“If there is anything you wish to change…” He left his sentence dangling.
“Not at present.”
His chair creaked and the fabric of his coat whispered. He’d shifted. Perhaps he’d taken upthe postureand was gazing at her with the same dispassionate, but slightly perplexed expression, she’d seen him use on her sisters on prior mornings. Or maybe his eyes were burning with the same dark, hungry expression she remembered from last night…
Butter oozed over the top of her toast, slowly liquefying. She wet her lips.
“The wedding went well.” His voice had gone soft.
“Yes,” she answered. “Very… proper.”
“I was,” he paused, “well-pleased.”
Good Heavens. Werethey discussing the ceremony?
She feared not.
Would every discussion with him be this fraught?
Because the conversation was embarrassing, and the weight of everything theyweren’tsaying was bearing hard against her chest.
If this was to be her conversational lot, she would be taking breakfast in bed for a lifetime.
*
Lud.
While Harbury knew he’d never been the best of conversationalists, he hadn’t felt this inept in decades. He felt as if he were shrinking back into the child he’d once been.
He may be sitting at the table’s head, but, if he glanced down, he half expected he’d see short pants hugging legs too small to reach the floor. Reflexively, he wiped the back of his knees, surprised when his hand met leather. He could have sworn sweat was making them stick uncomfortably to mahogany.
His mind spasmed with the same old disorientation, just as if he were a boy again and the other empty chairs contained his mother, his father and his sister Sarah. He felt the resurgent, maddening inability to enter a conversation flowing as smoothly and naturally as the stream cutting through the home wood’s northwest corner.
How had the rest of his family always known just what to say to one another, just when to drop in the amusing anecdote, while he had never been able to form the proper words?
Whenever he’d tried to venture something important—birdsong he’d identified or a passage in a book he’d enjoyed—his father had scowled. In fact, he’d never had a conversational ally at the table until late adolescence, when Adrian had come to live in the household.
But Adrian was no longer here, neither in the distant past, nor as he had been just yesterday.
Harbury’s own fault, too.
He’d planned everything so all their guests would leave just after the celebration. Without the Wainwright girls’ incessant, mystifying chatter, he’d hoped a comfortable pattern of civility might slide into place between himself and his wife.
After all, Cassandra had been easy to talk to when they’d been “courting,” even if the “courtship” had, at the time, been a pretense to satisfy her godmother’s concern for her reputation.
Had her gentleness then also been pretense?
Or was her awkwardness now the anomaly?
He’d wager his last pence her gentleness had been sincere. Before, she’d had no expectations of him. But now…
Well, if she had expectations, he’d clearly failed to measure up.
He’d thought marriage would make him feel like the man he should be. Instead, his current experience was quite the opposite. And he’d no idea how to go about building a bridge between a present he hadn’t expressly wanted and a future in which he might take pride. Every future he’d imagined had always contained Viv.
Vivianne’s first marriage, he’d forgiven. His father had been at fault, then—no one ever defied the prior duke, least of all a penniless governess turned companion. But the man his father had forced her to wed had been of his father’s generation, and he’d thought…
Well, it didn’t matter what he’d thought now. Everything had changed.
