She held it the way she had held the image of Tristan on the study floor with wooden blocks in his lap, the way she held the memory of his face breaking open when she smiled. She added it to the collection of things she had not asked for and could not return—the small, accumulating evidence of a man who had not always been granite. Who had once read badly to a boy he loved. Who had tried to teach a cat to fetch because he believed, at twelve, that enough persistence could bend the world into the shape he wanted.
Something had broken it out of him. Adrian had not said what. He did not need to. The answer lived in the flat, clipped finality with which Tristan had spoken of his brother in the gallery—He died long ago—and in the way Adrian’s hand had tightened on his cup when he said the name James, as though the syllable itself were a thing that could cut.
Tristan entered the breakfast room twenty minutes after Adrian had redirected the conversation toward scone diplomacy. He wore dark wool. His hair was slightly disordered. He looked as though he had been awake for some time.
He stopped when he saw Adrian.
“You are eating my toast.”
“Clara ate your toast. I am merely an accomplice.” Adrian leaned back in his chair with the particular ease of a man who knew precisely how much of an irritant he was and considered it a public service. “Good morning, cousin. You look dreadful. Have you slept at all?”
“Adequately.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is what you received.” Tristan crossed to the sideboard, poured coffee, and took the chair at the head of the table—the fourteen-foot distance between himself and Rosamund restored with the mechanical precision of a man repositioning chess pieces. His gaze passed over her once, quickly, and whatever he saw in her expression made his jaw tighten a fraction before he looked away.
He had seen that she had been listening to Adrian. He had seen the shift in her—the hairline change in the way she held her cup, the way her eyes tracked him as he moved through the room. He saw everything. That was one of the things she was learning about the Duke of Rathbourne: he missed nothing, absorbed everything, and gave back only what he chose.
And what he chose, this morning, was distance.
Clara had no interest in distance.
“Your cousin is brave,” she informed Tristan, holding up the butter knife Adrian had surrendered. “He proved it. Can he come to breakfast again?”
Tristan looked at the butter knife, then at Adrian, then at Clara, and the corner of his mouth did the thing—the small, involuntary twitch that was not quite a smile but was closer to one than anything else his face seemed willing to produce.
“That depends entirely on whether he continues to arrive uninvited, which he will, because he has never once in thirty years waited for an invitation to do anything.”
“Accurate,” Adrian confirmed. “And I shall take that as a yes.”
“You will take it as a statement of fact regarding your character, not as an endorsement of it.”
“Noted. Ignored.” Adrian stood, brushed crumbs from his coat, and bent to Clara’s level. “A pleasure, Miss Dragon. I shall return with superior weaponry next time. Perhaps a spoon.”
Clara beamed. Adrian straightened, caught Rosamund’s eye, and inclined his head with a warmth that carried no agenda—simply the acknowledgement of one person to another that the morning had meant something, and that the meaning was hers to keep.
Then he was gone, sauntering down the corridor with the unhurried gait of a man who had accomplished exactly what he came to do and saw no reason to linger over it.
Rosamund sat at the breakfast table and looked at the man at the other end of it—the man who had once read to his brother every night in bad voices, who had argued with tutors and trained cats and carried, somewhere beneath the armour, a tenderness that grief had buried and duty had sealed over.
He was reading his correspondence. He did not look up. The distance between them stretched the length of the mahogany, vast and polished and deliberate.
But for the first time since she had sat at this table, Rosamund did not want it there.
CHAPTER 13
“No.”
The word came out flat and final, and Rosamund folded her arms across her chest as though the posture alone might end the discussion. They stood in the morning room—she near the window, he near the door, the geography of the conversation already drawn along the lines of a siege.
“I will not parade myself before the ton so that London can satisfy its curiosity about the Duke of Rathbourne’s charity bride.”
Tristan’s expression did not change. He had entered the morning room five minutes ago carrying an invitation on heavy cream card—Lady Ashbourne’s summer ball, this evening, attendance expected—and had presented it to Rosamund with the same clipped efficiency he brought to legal briefs, as though the prospect of a ballroom were simply another matter requiring her signature.
“It is not a parade,” he said. “It is an appearance. One evening. Three hours at most.”
“Three hours of being stared at, whispered about, and assessed by women who withdrew their friendship the moment my father’s name appeared in the broadsheets.” Her voice held steady, but the colour had risen in her. “I have no desire to provide entertainment for people who left me to starve.”
