The letters from London remained unanswered on his desk. Mr. Grieves could wait. The ton would definitely gossip and the scandal sheets could write whatever they pleased.
Rhys was exactly where he wanted to be.
The schoolroom was quiet at the hour Rhys usually chose, which was late enough for the children to be asleep and early enough that Mel had not yet gone up. He had found, without admitting it to himself for some weeks that this was the hour he looked forward to most in the day.
He knocked. He had begun knocking since the title reveal and he had kept knocking afterwards, even when she had told him it was unnecessary.
“Come in.”
She was at the writing desk by the window with a chart spread before her and her quill moving in the brisk, precise strokes that he had learned to associate with her worst nights. Mel did not fret aloud, she charted.
“Anna’s comparative study of European succession law,” he said, reading over her shoulder.
“Should I be worried?”
“She has requested additional source material. I am drawing up a list for the next order of books.”
“My daughter is six.”
“Your daughter is functionally the age of two and forty. The two facts are not related to her chronological age.”
He laughed, though he had not meant to. It escaped him in the way small things did in this room, where she sat with her sleeves pushed up and ink on her third finger and her hair coming down by degrees from whatever arrangement she had started the morning with.
“May I see,” he said, leaning down.
“The chart, or the list.”
“Both.”
She slid the chart toward him. He bent further to read it, bracing one hand on the desk beside hers, close enough that he could see the small freckle at her wrist that he had never permitted himself to notice before.
His cuff caught the rim of the inkwell.
The whole world did what objects do when one of them has decided to fall. The inkwell tipped over and the ink spread across the chart, her hand, across her sleeve from wrist to elbow in one elegant, devastating streak across the chart. A single black droplet settled on the edge of her jaw, as precise as if someone had placed it there on purpose.
“Oh,” she said. “I am so very sorry.”
“The chart is ruined.”
“I will replace the chart.”
“The ink is French. Anna selected it for its superior permanence.”
“Then I have done quite a thorough job.”
She was looking at her sleeve. She lifted her hand slowly, turned it over and studied the black tributary running down the side of her wrist. He looked up at her, half expecting anger and a crisp, cold reprimand that he had been receiving from her in various gradations for weeks.
He braced himself for it.
She began, very quietly, to laugh.
“Mel.”
“I am laughing at you.”
“I had gathered.”
“You are the Duke of Trevane. You negotiate with Parliament. You have been knighted by a monarch. And you have just destroyed a chart, a sleeve, and a week’s worth of French ink by leaning over a desk.”
