is standing in the room,” he said. “If you hurt her again, no friendship will save you. Nothing will.”
