Page 31 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“I discovered all this during our lesson yesterday. I merely mentioned that Rosalind seemed a fine name for a fine horse, the way I always do, and he grew quite insistent that I understood the matter properly.”

“You gathered all of that from him. Through signs.”

“And gestures and expressions, Your Grace. He says a great deal more with his face than most people give him credit for, if one only bothers to actually look rather than simply waiting for him to speak aloud. The tilt of his head when he disagrees with something. The way his mouth thins when he is holding back an objection he has decided not to voice after all. I have learned to read a great deal of him, simply by paying the sort of attention no one else seemed to think worth the effort.”

Julian sat with that for a moment, turning it over slowly, the way he turned over any fact that unsettled some previously comfortable arrangement of his thinking.

“I have lived with the boy for years,” he said finally, quieter now. “And you have gathered in a fortnight that my ward has been silently correcting my mistaken belief about his mare’s name the entire time, and I never once noticed.”

“You were not looking for it the way it needed to be looked for, Your Grace. That is not a failing so much as an accident of circumstance. Grief teaches people to protect themselves in the ways they know how, and yours has simply never required you to read a room the way mine has required of me my whole life, growing up beside a grandmother the rest of the world dismissed as having nothing worth listening to.”

She said it plainly, without unkindness, before reaching for another piece of bread as though the observation cost her nothing at all.

Julian found himself watching her hands again, the unhurried way she executed the smallest gestures, entirely at ease in her own skin in a manner he had rarely encountered in anyone of his acquaintance.

She is remarkable. Not merely clever, though she is certainly that. She sees people the way most men study a ledger, missing nothing, holding every figure in her memory until it balances properly, and she has done in a fortnight what I could not manage in years. Not through any greater skill with signs than the tutors, governesses, physicians I hired, but through the simple patient act of actually looking at him.

The observation arrived with an ease that startled him more than the thought itself.

He caught himself watching the candlelight catch the auburn in her hair as she laughed again at some other detail of Kit’s opinions on his own mare’s dignity, caught himself cataloging the curve of her smile when it was entirely unguarded, honest amusement rather than the careful composure she wore in company.

Stop that. He reached for his wine. This is a practical marriage. I promised her respect, protection, and my name for Eleanor’s sake, and I promised myself, long before I ever met her, that I would never again risk what loving someone deeply enough to lose them costs a man. Admiration is not the same thing as danger. I am permitted to admire her cleverness without doing anything further.

“What was the mare’s name, then?” he asked, steering the conversation back to safer ground. “Her actual name, if not Rosalind.”

“He would not tell me. It seems that it would be between himself and the horse when he finally decides on one, and that you had gone three years without asking properly, so you could wait a little longer to learn it.” Louisa’s eyes danced with open delight. “I find I rather admire him for his discipline. Not many people hold their ground so firmly against a duke.”

“No,” Julian agreed, and found, despite the small private battle he had just fought and only partially won against his own wandering thoughts, that he was smiling regardless. “I do not suppose they do.”

CHAPTER 15

“Good God, is that the famous duchess who proposed marriage within a quarter hour of meeting my brother? I confess I expected someone considerably more terrifying.”

Several weeks had passed, and the nursery no longer looked quite so unfamiliar beneath her hands. Kit's lessons had become a part of the daily routine, and she was beginning to recognize which corridors led where without having to think about it.

Louisa turned away from the nursery window to see a young man striding into the room without so much as a knock, dark-haired and green-eyed in a way that made his relation to Julian unmistakable at a glance, though everything about his bearing, the easy grin, the coat slightly rumpled from travel, suggested a man who had never once in his life practiced the stillness his older brother wore like armor.

“You must be Dr. Cavendish.”

“Piers, please, unless you intend to stand on ceremony with me, in which case I shall be forced to stand on it right back, and neither of us will enjoy that half so much as simply being informal from the start.” He crossed the room and peered into the cradle where Eleanor lay, wide awake and studying the ceiling with the solemn focus of infants. “And who is this small person glaring at the plasterwork as though it has personally offended her?”

“Eleanor.”

“Eleanor.” Piers leaned over the cradle and made faces so thoroughly ridiculous that Louisa found herself biting back a laugh despite her surprise at his appearance.

Eleanor’s solemn study of the ceiling slowly gave way to a delighted attention on the stranger looming above her, and within a minute, she had produced a gurgling coo of pure approval that Louisa had rarely heard her offer to anyone outside the staff.

“There.” Piers straightened, entirely pleased with himself. “I have always had a talent with infants. It is widely considered my finest quality, ahead of my medical training, which I find rather insulting given the years I spent acquiring the latter.”

“You have known her all of ninety seconds.”

“Ninety seconds is ample time to establish oneself as a person of quality, provided one commits fully to the enterprise.” He turned his attention to Louisa properly now, studying her with frankness, though rendered considerably warmer and less guarded. “You do not look terrifying at all, incidentally. I feel rather cheated. Julian wrote to me describing a woman who proposed marriage to him within the hour of their meeting, and I confess I built up an image of someone rather more fearsome in my head.”

“I am fearsome when the occasion calls for it, Dr. Cavendish. I have simply not yet found the occasion, in your case.”

“Piers, please, I insisted on that already.” He grinned, delighted rather than chastened. “And I shall take that as a warning rather than a comfort, since I gather my brother has learned the same lesson rather thoroughly these past weeks.”

“Your brother has survived the acquaintance well enough so far.”