Page 88 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“He understands,” Annabelle said from her low chair beside the settee. “He simply doesn’t repent.”
James appeared to accept this as the known defect it was, and returned to watching Charlotte, who had lifted both hands from the table and taken one swaying step forward before catching herself. She made a sound. She found James across the rug, and in the way of children who have not yet been taught to ask permission, started toward him, putting her feet down with the front-weighted determination of someone who still trusts the act considerably more than the physics.
She reached him and grabbed his sleeve.
“She’s holding my jacket,” James said.
“I see that,” Annabelle said.
“Is she going to let go?”
“Probably not.”
Charlotte looked up at James. James looked down at Charlotte. His free hand came up and then changed its mind and went back to his side. Charlotte, apparently finding this arrangement satisfactory, turned her attention back to Newton and maintained her grip.
From the armchair beside the fire, Dominic watched the two of them.
James stood very still with Charlotte attached to his sleeve, not pulling away, his eyes moving between her and the cat with the close attention of someone monitoring a situation for which no prior protocol existed. Eventually, he sat down on the edge of the rug, which brought him to Charlotte’s height. She sat too, still holding his sleeve, and pointed at Newton.
“He knows,” James told her.
Charlotte pointed again.
“He is unrepentant,” James said.
Lucien had said, “I’ve some correspondence to see to,” and glanced at Dominic, and Dominic had understood the shape of the offer and followed him to the library.
He had been tracking Lucien’s movements since their arrival, the way he tracked anyone who might, on sufficient provocation, ask him to meet at dawn. Not openly. He had spent years learning how Lucien Stanton moved through a room when he was managing something versus when he was genuinely at ease, and he had spent the past two months distinguishing between those two states on a near-daily basis.
Lucien, in his own library, poured two glasses and handed one across. His jaw was easy. His gaze came to Dominic straight.
That was a different matter altogether.
“The Whitmore boundary dispute,” Lucien said, taking the chair by the window. “Went to arbitration?”
“Last month. Settled for Whitmore.” Dominic sat. “He’s changed solicitors.”
“I heard. Pemberton’s firm?” Lucien swirled his glass. “They’d have caught it in the documentation phase. Aldworth always ran long.”
“Three years past due, that case.” Dominic turned his glass in his hand and watched Lucien’s face, the line of his shoulders. Not wire-tight. Not holding anything back. “Who handles the Fairmont northern boundary now?”
“Pemberton, since last year.” A brief pause. “I’d consider Graves for the Wiltshire matter if he’s still with you.”
“Twelve years,” Dominic said. “He’ll see the problem in a week.”
Lucien looked at the fire. The coals had built to a good heat, and neither of them needed to tend it, and the quiet between them was the quiet of a library with nothing unresolved in it, which was the first time in two months that had been true, and Dominic noted it and said nothing about it.
“She is good with James,” Lucien said, after a stretch. He did not clarify which one. “She was always good with children who needed room to come forward on their own terms. There was a boy at the Felby estate when we were small, the same age, who couldn’t speak. She would sit with him for hours.” He turned his glass once. “She knows how to wait.”
“I know,” Dominic said.
Lucien looked at the fire.
“She always has,” he said, and that was the end of it.
He came back to the drawing room to find it rearranged.
James was cross-legged on the rug with Newton across his knees, paging through a book with the authority of someone conducting a second inspection. Charlotte was in Annabelle’s arms.
