“Yesterday,” James continued, turning away from the fire, “I was a marquess with a comfortable estate, a decent income, and no responsibilities that required my attention before noon. Today, I rule over a duchy, have a ward, and am expected to take a wife before society decides I am unfit for any of them.”
“I appreciate that the timing is?—”
“The timing,” James cut in, “is catastrophic.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And if I do not marry?”
Calder looked at his papers. “Then the conversation about the guardianship will continue. And it will grow louder. And eventually… I cannot give you a timeline, but eventually, it will find its way to the courts.” He looked up. “I am sorry, Your Grace. I do not bring this news gladly.”
James looked at him for a long moment.
“You may go, Mr. Calder,” he said.
The solicitor hesitated, then gathered his papers, bowed, and left with quiet discretion.
James stood alone in the study for a few minutes. The clock ticked.
Fitness…
The word sat in his chest like a stone.
He had spent his adult life being many things that society found useful to discuss. Charming. Reckless. Expensive in his habits and careless in his affections and reliably entertaining at other people’s dinner tables.
He had worn most of it lightly because it had cost him very little. A reputation was only a liability if you needed something from the people who held it, and he had been very careful for a very long time not to need anything from anyone.
And now there was a child upstairs who had no one else.
The thought of anyone looking at Violet and seeing a problem to be managed rather than a child to be protected stirred within him a cold anger that had nothing to do with reputation and everything to do with something older and less manageable.
He moved, almost without thinking, toward the door and out into the corridor, which was dark and cool. The house settled around him in its deep nighttime quiet.
He did not know why he was walking. He walked anyway, because the study had become intolerable and the alternative was standing still.
He reached the foot of the stairs without deciding to and looked up. At the top, a strip of light shone beneath the nursery door, faint and warm.
He went up.
The door was ajar. He stopped at the threshold with his hand raised to knock, registered the quiet inside, and lowered it.
He slowly pushed the door open.
The room was dim—the lamp turned low, the fire a gentle glow, the kind of light that existed for warmth rather than purpose. The nurse’s chair sat empty by the door. The room smelled of milk and lavender and something faintly floral that he could not immediately place.
He found the source of it.
Isadora sat in the chair by the window. She had not heard him. She was entirely elsewhere, angled slightly toward the glass, the dark grounds beyond it invisible in the night, her attention focused on the child in her arms.
She was singing. Very quietly, barely above a breath, more melody than lyric, the kind of sound that was less a song than a texture.
Her dark blonde hair had come loose from its arrangement, the way it always did when she stopped paying attention to it, the soft strands brushing against her cheek and throat. She did not seem to notice.
In the firelight, she looked softer, the careful composure she wore in company entirely absent. What remained was simply her without architecture.
She is, James thought, with the involuntary honesty of a man who had caught himself off guard,quite extraordinarily lovely.
He had always thought her lovely in an abstract sense. He had known it in the peripheral, unexamined way one knew things about people seen too often to look at properly.
