Chapter Fifteen
“Thomas, hold the brush at an angle—yes, like that. Lovely.”
Lorraine guided Thomas’s small hand across the paper, watching as a slightly lopsided kestrel took shape beneath his brush. They had been painting all morning—his latest enthusiasm, inspired by a book of illustrated birds that she had discovered in the library and supplemented with their own observations from the garden. The boy possessed a steadier hand than one might expect of six years, and a remarkable instinct for colour.
“His wing is wrong,” Thomas said, frowning. “It should curve more.”
“Then curve it more. Art is not about perfection—it is about seeing.”
He bent again to his work, tongue caught at the corner of his mouth in concentration, his fair hair falling forward in a way that would soon require attention. He pushed it back with paint-stained fingers.
He looked happy.
Truly happy, in a way that would have been unimaginable mere weeks ago. The wary child she had first encountered remained—perhaps always would—but he had been joined by this brighter version of himself. The one who laughed at breakfast and asked questions without fear, and carried the wooden horse the Duke had given him everywhere, as though it were a talisman against the world.
The thought of Dominic sent a flush through her that she resolutely ignored.
Soon.
The word had become a quiet, relentless pulse within her. Days since the almost-kiss. Days of exquisite restraint. Days of watching him across rooms and feeling the space between them like something physical—tangible, aching.
They had not been alone together since.
By silent agreement, the library had been avoided after dark. A mutual understanding, perhaps, that the next time they found themselves there—firelight, shadows, and no witnesses—there would be no restraint left to claim.
The question was notwhether. It waswhen.
And the waiting was becoming unbearable.
“Miss Weston?” Thomas looked up from his kestrel. “May I paint in the garden this afternoon? The light is better outside.”
Lorraine glanced through the window. November had relented for the day, offering a sky of pale, watery blue and a sun that held no warmth but at leastpossessed the decency to appear. The garden—still bedraggled with autumn, its beds stripped bare and its borders worn to dull browns—gleamed with frost that was already beginning to melt.
“I think that is an excellent idea. Finish your kestrel, and we shall set up outside after luncheon.”
***
The garden was cold but beautiful in the thin November light.
Lorraine had claimed a stone bench near the south wall, where a climbing rose—dormant now, its branches bare and ropy—formed a sheltered alcove against the wind.
Thomas sat cross-legged upon a blanket nearby, his watercolours spread around him, painting with fierce concentration while Jenny hovered at the edge of the lawn, mending stockings and stealing glances at the under-gardener.
Lorraine was not painting. She was pretending to read, though in truth she was watching the house—specifically, the window of the Duke’s study, where a tall figure had appeared and disappeared several times during the past hour.
He is watching me, she thought, and the knowledge sent a warmth through her chest that had nothing to do with the weak November sun.He is standing at his window, watching me sit in his garden, and he can no more attend to his work than I can attend to this book.
It was absurd. They were behaving like figures in one of the novels she kept hidden in her bedside drawer—the kind in which the heroine spent entire chapters pining by windows while the hero brooded magnificently in his study. She was a sensible woman. A governess. A woman who had learned, through bitter experience, that yearning was a luxury she could ill afford.
And yet she yearned.
“Miss Weston, I am going to fetch more water for my paints.” Thomas scrambled to his feet, clutching his jar. “Jenny, will you come? I need someone to hold the door whilst I fill it.”
Jenny looked up from her mending with the slightly dazed expression of a girl whose thoughts had been elsewhere—specifically, Lorraine suspected, upon the under-gardener’s forearms. “Of course, love. Lead the way.”
They disappeared toward the kitchen entrance, Thomas chattering about the precise shade of brown he required for the kestrel’s breast feathers. Lorraine watched them go, then turned back to her book.
She heard him before she saw him.
