Page 10 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Nothing. The currycomb moved on, steady, unhurried.

Kit’s dark hair had fallen over his eyes, and he did not push it back, did not glance toward the doorway, gave no sign that he had registered another person entering the stall.

“I understand you’ve been down here most of the afternoon.”

Silence.

Julian had grown, against his own wishes, almost accustomed to it, to the quality of it—thick and deliberate, nothing like the ordinary quiet of a shy child. It was a wall built brick by careful brick, and Julian had spent three years failing to find a single gap in it.

He felt, standing there, the same low familiar ache he always felt in this stable, the sense of reaching toward something just out of his hand’s span, again and again, until his arm had grown tired of the reaching.

“Rosalind’s fortunate,” he tried again, leaning against the stall door, keeping his voice even, the way Piers had once told him worked better than urgency ever did. “Not every horse gets brushed twice in one day.”

Kit’s hand paused briefly over the mare’s shoulder.

For one instant, Julian’s chest tightened with something close to hope, foolish and immediate, that he might have found some thread worth pulling. Then the boy’s hand resumed its motion, and whatever had flickered there closed over again, smooth as water settling, and Julian’s hope closed over with it.

His eyes fell to the sketchbook tucked beneath Kit’s arm, the corner of a page visible, some study of the stable rafters or the mare’s head, rendered with a careful, patient hand that he had only ever glimpsed in fragments, since Kit guarded the sketchbook more fiercely than he guarded anything else in his small, silent world.

“May I see?” Julian reached for it slowly, the way one reached for anything wary and easily startled.

Kit moved before Julian’s fingers had properly closed on the cover. He wrenched the sketchbook away, clutched it to his chest, and for one raw, unguarded moment, his eyes came up and met Julian’s, furious, wounded, entirely unwilling to be looked at.

Julian went still, the way he’d learned to go still around him, as though stillness alone might undo whatever damage his reaching hand had just caused.

The boy tore the page free in one sharp motion, crumpled it, and dropped it in the straw at Julian’s feet. Then he turned and walked out of the stable, shoulders set with a rigidity that belonged on a man three times his age, and did not once look back.

Julian stood alone with the mare, the curry comb abandoned on the straw, and bent slowly to retrieve the crumpled page. He smoothed it against his knee. It was a sketch of a horse, rendered in quick, sure lines, more skill in it than most drawing masters managed by twenty. Beneath it, half-erased, was the ghost of a word Kit had begun and then scrubbed away before anyone could see it.

He could not make out what the word had been. He suspected that had been the point.

Julian folded the page carefully into his coat and left the stable with the hollow feeling that always followed these attempts, the sense of having reached toward something only to watch it recede a fraction further out of reach, and no clearer idea now than he’d had three years ago of how to close the distance.

Dominic Carter, the Viscount Carwell, arrived a little after nine, let himself into the study with the ease of a man who had been doing so since the two of them were boys at Eton together, and dropped into the chair opposite Julian’s desk without waiting to be invited.

He had a way of entering a room as though he owned a share of it, unhurried, faintly amused, the sort of man whose steady company Julian had relied on through his father’s funeral, his inheritance of the title, and the long, grim year after Daniel’s accident when Dominic had simply appeared at Ashvale House most evenings and said very little, which at the time had been exactly the right amount.

“You look like a man who has lost an argument.”

“I have not lost anything. I have merely had an unusual afternoon.”

“Unusual is not a word I associate with you.” Dominic reached for the brandy Julian kept for exactly these visits, poured himself a measure without asking, and settled back. “Before you tell me whatever it is, I want it noted that I have had a thoroughly tedious week and require some entertainment as compensation. My aunt has decided I ought to marry before the year is out, and has taken to seating me beside a fresh candidate at every dinner she hosts. Last week, it was a Miss Pratt, who spoke for forty minutes about her spaniel’s digestion.”

“You have my sympathy.”

“You have never once offered me sympathy in your life. Do not begin now; it does not suit you.” Dominic swirled his brandy, eyeing Julian over the rim of his glass. “How is Kit?”

Julian’s jaw tightened, and some of the evening’s earlier hollowness crept back into his chest. “The same. Perhaps worse. He tore a page from his sketchbook this afternoon and left it in the straw rather than let me see it.”

“He lets no one see his sketchbook. You know this.”

“I know it. It does not make his refusal easier, though.”

“No,” Dominic said, quieter. “I imagine it does not.” He let the silence sit for a moment, the comfortable kind that only came from years of friendship, before his mouth curved again, some of the lightness returning. “And how is your brother? Still saving London one patient at a time and insufferably pleased about it?”

“Piers is well. He called last week to tell me, at considerable length, that a man he treated for a fever in Spitalfields has recovered fully, as though I had personally doubted his competence.”

“He has always required an audience for his triumphs. I blame you for spoiling him as a boy.”