Rowan went rigid, his spine snapping against the mahogany chair. Beside him, Emmeline shifted, her weight leaning toward the boy, her hand hovering just off the linen.
Rowan’s pulse hammered against his collar. He saw the way Aaron’s eyes began to gloss, the way the heavy silver and candlelight suddenly felt like the walls of a tomb.
“The past stays where it belongs,” he said, each word clipped. “We concern ourselves with the future.”
Aaron’s mouth trembled with frustration. “That’s what y-you always s-say!”
“Lower your voice.”
“I wasn’t—I d-didn’t?—”
The stammer seized him then, sudden and vicious, tangling what little remained of his composure. His face reddened. He pushed his chair back too fast, Comet clattering onto the tablecloth, and before anyone could stop him, he was out of the room.
The silence afterward was brutal.
Emmeline had gone half out of her chair. Rowan had risen fully before he could think, his pulse hard, his own irritation already souring into regret.
“I apologize,” he said, forcing the words toward civility. “Aaron has struggled since my sister’s disappearance. Beyond that, he is a good boy.”
Lord Weston recovered first. “I understand.”
Emmeline did not sit back immediately. “Are you not going after him?”
Rowan froze, his wine glass suspended in mid-air. The muscles in his forearm corded, straining against his coat sleeve. Her question was a knife between his ribs, expertly finding the gap in his armor and twisting.
He stared at her, his thoughts snagging.She is asking me to abandon my own table. In my own house.The sheer, quiet audacity of it made the air in his lungs feel too thick. He looked at her honey-brown eyes and found no apology there—only a sharp, expectant clarity that made his sense of duty feel suddenly, bafflingly small.
“He needs a moment to regain his calm,” Rowan said. “And I cannot leave my guests.”
She sat slowly, but not with surrender. “If he hears a few kind words from his father, he may regain it more quickly.”
Rowan looked at her.
“He is not a child in a nursery tantrum,” she continued, and though her voice remained low, there was force in it now. “He is grieving.”
“Mourning is one thing,” Rowan said carefully, each word selected before it left him. “Defiance is another.”
Her eyes sharpened. “He is seven.”
“And if he learns that grief excuses every outburst, he will grow into a man who governs neither his temper nor himself.”
“Or,” Emmeline countered, her knuckles white as she gripped her silk skirts, “if you meet every cry for help with a fist of iron, eventually, he will stop reaching for you entirely.”
What?
Rowan held her gaze. Lord Weston cleared his throat softly, the sound strained with the effort of pretending not to hear a quarrel form at his future son-in-law’s table.
“You presume much,” Rowan said.
“Perhaps,” Emmeline replied. “But not, I think, wrongly.”
For one long second, the room seemed to draw in around them, all candlelight and silver and restrained breath. Rowan was abruptly, unwillingly aware of how alive she looked when she argued—her eyes brighter, her mouth firmer, the soft gentleness he had seen with Aaron now sharpened into something that met him head-on. The attraction that moved through him at such moments was so ill-timed it felt almost insulting.
“Well,” Lord Weston said suddenly, his voice a little too bright as he reached for his wineglass, “I noticed on the way here that the roads into London are in a dreadful state. Quite dreadful. I have often thought Parliament might do better to concern itself with the condition of the highways rather than quarrel endlessly over matters no ordinary man can understand.”
Emmeline’s gaze flickered, the sharpness in it wavering as she looked toward her father.
“Papa,” she said softly.
