Dominic entered, still in his riding clothes, the cold clinging to him like a second skin. His hair was disordered by the wind, his cheeks roughened by it. He had been out since dawn—riding the moors with a ferocity that had begun to concern the grooms and unsettle the horses, the restless exertion of a man attempting to outrun something that could not be outrun.
He stopped when he saw her.
His gaze—those pale, piercing eyes she had watched shift, over these past months, from ice to fire and back again—moved over her face with an intensity that made her skin prickle.
“You have been counting again,” he said.
“I have not.”
“You have. You get a line between your brows.” He crossed to the sideboard, poured himself coffee, and did not drink it. “How many?”
“Four weeks. Possibly five.”
The number landed between them like a stone.
***
Four weeks.
He carried the number with him through the morning like a wound—through Thomas’s geography lesson, which he now attended daily; through the estate correspondence he could no longer pretend to care about; through luncheon, where he sat opposite Lorraine and Thomas and watched them laugh at something Jenny had said, and felt the simultaneous, irreconcilable urges to fix every detail in memory and to look away before the looking undid him.
Four weeks until Thomas left. Four weeks until Lorraine had no reason to remain. Four weeks until this house returned to what it had been before—a mausoleum dressed in comfort.
He had promised to find a way. He had meant it. And in the weeks since, he had written to his solicitor, consulted a barrister in York, and pursued every legal avenue by which a guardian might contest the removal of a ward to blood relatives.
The answer, delivered with brisk civility, was that he could not.
The Hardings were Thomas’s grandparents—his nearest kin. Their claim was unquestionable. Dominic’s authority extended only so far as their absence. The law did not recognise love. It did not care that Thomas painted kestrels, or wore his father’s compass, or called Rovewood home. It cared for lineage—and Dominic’s was irrelevant.
He had not told Lorraine.
He would. He was merely—postponing.
Coward, said the voice in his head that sounded very much like hers.You are postponing because telling her means admitting you have failed.
After luncheon, Thomas went upstairs with Jenny. Lorraine withdrew to the library. Dominic returned to his study, stared at the crooked kestrel upon the wall, and felt the hours slipping through his fingers.
At half past nine, when the house had settled into its quiet, he went to her.
Not to his own chambers to wait, as had become their custom. To her.
He knocked once—and entered.
***
He was standing in her doorway, and he looked wrecked.
Not distant. Not composed. The careful mask she had come to recognise was gone. His cravat was missing, his waistcoat unfastened, his hair disordered as though he had dragged his hands through it one time too many. His eyes were dark—not with desire alone, but with something deeper. Less contained.
“Dominic.” She rose at once. “What—”
“I need you.”
Nothing guarded in it. No preamble. No attempt at control.
She crossed the room without hesitation and took his face between her hands.
“Then have me.”
