Rowan stared at him. Emmeline only looked at Rowan, and the quiet triumph in her eyes was worse than any argument she might have made.
Aaron looked between them. “Did I do it right?”
Rowan’s throat worked once. For once, there was no correction waiting on his tongue.
“Yes,” he said, the word rougher than he intended. “You did.”
Chapter Seventeen
“You look murderous,” Frederick said, lifting his glass. “I assume marriage is going well.”
Rowan’s hand tightened around his tankard.
The tavern was too loud for his mood. Too full of men laughing with their mouths open, dice rattling on scarred tables, tankards striking wood, boots dragging over rushes scattered across the floor.
But he could not bear to be in Ironford, because all he heard there was Emmeline’s voice.
And beneath all of it was the memory of her beneath the beech tree, eyes bright, mouth parted, chest rising beneath the modest cut of her gown as she dared him to come closer.
Rowan drank.
The ale was bitter. It did nothing.
He wished Juliet were home.
The thought came with such sudden force that his fingers tightened around the tankard. He had sent men across roads, inns, villages, coaching houses, and every place she might have thought to hide, and still there had been nothing. No reliable sighting. No second note. No scrap of certainty that she was safe. Only silence.
Juliet had always filled a room with feeling, even when he had not known what to do with it, and now her absence sat in the middle of his life like another accusation he could not answer.
Frederick watched him over the rim of his glass, his golden-brown eyes far too knowing for a man who made such an art of appearing useless.
“Ah,” he said. “So it is your wife.”
“It is not my wife.”
“No, of course not. You rode nearly seven miles after supper to sit in a tavern that smells of onions and regret because of estate matters.”
Rowan set the tankard down with enough force to make the liquid jump. “Do you intend to be amusing all evening?”
“I intend to be useful. Being amusing merely makes the usefulness easier to swallow.” Frederick leaned back, stretching his long legs beneath the table. “So. Tell me what Her Grace has done now.”
Rowan stared into his drink.
He had almost kissed her again.
He had been seconds away from taking her mouth beneath a tree like some green boy with no discipline, while his son stood somewhere nearby and half the household might have rounded the corner at any moment.
And some part of him had not cared.
Some part of him had wanted the scandal of it, wanted to know whether the soft little hitch in her breath would break into his name if his mouth found her throat.
His body tightened at the thought.
Frederick’s brow lifted. “That bad?”
Rowan dragged his gaze up. “She is meddlesome.”
“All wives are meddlesome. It is the Lord’s way of ensuring husbands do not become entirely insufferable.”
