Aaron’s shoulders had gone rigid.
Emmeline moved before she fully thought it through.
“Aaron,” she said, smiling as she came up beside them, “there you are. I was beginning to think all the cake would vanish before we found you.”
Lord Vale straightened, startled into retreat by her interruption.
Aaron looked up at her with visible relief.
“It is not yet gone?” he asked.
“Not if we are quick.”
The Duke arrived at the same moment from the other side, his expression cooling at once when he took in the scene.
“My son is not to be interrogated on family matters,” he said, and though his tone remained perfectly civil, Lord Vale flushed anyway, muttered something about not meaning any harm, and withdrew with suspicious haste.
Aaron looked from one to the other of them.
Emmeline held out her hand. “Come. Let us rescue what remains.”
He took it at once.
The Duke’s gaze dropped to their joined hands for one brief second, and something in his face tightened too subtly.
She led Aaron toward the table where the cakes had been laid out among polished silver and pale flowers, and his solemnity eased almost immediately.
By the time he had chosen a small slice and begun to eat it with the concentration of a scholar handling a rare manuscript, Emmeline felt some of the strain in herself ease too.
“You like it?” she asked.
The boy nodded with dignified fervor.
“Good. I should be very sorry if my first duty as your stepmother were to let you have poor cake.”
Aaron blinked up at her, then laughed—a short, startled sound, as though he had not expected to.
It warmed her immediately.
She looked up only to find the Duke watching them from across the room.
His gaze remained fixed on the spot where her hand rested on Aaron’s shoulder.
The habitual horizontal line of his brow smoothed, the deep, permanent crease between his eyes vanishing for the first time since she’d known him. His chest expanded in a slow, heavy breath that seemed to deflate the rigid tension in his frame.
The air in the room suddenly felt too thin, too hot. A single muscle in his jaw worked, a sharp, rhythmic pulse that betrayed the stillness of the rest of his face.
He turned away then.
A little later, while Aaron had been lured into some discussion with Frederick about whether horses preferred oats to apples and Lord Weston was being held hostage by Viscount Dunbrook’s opinions on claret, Emmeline stepped into the passage just beyond the breakfast room for one breath of quiet.
That was when she heard the Duke speak.
“What do you mean you found nothing?”
She froze instinctively.
The footman stood before him, head bowed, the posture of a man already braced for displeasure. Rowan’s voice was low, but there was iron in it.
