Page 11 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“I did not spoil him. I merely failed to discourage him sufficiently.”

“A distinction without a difference, in my experience.” Dominic set his glass down, stretching his legs toward the fire. “Now, you have that look about you, Julian, the one you get when something has actually happened rather than merely occurred to you. Out with it. What sort of afternoon warrants that face?”

“I received a young woman this afternoon. Lady Louisa Everly. Fluent in sign language, apparently, and rather more direct than most women of my acquaintance.” Julian rubbed a hand across his jaw, aware, even as he said it, how strange the next part would sound to the one man alive who might actually believe him. “She proposed marriage to me.”

Dominic’s glass paused halfway to his mouth. “She what?”

“You heard me correctly.”

“I did, and I find I would still like you to repeat it, because it improves considerably with a second telling.” Dominic set his glass down, grinning now, thoroughly delighted. “A woman walked into your study and proposed marriage to the coldest duke in London after just meeting him. Julian, tell me everything and leave nothing out, I beg you.”

“There is less to tell than you imagine. She has taken in a child—her maid’s orphaned daughter—and requires a husband to give the girl a name. I require someone Kit will trust. She pointed out, not without some justice, that marriage would solve both problems more thoroughly than simple employment.”

“Was she very plain and very desperate? I confess I had not thought your reputation had sunk quite so low as to attract proposals from strangers.”

“She was neither plain nor, as far as I could determine, desperate.”

“Good God.” Dominic sat back, genuinely startled now, the teasing edge falling away for a moment. “And what manner of woman proposes such a thing with a straight face?”

“The sort who has already refused four proposals, I gathered, and did not seem to think this one required any greater sentiment than the ones she’d turned down.”

“I like her already sight unseen.” Dominic’s grin returned, sharper now. “And what did you tell her?”

“That I needed time to consider it.”

Dominic’s grin widened, and then, slowly, it faded into something else, something more careful. He set his glass down entirely and studied Julian with the particular attention he reserved for the handful of moments each year when he judged their friendship worth more than his amusement, the look that had, over two decades, come to mean he intended to say something Julian would not enjoy hearing.

“Julian.” His voice had dropped. “May I ask you something, and would you actually answer it, rather than retreating behind that very useful silence of yours?”

“Go on.”

“If Kit were your own son—not your ward, not Daniel’s boy inherited out of duty and grief, but your own blood, your own child—sitting silent in that stable every day for three years while every tutor and physician in London failed him, would you still refuse a solution because it arrived in an unconventional shape?”

Julian did not answer. He felt the question settle into him somewhere he would rather it hadn’t, and found he had no ready argument to push it back out.

“You have tried everything else,” Dominic continued. “Governesses. Physicians. That specialist Piers dragged down from Edinburgh who charged you a small fortune to sit in a room with the boy and accomplish precisely nothing. Three years, Julian. Three years of patience, money, and every method available to a man of your resources, and Kit is exactly where he was the day his father died, except older, and further away, and considerably better at hiding whatever he draws in that sketchbook of his.”

“I am aware of the timeline, Dominic. I do not require you to recite it to me.”

“I recite it because I do not think you have looked at it plainly.” Dominic held his gaze a moment longer, then softened, some of the old warmth returning to his face. “I do not say this to wound you. You have given that boy everything money and title could purchase. I only wonder whether what he needs was never for sale.”

Julian said nothing, and Dominic, reading the silence correctly, did not press further. He finished his brandy, set his glass down with a small, decisive clink, and rose, checking his pocket watch with a faint grimace.

“I ought to go. I promised my aunt I would call before ten, and if I arrive later than that, she will assume I have died in a ditch and send the entire household out with lanterns, which would be considerably more embarrassing than simply being punctual.”

He retrieved his hat from the chair beside him and paused at the door, his usual lightness entirely gone now. “You have been searching for a teacher, Julian. Someone skilled enough, patient enough, clever enough to reach a boy who has decided the world is not safe enough to speak into. But Kit does not need another teacher. He has had six of them, and every one of them has failed for the same reason. He needs someone who will not leave. He needs a family, not another employee who arrives each morning and departs each evening back to a life that has nothing to do with him. This woman offered you one in a single afternoon, Julian. I would think carefully before deciding that was too strange a shape for the solution to take.”

“Go and see your aunt, Dominic, before she sends out a search party.”

“I am going.” He grinned once more, some of the gravity lifting off him as easily as it had settled. “Send word when you’ve decided. I find I am unreasonably invested in the outcome, and I intend to say a great many insufferable things at your wedding if it comes to that.”

“There will be no wedding to speak insufferable things at.”

“We shall see.” Dominic tipped his hat and was gone, his footsteps receding down the corridor, and the study fell quiet behind him.

Julian remained at his desk a long while after Dominic’s departure, the crumpled sketch still folded in his coat pocket where his fingers found it twice without quite meaning to. His mind returned, against his will, to the study that afternoon, to Louisa Everly sitting across from him with her chin lifted and her terms laid out as plainly as a solicitor’s brief.

A practical arrangement, built on mutual respect. She had not once dressed the proposal up as anything nobler than what it was, had not feigned affection she did not feel, had simply looked at the shape of his problem and the shape of her own and pointed out, with a directness he had not encountered in a decade of London drawing rooms, that the two fit together.