Page 63

I want that smile.

The thought struck him with crushing force. It was not a mild preference or a quiet wish, but a fierce, possessive ache that seized his chest and refused to release him.

I want her to look at me that way. I want her hands to hold something I gave her with that same tenderness. I want her eyes to warm for me, not for his memory.

A sharp, sickening guilt followed immediately. Thomas was dead. Thomas had loved her first, carrying an unfinished letter in his field pack—a proposal he never delivered. And here Julian sat, across a library table from the woman his brother had intended to marry, coveting her affection for himself.

Adelaide looked up from the heather, noting his sudden silence. "Julian? Are you all right? You have gone remarkably still."

He stood up abruptly, his chair scraping loudly against the floorboards. Placing his hands flat on the edge of the table, he gripped the wood until his knuckles turned white.

"I require air," he said, his voice stiff and controlled. "Forgive me. I have a matter to attend to."

"Now?" She straightened in her chair, her smile fading into concern. "We have forty specimens remaining to catalog before⁠—"

"I shall return to them shortly."

Without waiting for her reply, he crossed the library in four quick strides, pulled the double doors open, and stepped into the hallway. The cool air struck his face as he walked purposefully past the gallery, past the covered portraits, and past the closed door of Thomas's bedchamber without looking back.

Pushing through the glass doors at the rear of the hall, he stepped out into the bright afternoon light of the garden.

I am not my brother.

CHAPTER 19

"We really thought we were invincible then, didn't we?"

Julian stood before the ancient oak at the far wall of the Ravensmere garden, his thumb moving slowly over the weathered bark. Afternoon light filtered through the broad leaf canopy in scattered gold, warming the carved letters beneath his fingertips. J and T, cut deep into the trunk decades ago, their edges softened by years of rain and sun.

Beside them was the tiny A that had bound their childhoods together.

His chest ached with remembered warmth. Pressing his palm flat against the trunk, he allowed the past to wash over him.

Thomas had held the silver penknife at an angle, his tongue caught between his teeth in intense concentration. "Hold still. The bark keeps shifting."

"Bark does not shift, Thomas. Your hand shifts."

"My hand remains entirely steady. It is the tree that proves uncooperative."

"The tree is two hundred years old. I believe it has earned the right to be uncooperative."

Thomas blew pale wood shavings from the freshly carved T, holding up the knife with an irrepressible grin. "There. We are immortal now. This oak will carry our names long after we are dust."

"How cheerful an assessment."

"I am a cheerful person." Thomas handed him the knife. "Your turn. And carve the J properly. Last time you attempted woodcarving, the result resembled a fish."

"It was a field sketch of a minnow."

"It was a fish, Julian. Admit the truth."

Julian accepted the penknife and began cutting the J into the bark beside Thomas's T, each stroke careful and deliberate. The silver penknife had been a gift from their father, compact and neat, its blade sharp enough to carve through green wood.

"Thomas, look what I found!"

Adelaide's clear voice had carried across the garden from the direction of the orchard. She appeared around the boundary hedge at a run, her skirts gathered in one fist, and a feathery green frond held aloft in the other like a trophy. At fourteen, she was all long limbs, quick grace, and restless energy, her chestnut hair half unpinned from whatever arrangement she had attempted that morning.

Skidding to a stop beneath the oak, slightly breathless, she thrust the frond toward both of them. "Can either of you identify what this is?"