Page 60 of Duke of Sapphire

The smile was gone in an instant. He looked at the gate. Then at the rose bed. Then at the middle distance. Charlotte turned to face him fully.

“You smiled,” she said.

“I did not.”

“You absolutely did. Just now. At Ian and the rabbit.”

“I was assessing whether he had hurt himself on the path.”

“You were smiling.”

“I was concerned.”

“Henry.” She tilted her head. “Your concern looked remarkably like delight.”

“You are misreading the situation.”

“I am reading it with considerable accuracy.” She folded her arms. “Your mouth went up at the left corner. Your shoulders dropped. You looked—” She searched for the right word. “—quite pleased.”

“I am never quite pleased.”

“You were quite pleased.”

Henry turned to look at her. He was deploying the full force of his composure now—chin level and gaze even.

“I was,” he said, “checking on the boy.”

“While smiling.”

“While maintaining an expression appropriate to the circumstances.”

“The circumstances being Ian chasing a rabbit into the rose bed.”

“Exactly.” A pause. “Which was not amusing.”

Charlotte bit the inside of her cheek. “Not in the slightest.”

Henry looked back at Ian, who had abandoned the gate and was now examining the rose bed on his side of it.

“Ian,” Henry called. “Leave the rabbit.”

Ian looked up. “I almost had it.”

“You were never going to have it.”

“I was very close.”

“The gap under the gate is four inches. You are not four inches.”

Ian studied the gap with one eye closed. He appeared to be calculating. Then he straightened and brushed his hands on his coat, which did nothing to clean them, and came back up the path.

Charlotte watched Henry track the boy across the grass. The wariness was back in his face, the careful containment. But it was thinner than it had been. She could see the edges of it. Not the man, she thought, but the habit. The habit of holding everything at a distance that felt, from the inside, like safety and looked, from the outside, like cold.

It was not cold. She knew that. She had known it since a Scottish coaching inn, since a pair of hands wrapped her ankle without being asked, since a duke who put himself between her and a hired man without making anything of it. She had been filing the evidence away, piece by piece, and the picture it made was clear.

He was going to make it quite difficult to keep her feelings properly arranged.

She was still thinking about that when she heard the footstep on the path behind her.