Page 64 of Duke of Sapphire

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.” She said it quickly. Then she stopped. “No. Possibly.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “I am quite certain I will be shortly.”

Henry crossed to the desk and sat on the corner of it, which put him near her without looming over her. He was not sure why his position mattered, but it did.

“You will never have to do that alone,” he said.

She looked up at him.

“Whatever he says or wants or demands,” Henry said, “you will not face it without me.”

Charlotte was quiet for a moment. Her eyes were very bright. She was not going to cry—he could see that, the particular quality of the brightness, the slight set of her jaw holding it back—but the brilliance was there.

“Thank you,” she said. “For—stepping in. You held back longer than I expected.”

“You wanted to try.”

“I did.” She let out a breath. “I was not doing very well at it.”

“You were doing better than you think.”

“I was hedging,” she said. “I always hedge with him. He speaks and I find myself becoming smaller. I hate it.” She said it very plainly and without self-pity. Just a fact.

Henry looked at her. “How long has it been like that?”

“Always.” She looked out of the window. “Well. Not always. When I was young—my mother was exceptionally good at doing the opposite. At taking up space. Not loudly. She was never loud. But she knew how to simply be present in a room in a way that mattered.” She paused. “He was different when she was alive. Or perhaps I was too young to see it clearly. She died when I was ten, and after that—” She stopped. “After that, no one ever pushed back.”

Henry was very still.

“Not once,” Charlotte said. “Not a single time, until today.” She looked at him. “No one has ever stood up to him for my sake before. Not since she died.”

He did not have a response for that. Not a quick one, not a tidy one. He looked at her, at the brightness still in her eyes and the steadiness of her chin, and something behind his ribs did something he had not authorized.

“Protecting you,” he said, “is my responsibility.”

Charlotte looked at him for a beat. Then the corner of her mouth moved.

“Your responsibility,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“That is a very—you.” She tilted her head. “That is the most Henry Kingswell thing you could possibly have said.”

“I fail to see what is wrong with it.”

“Nothing is wrong with it. It is simply—” She seemed to be looking for the word. “Possessive. Notably possessive. For a man in a marriage of convenience.”

“I am not being possessive. I am being accurate.”

“Possessiveness and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.” She was watching him with that particular expression, the one that was curious and direct and slightly wicked at the edges. “You were very fierce in there, you know. A lesser man would have been frightened of you.”

“Your father was not frightened of me.”

“My father,” Charlotte said, “is not a lesser man. He is a difficult one.” She stood from the chair, slowly, gathering herself back together by degrees. “I suspect he will come back.”

“Let him,” Henry said.

She looked at him. “You are doing it again.”