“Has it?” Julian leaned back with careless ease. “I am glad. The place has been in want of animation. Dom has been haunting it like a particularly well-appointed ghost.”
“Julian—” Dominic began warningly.
“It is true.” He waved it aside. “Tell me, Miss Weston—what occupied you before you came here?”
Lorraine’s expression did not change, but Dominic saw the shift—a slight tightening, quickly mastered.
“I was with a family in Hampshire,” she said. “Three daughters—very lively. Before that, I was brought up in the country. My father was a gentleman of modest means, and a great lover of books.”
“A reader! Dom used to be a reader too, before he determined that misery would serve as a profession.” Julian grinned, and the warmth of it was difficult to resist—Lorraine smiled in return, unguarded, the kind that altered her whole face, setting her eyes alight and bringing a faint colour to her cheeks.
Dominic watched that smile appear and felt something dark tighten in his chest.
He knew it for what it was. He had read of it, heard it named, dismissed it as something that belonged to other men. Yet there it was—sharp, unmistakable.
Jealousy.
Julian was making her laugh. Julian—with his ease, his charm, his unbroken lightness—drew from her in a moment what Dominic had approached only with care. As though it cost him nothing.
Dominic’s hand closed beneath the table. He reached for his wine and drank, tasting nothing.
You have no right,he told himself.She is not yours.
He set the glass down with more force than necessary. Lorraine glanced toward him, and something in her expression altered—awareness, perhaps.
“Your Grace? Are you well?”
“Perfectly.” His voice was clipped, the old coldness settling back into place. “If you will excuse me, I have correspondence to attend to.”
He rose without waiting for a reply, aware of Julian’s gaze, of Thomas’s disappointment, of the way Lorraine’s smile faded as he withdrew.
He did not look back.
***
Julian found him in the study an hour later, precisely as expected.
He entered without knocking and took the chair opposite the desk as though it belonged to him.
“Well,” he said. “That was instructive.”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“Of course you do. You left the table as though the house were on fire, and you expect me to believe it was about correspondence.” Julian stretched out his legs. “Speak, Dom.”
“There is nothing to say.”
“There is a great deal to say. There is a woman at your table who looks at you as though you hung the moon, and you fled because I made her laugh.”
Dominic’s hands tightened. “Miss Weston is Thomas’s governess. Nothing more.”
Julian’s expression shifted, the levity giving way to something steadier. “Miss Weston is a remarkable woman, and you are either blind or wilfully obtuse. As I know you are not blind—”
“You presume too much.”
“I observe.” Julian leaned forward. “I watched you tonight. I watched you watch her. I have not seen that look on your face since before Spain.”
“You are mistaken.”
