The front door closed behind him. The afternoon sun hit his face. He stood on the steps and breathed the warm London air.
The pamphlets would stop. Miss Stapleton would be provided for amply. Lady Stapleton would disappear.
He had won. The threat was neutralized, the enemy contained, the problem solved with the surgical efficiency he brought to every challenge he deemed worthy of his attention. He should have felt satisfaction. A month ago, he would have. A month ago, he would have climbed into his carriage, poured himself a drink, and moved on to the next problem without a backward glance.
And in four days, he would marry Lady Lily, and that fact sat in his chest with a weight that had nothing to do with strategy andeverything to do with the woman herself. Her green eyes. Her sharp tongue. The way she had looked at him across the study when he announced his intention to marry her, searching his face for something he had been too afraid to show her.
He wanted to marry her. The admission surfaced unbidden, and he did not push it down. He wanted to marry her, and the wanting terrified him, because wanting things had never ended well for Hugo Beaumont. Wanting his mother to stay alive. Wanting his father to look at him without disappointment. Wanting his brother to be kind. Every want had been a door opened onto loss, and he had learned, long ago, to stop opening doors.
And yet.
He straightened his coat and walked toward the waiting carriage, and the weight of the folded paper in his pocket felt like nothing at all compared to the weight of the words he still could not bring himself to say.
CHAPTER 27
“Auntie Lily, Jane spit on me.” Oliver stood in the entrance hall of Heatherwell House with a damp patch on his shoulder and the indignant expression of a boy who considered himself far too old to be subjected to infant bodily functions.
“She is a baby, Oliver. Spitting is how she communicates.”
“She communicates very rudely.”
Lily crouched and brushed the damp spot with her handkerchief. “I’m afraid that is all that babies can do.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Oliver grinned, the affront already forgotten. He grabbed Lily’s hand and pulled her toward the drawing room. “Come see what Leo built. He made a tower out of spoons, and it is going to fall.”
The drawing room was warm, sunlit, and smelled of beeswax and the sweetness of small children. Leo sat on a rug surrounded by a precarious structure of silver spoons balanced in a pyramid that defied both gravity and common sense. He looked up at Lily with enormous dark eyes and pointed.
“Tower,” he announced.
“It is magnificent, Leo.”
“It will fall in a bit.”
“Then we had better admire it while we can.”
Sophia appeared from the corridor with Jane on her hip, and a muslin cloth draped over her shoulder that bore the evidence of the spitting Oliver had reported. She kissed Lily’s cheek and held her at arm’s length, scanning her face with the quick, thorough assessment of an older sister who could identify a crisis at forty paces.
“You look tired,” Sophia said.
“I am fine.”
“You look tired and you saidfine, which means you are not fine.”
“Sophia.”
“Lily.”
They held each other’s gaze. Leo’s spoon tower collapsed with a spectacular clatter. Oliver cheered. Jane startled awake and cried. Sophia bounced the baby against her shoulder and did not break eye contact.
“I need to speak with Edward,” Lily said. “Alone, if I may.”
Sophia’s brow creased. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine. I promise. I simply need his perspective on something.”
Sophia studied her for a moment longer. Whatever she found in Lily’s expression must have satisfied her, because she nodded and gestured toward the corridor.
“He is in his study.”
