“She interferes with Aaron.”
“Ah.” Frederick nodded as though this explained everything. “What did she do?”
Rowan did not answer at once. There was something absurdly intimate in describing it. Barking. The puppy. Aaron’s uncertain little face turning toward him, waiting for judgment. Emmeline standing beside them, steady and warm and unashamed of the strange method because it had helped the boy.
“She has him making sounds,” Rowan said at last. “When he cannot finish a word. To help him through it.”
Frederick’s expression shifted, the mockery fading. “And did it?”
Rowan looked away.
Frederick exhaled. “You are angry because it worked.”
“I am angry because she does not consider what the world will do if it sees him as something to laugh at.”
“Perhaps,” Frederick said slowly, “she is considering what will happen if he grows up believing every sound he makes is something to hide.”
Rowan’s hand tightened around the tankard again. “Do not repeat her arguments to me.”
“Then stop making her sound reasonable.”
A muscle jumped in Rowan’s jaw. The tavern noise pressed at him, the laughter too sharp, the air too close. He had come here to escape the house, but Emmeline had followed him into the smoke and fire anyway.
Frederick studied him for a moment longer, then tilted his head. “There are, of course, many ways to vent this… exasperation.”
Rowan’s eyes cut to him.
Frederick took a drink, entirely unbothered. “Some of them are even marital.”
A low growl left Rowan before he could stop it.
Frederick’s grin appeared. “There he is.”
“Do not.”
“Do not what? Suggest that a man might consider going home and taking his very lovely wife to bed?” Frederick leaned forward, lowering his voice, though his amusement remained intact.
Rowan looked down into his ale because if he looked at Frederick too long, he might hit him.
His mind, traitorous thing, supplied the image without permission. Emmeline in his bed. Emmeline beneath his hands. That proud mouth losing its arguments against his skin. Her sandy hair spread over the pillow, freckles flushed across her cheeks, honey eyes dark and stunned as he showed her, properly, what her defiance did to him.
He could almost feel the softness of her waist beneath his palms. The warmth of her breath at his throat. The yielding shock of her body when he would first press his weight over hers.
His blood went hot.
He drank again, harder this time.
Frederick’s amusement softened into curiosity. “Why not?”
Rowan stared at the table.
“Because,” he said, each word roughened by restraint, “Emmeline wants children.”
Frederick stopped smiling, and the silence between them changed. The tavern carried on around them, laughter and movement and drunken talk rolling over the pause, but at their table, the air grew still.
“Ah,” Frederick said quietly.
Rowan’s mouth twisted without humor. “Yes. Ah.”
