Lucien’s eyebrows lifted. He said nothing further on the subject, which from Lucien constituted high praise.
“A week, then,” he said. “We’ll have you wed by Thursday next.”
“A week is enough time to manage the settlements properly.”
“Good.”
Dominic exhaled slowly.
No glove had been thrown. No seconds would be named. Whatever the morning had cost him in blood at the corner of his mouth, it was a price he’d have paid three times over rather than stand across a field from Lucien at dawn.
It was the creak on the staircase outside the study that broke what was left of the quiet.
Annabelle’s head turned first. Through the open door, on the landing above the hall, a small shape had gone still against the banister rails the moment the floorboard gave him away.
James peered down through the gap in the spindles.
“James.” Annabelle’s voice gentled at once. “Come down. It’s only us.”
He came down one stair at a time, his eyes moving across the room and cataloging each person in it before he reached the bottom. He stopped a few feet from Annabelle.
“Annabelle,” he said to her, as though he were just meeting her for the first time.
“James.” She replied with a smile.
He turned his head and considered the rest of the room with the same care. “Uncle Dominic.” A pause while his gaze caught on the cut at Dominic’s mouth, but he didn’t ask about it; moving on as though. “Your Graces.”
“James,” Elinor said, and crouched a little to bring herself nearer his height. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Newton is a very nice cat,” James told her. “He sleeps on my chair when I practice, and he doesn’t mind the wrong notes.”
Her mouth curved, and the corners of her eyes creased. “I’m glad to hear it. He used to be choosy about whose lap he’d allow.”
“He allows mine.” James said this as an established fact requiring no further defense, and turned back to Annabelle.
He studied her, his head tilted at the angle he used whenever he was working toward a question and meant to reach it in his own time.
“Are you really going to marry my uncle?”
Dominic stilled.
“Yes… I am,” Annabelle said slowly.
James considered this with the same gravity he gave a difficult passage of music, then nodded once, as if a sum had come out correctly. “That’s good news. You’re very nice.” A shorter pause. “Will you still teach me the piano?”
“Of course I will, darling. We’ll find a way,” Annabelle said, glancing at him once, brief and unreadable, before James spoke again.
“You could teach me here,” James said. “Now that Annabelle is going to live here too.” He looked at Dominic directly, the way he rarely managed to look at anyone for more than a second or two. “Will you unlock the music room? Since Annabelle is going to be your wife.”
The room went very quiet.
Dominic felt the old door in his mind the way he always did when someone said the words aloud.
Not this. Not now.
Right then, Dominic realized that Lucien was watching him now with an entirely different attention than he’d brought through the door an hour ago. Annabelle’s eyes were on him too, careful, waiting.
“That isn’t a conversation for now, James.”
