“Well.” Dominic was a foot to his left, both of them facing the same direction. “He’s sleeping properly. Eating.”
Lucien took a sip of his wine. “Good.”
The clock on the mantel ticked. In the card room behind them, someone laughed at something.
“He asked after you last week,” Dominic said. “He’s been asking Annab?—”
“I’ll visit.” Lucien said it before Dominic finished, and Annabelle watched her husband nod woodenly. She put her hands over her mouth, the secondhand awkwardness nearly causing her to topple.
Goodness, men quarreling was ever so awkward to watch…although, she couldn’t quite say much of anything, given ladies’ own leanings when in quarrels of their own.
As if spawning from thin air, Cressida said, “When both parties prefer the friendship to the grievance, it works out. And they do prefer it; it’s visible, even from across a room.”
“I agree. Even though they both look so stiff,” Anabelle added. The two exchanged a soft smile, yet Anabelle’s attention remained on the two men.
Now Dominic was speaking, and Lucien listening.
They’ll get there,Anabelle thought. It would take time, but they would get there.
A few minutes later, Lucien was pulled back into Theodore’s drainage argument. Dominic drifted to the far edge of the room and stopped with his back to the paneling. Annabelle set her wine on the side table and followed.
He turned as she came to stand beside him.
“You’ve been looking at me all evening,” she said.
“And you’ve been looking right back,” he said, watching out of the corner of his eye.
He saw her open her mouth…and then close it, having nothing to say in rebuttal.
And he also saw the moment she caught the perfect escape. “I was checking whether anyone had noticed.”
What a stubborn woman indeed. “Three people noticed, but none of them will say anything.” He shifted his gaze back to scanning the room. “Although…Lady Fitch is the one to watch, since she’s been counting.”
“Counting what?” Annabelle’s tone was confused.
“How many times I look.” He watched the party, his lips curling up. “She lost count around the fifth.”
“Hm,” She hummed, already sounding tired of this thread of the conversation. When she looked up at him, the look he caught in her eyes made him want to pull back. “Do you think you and my brother will get back to normal?”
Dominic cleared his throat. “Hm, well, he is a man I have known for some time,” he said, “but what I have done is not something that he can easily forgive…neither am I asking him to.”
Annabelle pursed her lips. “He has been my brother all my life, and I am telling you that he is softening up more than you think.”
Dominic tilted his head. “Is that so?”
She turned her wine glass once in her fingers. “Yes. I’m certain of it.”
“Then I shall take my wife’s beautiful word for it.”
At supper, Lucien held the door, and Dominic walked through it without comment, neither remarking on it at all.
Annabelle heard it before she understood it: a change in the quality of his breathing, a sharpening where there had beenease. She lay against his side in the dark, listening, and his chest was no longer the slow rise and fall of sleep. His arm had gone rigid. She lifted her head.
His jaw was tight. Behind closed lids, his eyes were moving. The hand at his side had closed into a fist in the bedding.
She put her palm on his chest, shaking him, “Dominic.”
His breathing quickened, but he did not stir. Heart pattering against her chest, she pressed even more.
