“You flew three times. It is Leo’s turn.”
Leo sat on the carpet beside the fire with a wooden horse clutched in each fist, watching his older brother with the patient, watchful expression of a child who had learned early that waiting produced better results than demanding. He was almost three, dark-haired like his father, and possessed the same quiet intensity that Edward brought to everything.
Lily set Oliver on his feet and crouched beside Leo. “Shall we fly, little one?”
Leo considered this with the gravity of a magistrate weighing evidence. Then he held up one of the wooden horses.
“Horsy fly.”
“The horse wants to fly? Well then.” Lily took the horse and swooped it through the air in wide arcs while Leo tracked its path with enormous brown eyes and a smile that broke across his face like the sunrise.
The drawing room door opened. Edward appeared in shirtsleeves, his cravat loosened, a stack of correspondence tucked under one arm. He surveyed the scene with the composed amusement of a man who had learned that the transition from Duke to father required nothing more complicated than removing his coat and sitting on the floor.
“Papa!” Oliver charged across the room and collided with Edward’s knees.
Edward caught him without dropping the correspondence, which spoke to either excellent reflexes or extensive practice. He set the letters on the side table and lowered himself on the carpet beside Leo.
“Has the horse learned to fly?”
“Horsy fly,” Leo confirmed and handed Edward the second horse with the solemn generosity of a child sharing his most prized possession.
Edward flew the horse. Oliver climbed onto his back. Leo produced a third horse from somewhere behind the settee, and within minutes, Edward was conducting an aerial cavalry exercise across the drawing room carpet with the focused determination he normally reserved for parliamentary debates.
Lily watched them and felt the ache that always accompanied time with Sophia’s family. Not envy. Something gentler. The quiet recognition that this was what a life could look like when it was built on something real.
She settled into the chair beside Sophia and smoothed her skirts. Jane stirred against Sophia’s shoulder, made a soft sound, and settled again.
“She has your temperament,” Lily said. “Nothing disturbs her.”
“She has Edward’s temperament. I am disturbed by everything. I simply hide it better.” Sophia shifted the baby to her othershoulder and turned her attention to Lily with the focused precision that had made her the most feared gossip columnist in London. “What is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter.”
“Something is the matter. You have been odd all morning.”
“I have not been odd.”
“You have been odd.” Sophia’s voice was gentle but immovable. “You arrived an hour early. You have played with the children without stopping, which you normally do when you are avoiding thinking about something. And you have not mentioned Hugo once, which means you are thinking about him constantly.”
Lily opened her mouth to protest and then closed it. There was no point in lying to Sophia. There had never been any point in lying to Sophia. Her sister read people the way other women read novels, and she had been reading Lily since the day she was born.
“The opera,” Lily said.
Sophia waited.
“He was… attentive.” Lily chose the word with care. “We sat together in his box. The proximity was… notable.”
“Notable.”
“He made comments. About my restlessness. About my posture. He was observing me in that way he does, as though he is cataloging every detail for future use.”
“And this bothered you?”
“It unsettled me. There is a difference.” Lily smoothed a crease in her skirt that did not exist. “He has a way of making me feel as though I am being studied. Not judged.Studied. As though he is trying to understand something about me that I have not yet understood about myself.”
Sophia said nothing for a long moment. Jane shifted and sighed. On the carpet, Oliver had recruited Edward into building a fortress out of sofa cushions, and Leo was methodically dismantling it from the other side with the quiet satisfaction of a born strategist.
“Lily.” Sophia’s voice was careful now. “Are you developing feelings for the Duke?”
