The paper caught at once—dry, expensive stock that burned clean and fast. He watched the words curl and blacken, Hargrove’s careful script dissolving into ash. Edwin Vale’s name went last, the ink holding its shape for a final stubborn instant before the fire consumed it entirely.
He set the poker back in its stand and brushed the residue from his fingers.
She would not know. He would not tell her, because telling her meant placing the shadow of Edwin back across the threshold of a house she had only just begun to trust.
She had smiled this afternoon.
He had not been prepared for it. He had been sitting on the carpet of his own study—a position that, forty-eight hours ago, he would have considered beneath both his dignity and his knees—holding one end of a length of string while Clara held the other, when Rosamund appeared in the doorway. She had watched her sister ordering him about with the imperious confidence of a girl who had decided that dukes were staff. And then her mouth had curved. Small. Involuntary. Gone almost before it arrived, killed with the swift efficiency of a woman who treated her own warmth as a liability.
Two seconds. Three at most.
The memory had lodged in him like a musket ball—clean entry, no exit—and he had been sitting here ever since, cataloguing the damage with the dispassionate precision he applied to legal briefs, and the damage was considerable.
She had not given it to him. That was the devastating part. The smile had been for the scene—for Clara’s laughter, for the collapsed string, for the absurdity of a tall man folded onto a carpet at the direction of a very small tyrant. Rosamundhad not looked at him and chose to smile. She had looked at a moment and forgotten, for the span of a breath, to be guarded. The warmth had escaped her the way heat escapes a banked fire when someone lifts the grate—involuntary, brief, and immediately contained.
He had stolen it. And he would keep it, because he was apparently the sort of man who treasured stolen things now, and the self-knowledge sat in him like rust.
He rose. Crossed to the window. Stood where he had stood the morning she came to accept his proposal, looking out at a city that did not know or care that a man was standing in the dark with a burned letter at his back and a stolen smile lodged in his chest.
Edwin would come again. He would probe and test and press, because that was what men like Edwin did—they did not assault walls, they waited for erosion. And when he came, he would find nothing. Every document sound. Every legal seam sealed. Every avenue of challenge dead-ending into the full, immovable weight of the Rathbourne name.
He would carry this alone. The guilt, the duty, the slow-burning knowledge that the woman sleeping fifty feet from his study door was the cost of a justice he had imposed and the reason he could no longer be certain that justice was enough.
She had only just begun to stop flinching at shadows. He had watched it happen—the gradual loosening, day by day, as the house proved itself trustworthy. She no longer startled at suddensounds in the corridor. She no longer counted the locks at night. Yesterday, she had left Clara’s door ajar rather than standing guard at it, and the casualness of the gesture had hit him harder than any accusation she had ever delivered, because it meant she was beginning to believe that this place—his place—was safe.
He would not be the one to put the shadows back.
Tristan turned from the window. He collected the sealed reply, placed it on the silver tray outside his study door for Harding, and stood for a moment in the darkened corridor.
Fifty feet away, behind two closed doors, a strip of light glowed beneath her door.
She was awake. He was awake. The whole vast, silent machinery of Rath House held its breath between them, and neither of them moved.
He turned the other way. His boots sounded once, twice, on the polished floor—and then he stopped.
From the nursery, muffled by walls and doors and the careful distances he had built into the very architecture of this arrangement, came a sound. Small. Bright. Gone almost before he could be certain he had heard it.
Clara, laughing in her sleep.
Tristan stood in the corridor and listened to the ghost of it fade, and something in his chest shifted. A fracture. Hairline and irreversible.
He continued to his chambers. He did not sleep. But for the first time in a very long while, the reason had nothing to do with duty, or guilt, or the dead.
It had to do with a smile he did not deserve and could not forget, and a child laughing somewhere in the dark, and the unbearable, terrifying suspicion that the fortress he had built to protect them was no longer the only thing he wanted to give.
CHAPTER 12
“Ah. The dragon has emerged.”
Rosamund stopped in the breakfast room doorway. A man she had never seen at this hour—or at this table—sat in the chair nearest the sideboard with a plate of toast balanced on one knee and a cup of Tristan’s coffee steaming in his hand. He wore his coat as though it had been thrown on in the dark, his cravat was tied with a cheerful indifference that would have given Tristan palpitations, and he was smiling at Clara with the easy warmth of a man who had decided, upon entering a room, that the smallest person in it was the most interesting.
Lord Adrian Beaumont. She recognised him from the wedding—the cousin, the witness, the man who had stood beside Tristan at the altar and looked as though he were enjoying himself far too much for the occasion.
He rose the moment he saw her.
“Your Grace. Forgive the intrusion. Your butler made a valiant attempt to announce me, but I have found that the element of surprise improves most breakfasts considerably.” He turned to Clara, who had already climbed into the chair opposite his and was regarding the toast rack with professional interest. “And this must be Miss Clara. I have heard a great deal about you.”
Clara looked up. She had dressed herself this morning—a fact evident in the backwards pinafore and the stocking that had migrated to half-mast—and her hair bore the marks of a negotiation with a hairbrush that had ended in defeat for both parties.
