“I was.”
“You do not generally whistle.”
“I do not generally—” James paused. “Have I never whistled?”
“Not to my recollection, Your Grace.” A pause. “Not once.”
James considered this.
“Well,” he said. “There it is then. A man can change.”
He turned back to the mirror and adjusted the cravat himself, which he was perfectly capable of doing and which Reeves usually prevented him from doing because their standards were not the same. This morning, Reeves seemed too unsettled to intervene.
“Never seen a man whistle before, have you?”
“I have seen many men whistle, Your Grace. But not this man,” Reeves muttered under his breath.
James pretended not to hear him.
“Then it’s good for you,” he said pleasantly. “Broadens the experience.”
He took one more look at his reflection in the mirror, decided the coat was exactly right, and moved toward the door with the energy of a man who had somewhere he wanted to be.
He wanted to be at breakfast. More specifically, he wanted to be at breakfast before Isadora came down, so that he would already be there when she arrived. Which would appear entirely unremarkable, when in truth the prospect of watching her come through the breakfast room door this particular morning, on this particular day after a most particular evening, stirred within him a warmth that had absolutely nothing unremarkable about it.
He had kissed his wife.
He had kissed her thoroughly, in the dark, with her hands gripping the front of his coat, and she had kissed him back.
He had spent a considerable part of the night thinking about very little else. He intended to kiss her again at the earliest reasonable opportunity.
He was, by any honest measure, in an excellent mood.
He was halfway down the east corridor, moving at a pace that could generously be described as purposeful, when he heard the carriage.
He stopped.
It was not one of his carriages—he knew the sound of his horses’ hooves on the gravel well enough by now, the particular rhythm of them coming around the drive. This was different. Heavier. Multiple horses, moving with the deliberate pace of a journey recently concluded.
James went to the window at the end of the corridor.
A carriage had drawn up before the front steps. Well-appointed. Three horses, not two.
Two men descended. The first James recognized immediately, and something inside him went very still.
Lord Nathaniel Mortimer.
Sixty-two, silver-haired, the bearing of a man who had been telling himself for thirty years that he belonged in rooms he had not been invited to. He stood on the drive and looked up at the house with an expression James could not fully read from this distance, but which had nothing deferential in it.
The second man was smaller, darker-coated, and wearing a frown. A solicitor.
James watched them for a moment from the window, the good mood of four minutes ago not quite gone but replaced by a clarity that was considerably colder.
He was already moving before Briggs appeared at the bottom of the stairs with the expression of a man delivering news he had not enjoyed receiving.
“Your Grace?—”
“I saw them,” James cut him off. “Where is the Duchess?”
