He looked at Cori again.
She had turned slightly in her seat and she wasn’t laughing now. She was looking out the long window at the moors beyond the glass. There was something in her face he recognized immediately. She was in the room but she was also, in some private way, elsewhere.
He understood that look very well.
The breakfast moved around him. Glasses were refilled. Hannah, allowed to attend for the meal, was telling Fairleigh something of great importance about Butter the foal. The Duchess of Hythe muttered something to Aunt Harriet that made her sit up very straight. Hythe had somehow produced his gazette, which surprised no one.
James breathed out a breath.
He’d been careful for three weeks. Since that dinner at Linthorpe House. He’d been sensible and responsible and had kept his thoughts where they were supposed to be and had managed, on the whole, rather well.
He thought again about Hannah.
Hannah, who’d passed her Marmalade with the gravity of conferring an honor. Hannah, who’d said she hoped Cori would stay, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to want. Hannah, who’d been sitting on the floor of his corridor with Cori as though there were nowhere else either of them was supposed to be.
He thought about asking Cori to stay. Not a declaration. Just asking her to stay a little longer, to find out if what was growing between them was as real as he suspected. It wasn't much to ask of her. Except that it was, because asking her to stay meant asking her to wait, and waiting on him carried a weight she couldn't fully understand and a truth he had no right to tell her.
James set down his glass.
He pushed back his chair.
He wasn’t certain it was wise, but at that precise moment, he wasn’t certain he cared about being wise.
He moved to the empty seat beside her.
Cori smiled in the general direction of her newly married sister and brother-in-law at the far end of the table. The wedding had been beautiful and Cait was a breathtaking bride. But most importantly, she was a happy bride. The pair was well and truly in love.
She was still smiling when she noticed the moors had gone the color of pewter through the windows. Of course, the sky had been pressing down all morning, threatening to rain, and now it looked as though the weather intended to make good on that threat.
Wedding day rain was considered good luck for the marriage, wasn’t it? She was thinking about that when the seat beside her shifted.
Cori didn’t need to look to know who had taken the seat. She could sense it in every part of her being.
She looked anyway and James Westham nearly took her breath away. He was in his wedding finery, but it wasn't that. It was the way he’d settled into the chair beside her as though he’d decided to be there and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
He’d settled into the chair beside her, close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him, and he was looking at her with his searching grey eyes that were direct and steady.
Her belly flipped.
"Cori.” His voice rumbled over her.
She waited.
He drew a breath.
Then suddenly…
A crash of thunder echoed through the hall.
There’d been no warning, no low rumble in the distance. Just a loud boom that cracked directly overhead, a single enormous sound that compressed the air in the great hall and released it all at once. Every candle flame leaned sideways. Half the room startled. Someone at the far end of the table knocked over a glass.
From a few seats away, Hannah let out a whimper. She’d gone rigid in her chair with her hands pressed flat on the table and her eyes very wide with fright.
James was at Hannah's side before Cori had even realized what had happened. He crouched beside his daughter’s chair and whispered something to her. After a moment, Hannah leaned sideways into his shoulder and closed her eyes.
Cori watched them and her breath caught slightly in her chest and the rest of the hall fell away.
She wasn’t aware of the commotion around her, or the rain beginning against the long windows, or the wedding breakfast carrying on without her. She was aware only of James, still crouched beside Hannah, one hand on her back, his voice too low to carry. And of the question that had not been asked, sitting in the space between them where his chair was now empty.
