Page 107 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Dominic felt the pull at the corner of his own mouth and did not fight it entirely. “That sounds fair.”
Lucien put out his hand. Dominic took it, and the grip on the other end was hard enough to mean what it meant.
“Then you have my blessing,” Lucien said. “For whatever a blessing is worth arriving this long after the wedding.”
“It is worth a great deal,” Annabelle said. Her voice caught on it, and she crossed the carpet and kissed her brother’s cheek, and he suffered it in the manner of a man who would have been wounded had she not. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Lucien went to the side table, where the decanters stood in a row, and poured Madeira into three glasses without asking anyone whether eleven in the morning was an hour for it. He handed them round. “Elinor will have this out of me before your hats are on, and then you will both be dining here Thursday, whether you consent or not. Bring James. Charlotte has learned a new word and requires an audience.”
“What word?” Annabelle asked.
“No.” Lucien lifted his glass an inch. “She deploys it with tremendous range.” He looked at the pair of them over the rim. “To the matched pair of fools.”
“Absolute matched pair,” Annabelle said. “That was the phrase. I remember it distinctly.”
“I stand by every syllable.” He drank, and set the glass down, and for the first time since the door had opened that morning, he looked at Dominic without weighing anything at all. “Go home, Silverford. You’ve a house to fill.”
Annabelle retrieved her bonnet and took Dominic’s arm in the hall, and they came out onto the step into a street going about its ordinary Tuesday, and she waited until the door had closed behind them before she spoke.
“You might have woken me.”
“You’d have insisted on coming.”
“I did come.”
“You’d have insisted on coming in.”
She considered this with her eyes ahead, down the eighty yards of pavement toward their own door. “That’s true,” she conceded. “And it needed to be the two of you.” Her hand tightened briefly on his arm. “Was it terrible?”
“It was owed.” He walked a few paces with the morning cold on his face and the Madeira still warm behind his sternum. “He asked whether I intend to spend the rest of my life making you happy.”
“And you said?”
“I said yes before he had finished the sentence.”
“Good,” she said. “Because your first opportunity begins this evening. James made an announcement at breakfast. You are to have your first lesson. I am to teach; he intends to supervise.”
Dominic stopped on the pavement outside his own railings.
“Then I had better learn my E from my F before six o’clock,” he said, and opened the gate for her.
Epilogue
FOUR MONTHS LATER
“There are forty chairs,” Miles said, stepping inside the old music room. He looked around with the inventory-taking expression he deployed at parties before deciding whether they were worth his attention. “Thirty-seven confirmed. Three chairs of architectural optimism.”
Dominic was at the far window. Below, the first carriages had begun to turn into the square, lanterns lit against the November dark. He had been standing here for twenty minutes. Annabelle had sent him out of their chambers at half past seven with the information that she could not finish dressing with him hovering, and the music room had been where his feet brought him.
“You arrived early,” Dominic said.
“I arrived at the right time,” Miles said. “Which is the better claim.” He came up beside him. They stood at the windowtogether, watching the lanterns below. After a moment, Miles looked at him sideways. “You have been in here a while.”
“I have an interest in the room’s condition.”
“You have an interest in your wife’s evening going well. Different thing.” Miles said nothing more about it, which was one of the qualities that made him tolerable.
Dominic turned from the window and looked at the piano.
