The admission hung between them.
He looked at her then—really looked—and something in his gaze held her in place. The silence stretched, taut and fragile.
“I wish you goodnight,” he said quietly.
“And you, Your Grace.”
He turned and walked away.
Charlotte stood where she was for several heartbeats after, aware only of the unfamiliar quickness of her pulse.
She pressed a hand lightly to her chest, frowning.
It made no sense at all.
And that, more than anything, unsettled her.
***
The morning was cold but bright, the kind of winter day that made the world feel newly scrubbed rather than buried. Frost clung to the edges of the garden paths, and the trees beyond stood bare and black against a pale sky.
Charlotte led Julian toward the edge of the grounds with a basket under her arm and a book tucked loosely against her side. He skipped ahead of her, boots crunching through frozen leaves, stopping every few paces to peer at something only he seemed to notice.
“What’s that one called?” he asked, pointing to a low plant dusted with frost.
Charlotte crouched beside him. “That,” she said, “is wintergreen. It keeps its leaves even when the cold comes.”
Julian wrinkled his nose. “That seems unfair.”
She smiled. “Then perhaps it has learned how to be stubborn.”
He brightened at once. “Like you.”
She laughed, surprised by the ease of it. “Or like you.”
They moved on slowly, Charlotte turning names into little rhymes without thinking—oak and yoke, pine and time—until Julian was chanting them back to her, breath puffing white in the air as he ran ahead and doubled back again. He made up his own songs, nonsense verses that sent them both into helpless laughter.
Charlotte told herself to focus. This was work. This was why she had come.
And yet, last night lingered.
The duke’s voice—quiet, unguarded, thanking her in a way that had felt almost private. The look in his eyes when Julian spoke of his mother, as though the thought alone had struck something tender and evocative.
She knew that look.
It was the look of a wound that never quite closed.
The thought stirred something inside her she did not welcome—a pull toward understanding him, toward easing a grief she recognized all too well. She tamped it down at once.
That way lay trouble.
She thought instead of Lady Amelia—elegant, composed, entirely at home in the world of titles and expectations. A woman who would know how to stand beside a duke without flinching. A woman like Charlotte had once imagined herself becoming.
A woman she could no longer be.
The distance between that life and this one felt immeasurable. She used it as a shield.
Julian slowed beside her, sudden seriousness dimming his earlier excitement. “Miss Fenton?”
