Nathaniel listened. Then he said, “Well then. Perhaps it is time to begin drawing again. With rather more care about what you put on the canvas.”
“I already know what my future looks like,” Julian said. “I will be very peacefully content on my own. I do not require a happy marriage. I do not require any of it.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “Then you must stop being so damnably attentive to Clara, for she will begin to think there is more between you than an arrangement, and I should not like to see her hurt again.”
“I would never hurt her,” Julian said. The words came out fast and firm.
Nathaniel looked at him for a long moment and said nothing. Which was, in its way, worse than anything he might have said.
Because even as Julian heard his own words, he knew they fell short of the truth. They already walked a path riddled with dangers. The afternoons at the menagerie. The walks in the park. The evenings in the garden while David slept between them.Dover. All of it. Every moment he had allowed himself to simply be near her without keeping his guard properly up.
Each one a cannonball yet to go off.
And the most dangerous part was not that he might set one off by accident.
The most dangerous part was that he was no longer entirely sure he wanted to avoid it.
* * *
Later that afternoon, he retreated to his study to attend to estate business he had neglected since recent events took shape. He was three-quarters through a steward’s assessment on a drainage project when a knock came at the door.
“Come.”
He looked up and then, despite himself, looked again.
Clara stood in the doorway in a rose-colored gown with three-quarter sleeves that he hadn’t seen before. She had put flowers in her hair. Small ones, pale, tucked just above her ear. Were they part of her?
He reminded himself, with some effort, of his conversation with Nathaniel.
“Clara,” he said, “I beg your pardon, I am rather occupied at present.”
“I can see that. I only came to tell you that Helena, Evelyn, and I have finalized the plans for the ball.”
“Yes.” He remembered now. Saturday. Standing before the assembled ton and performing the fiction of a love match with such conviction that nobody would think to question it. He dreaded nothing more. “Good,” he said, and turned a page of the ledger. Nothing on it, so he moved forward two pages to something he had already worked on, not wishing her to see that he paid no attention at all.
“I also thought of taking David out. A walk in the park—St James’s, perhaps. And afterwards I thought I might call on my mother. She has written again and is quite insistent on seeing him. I am afraid if we do not bring him to her she will grow suspicious.”
“A sensible plan. You should do it.”
“I thought perhaps you would come.”
He looked up. Her voice carried an unmistakable note of hope, and her eyes when he met them were open and clear and without guile. She did not maneuver. She simply wanted him to come.
He wanted to go. Not only because being seen with her in public served their purposes, not only because his mother-in-lawexpected the performance of a devoted husband, but because he wanted to be there. He wanted the afternoon in the park, David in the pram between them, the pretend ordinary pleasantness of it. He wanted to go on wanting it which was precisely why he could not.
He looked back at the ledger. “I cannot. I am behind on this.”
“Oh. Well, if you are busy, I can wait a little while. We need not leave for an hour.”
“No,” he said. “Go without me. The air will do you and David both good.” He picked up his quill and made a note that was, in truth, largely a squiggle.
“I see,” Clara said.
Those two words. The slight change in her voice—not sharp or reproachful, simply quieter—struck him somewhere he had not expected.
He heard the rustle of her skirt, the soft click of the door behind her.
“Clara,” he said and stood.
