Upstairs, she closed her chamber door and stood with her palm pressed flat against her sternum. The glove was still warm where his hand had been.
She set it on the dressing table beside the small vase of wildflowers that had appeared days ago, that she had still not asked about. Because asking would require an answer. And the answer would require her to do something with the feeling building behind every wall she had left.
He said duty was no longer enough.
From the writing desk she had not yet opened, a cream-coloured card caught the late afternoon light. Lady Willoughby’s invitation, delivered that morning, requesting the Duchess of Rathbourne’s company at luncheon on Thursday next.
A woman of impeccable connections and ruthless curiosity.
Rosamund picked it up. Turned it over. Set it down.
She would go. She would be charming and composed and give them nothing.
But as she changed for dinner that evening and fastened the buttons at her wrist, her fingers found the place on her glove—right hand, third finger—where the warmth of him still lingered like a question she was no longer certain she wanted to refuse.
CHAPTER 17
“Rath House feels different.”
Adrian did not announce the observation. He dropped it casually, without breaking stride, as though the wish it carried were someone else’s concern. He had arrived at half past nine, breezing past Harding with a cheerfulness that bordered on trespass, and installed himself in Tristan’s study without invitation, without apology, and with Tristan’s brandy already in hand.
Tristan did not look up from the letter he was writing. “Different how?”
“Warmer. Less mausoleum, more household. There are flowers in the morning room that were not there a month ago. Your housekeeper smiled at me—not the professional sort, the genuine article. And I passed the nursery on the way up, and someone—I will not speculate who—has left a rather fetching paper crown on the mantel, which suggests either a veryfestive burglary or a domestic atmosphere that has undergone a revolution.”
“Clara made it.”
“Clara made it. And someone wore it. And I suspect that someone was not the velvet rabbit.” Adrian swirled the brandy, a grin forming on his lips, as though he enjoyed the moment too much. “How does married life suit you?”
The pen scratched three more lines before Tristan set it down. He did not turn. The fire had burned low—he had been in the study since seven, working through a surveyor’s report on the Kent drainage and a secondary file from Hargrove regarding the fortification of trust documents for Clara.
“It suits me no more than expected.” He folded the letter. Sealed it. Set it on the stack with the others. “Rosamund is settled. Clara is safe. The arrangement functions precisely as intended.”
“The arrangement.” Adrian repeated the word without contradiction, but with a scepticism audible in every syllable. “You said arrangement.”
“That is because it is one.”
Adrian opened his mouth again, but before he could speak, Tristan shook his head firmly.
“Whatever you are about to say,” Tristan said, “do not.”
“I am about to say that you are falling in love with your wife.”
“I am not.”
“You are reorganising your life around the sound of her footsteps.”
“I am reorganising my schedule around the needs of a household that now includes a child. The logistics are not sentimental. They are practical.”
“You placed her room beside Clara’s and yours at the far end of the corridor.”
“For propriety.”
“For proximity. You wanted to be close enough to hear if something went wrong and far enough to convince yourself the distance meant something.” Adrian held his gaze ’without hesitation. “Tristan. I have known you since we were boys. I watched you grieve James. I watched you build this”—he gestured at the room, the house, the whole armoured apparatus of a life engineered to contain a man who did not trust himself with anything softer than duty—”and I said nothing, because you were surviving, and survival does not require commentary. But this is not survival. This is something else. And the woman down the corridor deserves better than a man who cannot name what he feels because he has decided, on no evidence whatsoever, that naming it would be a cruelty.”
The fist on the desk opened. Finger by finger. The effort of each release visible, as though he were peeling his hand from a surface it had fused to.
“Whatever exists between Rosamund and me is obligation.” His voice came out flatter than he intended—pressed through a gap too narrow for the weight behind it. “I owe her a debt that no marriage, no household, no number of wildflowers will discharge. That is not love. That is the minimum a man can do when he has destroyed a woman’s life and been given the unearned privilege of standing in the wreckage.”
