Page 40 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

This is absurd. You do not need a reason to speak to your own husband.

Except she knew the real reason had nothing to do with thatching. She only wanted to see him. Five more minutes of his low, even voice before the day properly ended, the same wanting that had crept up on her and left an ache in its wake.

I am the one who asked for this.

The thought landed with its familiar sting.

He agreed because I set those terms. I have no right now to stand outside his door at midnight, wanting something I told him I did not want.

Her hand had lifted, hovering some inches from the dark wood.

What if he answers, and I have nothing honest to say that does not unravel everything we have built?

She thought of Catherine and her words that evening.

“You do not have to name whatever this is today.”

She had not expected it to press quite so hard, standing there with her hand raised and her heart hammering as though she stood at some genuine edge rather than a corridor in her own home.

It is not fair to him to arrive at his door and ask him to account for feelings he never agreed to entertain.

She drew her hand back and made herself turn away.

She walked back to her room, her candle throwing unsteady shadows, and did not look back, though some small treacherous part of her strained to hear whether the door behind her opened.

It did not.

She reached her chamber and stood for a moment with her back against the closed door, her heart still beating too fast for a woman who had done nothing more than walk down a corridor and think better of a foolish impulse.

“It is better this way,” she said aloud, climbing into her cold bed.

I asked for a practical marriage. I have no right to want more than what I asked for.

She lay awake a long while after that, and did not manage, for the whole of that sleepless night, to talk herself fully out of wishing she had knocked regardless.

* * *

“My father used to say horses know when you’re sad before you do.”

Louisa slowed down at the stable door, watching Kit’s hands move in quick, easy bursts as he perched on his overturned bucket, Rosalind’s nose lowered toward him.

“He would take me out at dawn, before anyone else woke. He said the world looked different before everyone else woke up.”

Kit’s expression, as he signed, held none of its usual guardedness, none of the careful wariness he still wore for most of the household, even now, weeks into their lessons. As she watched him from the doorway, he looked almost peaceful, his hands moving through the signs with an ease and fluency that had crept up on her gradually enough that she had nearly stopped marking each new milestone as remarkable.

“Good morning.”

Louisa turned to find Julian beside her, his coat still damp from an early ride, and pressed a finger to her lips before nodding toward the boy.

“He is telling not Rosalind about his father,” she said quietly. “Sharing memories. Happy ones, from the sound of them, before everything changed.”

His eyebrows flew up. “Why now, do you suppose?”

“Because he finally feels safe enough to remember them without the memories undoing him.” Louisa watched Kit’s hands continue their quiet conversation, something warm settling in her chest at the sight of it. “Grief does that sometimes. It locks the good memories away alongside the bad, because a child cannot always tell the difference between remembering someone and losing them all over again. He has only just begun to trust that remembering his father does not have to mean reliving the worst of it.”

They stood there a moment longer, watching Kit, and Louisa found herself faintly aware of how close Julian stood beside her, close enough that she could smell the morning air and horse and leather clinging to his coat from his ride.

Kit’s hands stilled. He glanced toward the doorway, and his eyes found Julian’s. After a moment’s consideration, his hands lifted again, slower this time, deliberate.