“There you all are,” he said brightly, approaching with a well-dressed couple and a fair-haired boy near Aaron’s age. “I had begun to think Ironford had frightened half the company away.”
The other child smiled uncertainly at Aaron.
“This is Peter Ellsworth,” Frederick went on, clearly taking in the scene and deciding not to name it. “Peter, this is Aaron Huntley. I understand you both possess excellent opinions on horses and very questionable judgment about cake.”
That, at least, made Aaron look away from Rowan.
Emmeline bent slightly toward him. “Would you like to go play with Peter?”
Aaron looked at Rowan then, cautious now, waiting.
“May I, F-Father?” he asked.
This time the stammer had returned, though lighter.
Rowan hesitated. He did not know the Ellsworth child. He did not know whether some careless word from another boy might undo what little calm Aaron had recovered. He did not knowwhether permitting it would heal anything or merely delay another humiliation.
Then Emmeline looked at him.
She said nothing, but there was too much quiet meaning in the steadiness of her gaze, in the fact that she was asking him, without one word, not to choose fear for the boy again.
Rowan exhaled once. “Go on, then.”
Aaron brightened so quickly that something tightened painfully in Rowan’s chest. A second later, he had gone off with Peter across the lawn, wooden horse in hand, already pointing toward something.
“Well,” Frederick said into the silence that followed, “that was almost ruinously tense. Shall I make some remark about the weather or the church banns to rescue us?”
Emmeline’s mouth softened despite herself. “You may try.”
Frederick placed a hand against his heart. “Bless you. Most ladies merely suffer my rescue in silence.”
Emmeline’s eyes sparked. Rowan watched the light in them and felt the world shift. Just like that, she altered the air around him, stripping away the crowd and the noise until he saw nothing but her. For a heartbeat, he forgot to be a duke. He forgot the ton. He simply forgot.
“It was announced on Sunday,” Frederick continued, turning to the couple. “The first reading of the banns, I mean. All very proper. Another two Sundays and they will be tied together.”
Emmeline answered with more ease than Rowan expected. “I had not realized you attended our parish service so attentively, Lord Calham.”
Frederick smiled. “I attend everything attentively when there is sufficient possibility of scandal.”
She laughed, the sound light and brief.
It went through Rowan with a sharpness that pierced his chest, and he despised himself for it instantly.
Frederick could charm laughter from stone. Yet Rowan still found himself wanting the sound turned elsewhere, wanting it not handed so easily to another man, even one who had been his friend since boyhood.
He looked toward Aaron before the feeling could take deeper root.
The boy was kneeling in the grass with Peter now, Comet between them, speaking with animated hands even if the words themselves did not fully carry.
He looked… happy.
Rowan felt something in his chest loosen, only to tighten again with the awareness of how narrow the difference had been between this and another scene altogether.
“Do not glare so viciously at the crowd,” Frederick said as he adjusted his cuffs beneath the theatre lamps. “You are meant to look like a man attending for pleasure, not for execution.”
Rowan, who had already found the entrance too crowded, turned his head just enough to give his friend a look that ought to have ended the conversation.
Frederick only smiled wider.
