Frederick’s voice cut back in. “There. That face. You are thinking of her now.”
Rowan kept his gaze ahead. “Mind your own affairs.”
“Gladly,” Frederick said. “Mine are generally more entertaining.”
“Lady Emmeline.”
Rowan stepped forward the moment she entered Ironford House with her father, and bowed with all the formality the occasion required.
“Your Grace,” she replied, curtsying properly, though there was the faintest edge in her voice.
The instant his eyes landed on her, he felt that same unwelcome awareness move through him again. She was wearing a pale blue gown that only intensified the effect she had on him, her honey-brown eyes meeting his with perfect composure even as tension moved between them at once.
“Lord Weston,” Rowan said, turning to greet the older man with the same measured courtesy, though even as he did, his attention kept dragging back toward Emmeline.
“Your Grace,” Lord Weston replied.
“This way.”
As they moved deeper into the house, Rowan’s world narrowed to the woman at his side. He felt the phantom vibration of her skirts against the air, the steady, rhythmic click of her heels, andthe scent of roses that drifted from her skin—a soft, hypnotic intrusion into his sterile hallways.
“Your home is very fine,” Lord Weston offered after a moment, as though the quiet had grown too heavy to leave untouched.
“It serves its purpose,” Rowan said, and heard, rather than saw, the faint shift of Emmeline beside him, as if she had almost reacted to that.
Rowan saw Emmeline’s gaze lower briefly, and he had the distinct impression thatpurposehad not been the word she would have chosen for a London house large enough to make Weston Hall look intimate.
The door opened again before the silence could deepen.
Aaron stood there beside Miss Harrow, his governess, a wooden horse clutched in one hand. He had been prepared for the occasion with care, his dark hair brushed neatly, though none of that altered the uncertainty in his face as he looked into the room and found strangers in it.
Rowan straightened instinctively.
“Aaron,” he said. “Come here.”
The boy hesitated, his eyes moving first to Rowan, then to Emmeline, then to Lord Weston, then back again. Rowan felt,with familiar frustration, that small pinch in his chest that always came when the child looked almost scared.
“It is all right,” he said, more evenly. “This is Lady Emmeline Greene and Lord Weston.”
Aaron stepped forward at last, slowly, his small fingers tightening around the wooden horse. He stopped a little closer to Emmeline than to Rowan, which Rowan noticed and resented for reasons he refused to examine.
Emmeline sank into a graceful crouch, shedding her composure to meet the boy eye-to-eye. It was a movement so fluid and unforced that it made Rowan’s breath catch.
“That is a very fine horse,” she said. “Does he have a name?”
Aaron’s lips parted. “H-he… h-he is called C-Comet.”
She listened patiently. Rowan noticed that at once. She simply waited, looking at the toy with gentle interest rather than strained encouragement.
“Comet,” she repeated. “Then he must be very fast.”
A small change came over the boy’s face, not quite a smile yet, but something near it. “He is.”
“And does he behave?”
Aaron considered this very seriously. “N-not always.”
That won a warm smile from her then, and something low and immediate moved in Rowan’s body at the sight of it. The room seemed altered by it. A woman who could bring that kind of gentleness into a space without effort would draw everything toward her eventually.
