Page 20 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

This is a contract, he reminded himself, the thought arriving fast and hard, cutting through whatever had briefly clouded his mind during the vows. Mutual respect, nothing more. I will not begin this marriage by promising in front of witnesses something I have no intention of offering in private.

He lifted her hand instead, the one now wearing his ring, and pressed his mouth briefly to her knuckles, formal, correct, the sort of gesture a man might offer any lady of his acquaintance. Then he stepped back before the moment could ask anything further of either of them.

Something flickered across Louisa’s face, there and gone too quickly for the congregation to have caught it, though Julian did. It was not hurt, not really. It was something closer to recalibration.

“Your Grace,” she murmured, for his ears only, “you needn’t have looked quite so alarmed at the prospect. I was hardly going to insist.”

“I was not alarmed.”

“You very much were. I felt your hand go rigid the moment the vicar said the word.”

“I merely thought,” Julian said, keeping his voice as even as hers, “that we had agreed in writing on the nature of this arrangement, and I did not wish to begin our marriage by contradicting the terms in front of your entire family.”

“How very thorough of you.” A dry note entered her voice, though whether it disguised amusement or something less comfortable, Julian could not immediately determine. “I’m beginning to think you incapable of taking a single step without first consulting the document.”

“It has served us well thus far.

“So it has.”

She said nothing further on the matter, straightened her veil with a brisk, unbothered motion, and turned to face the church before he could examine her expression for whatever else it might have held.

The church erupted into the low murmur of a congregation released from ceremony, and Julian turned with his new wife on his arm to face the small crowd of well-wishers, distantly aware of Piers grinning like a fool three rows back and his wife’s friend pressing a handkerchief to her eyes with theatrical enthusiasm.

But Louisa did not go to her mother first, nor to her father, nor to her friend, who was already advancing with clear intent to embrace her. Instead, she went to Kit.

She knelt before him, right in the middle of the aisle, heedless of her ivory skirts. Julian watched her do it with a small jolt of surprise.

Kit lifted a folded piece of paper toward her, torn from his sketchbook, the corner still slightly crumpled from where he must have carried it in his coat pocket throughout the ceremony, and stretched it towards her.

Louisa took it and unfolded it slowly. Julian, standing close enough to see, found himself looking at it too. It was a drawing, careful and precise for a child of eight, rendered in charcoal, of a woman, a boy, and something small cradled in the woman’s arms that could only be Eleanor. All three were standing together beneath what looked like the outline of Ashvale House.

“Kit.” Louisa’s voice had gone soft, unguarded in a way Julian had not heard before. “This is beautiful.”

Kit did not answer, of course. His eyes, fixed on her face, said everything his voice could not. When Louisa reached out and gently touched his shoulder, he did not pull away, did not flinch or retreat the way he retreated from every hand that reached for him.

“Thank you,” she said, and folded the drawing carefully, tucking it against her heart as though it were the finest gift she had received that day, which Julian suspected it was.

Then her friend approached and pulled her into an embrace that nearly upended them both, and Lady Henswick burst into tears against her husband’s shoulder, and the church filled with the ordinary noise of a wedding concluding, congratulations and laughter and the vicar attempting and failing to usher everyone toward the door.

Julian watched it all from a small distance: Eleanor now settled into Louisa’s arms, handed off from the nursemaid who had minded her throughout the ceremony, and Kit standing close beside them, his hand finding a fold of Louisa’s skirt and holding on.

The three of them together, framed in the church’s afternoon light, looked like a family.

The thought should have reassured him. After all, it was the entire point of the arrangement—a household reconstructed around Kit and Eleanor, a stable permanent home for a boy who had known too little of either.

He should have felt satisfied, watching it take shape so naturally, so soon. Instead, something in his chest went tight and unsettled, watching his new wife laugh at something a lady next to her said, watching Kit’s hand stay curled in her skirts as though he had no intention of letting go, watching Eleanor’s small fist close around a strand of her hair with the same fierce trust.

I promised her a marriage of convenience. Mutual respect, and nothing more. I did not account for how difficult it would be to keep a proper distance from a woman who builds a family out of thin air within the space of a single afternoon simply by kneeling down and meaning every word she says.

Since Daniel’s death, he had built his whole life on the careful conviction that loving deeply only invited the kind of grief he had watched consume Daniel’s wife, Elizabeth, till she died. He had entered this marriage certain that conviction would hold, that an arrangement built on paper and practicality could not possibly ask more of him than he was prepared to give.

Watching Louisa at the end of the aisle with his ward’s hand in her skirts and her ward in her arms, Julian found himself, for the first time since he had signed his name on that document, uncertain whether he would manage to keep his distance from his wife and whether it would prove nearly as simple as declining a kiss at the altar.

CHAPTER 10

“You have read that same letter three times now, Your Grace, and each time your expression suggests it has grown no more agreeable with repetition.”

“It is a matter concerning the eastern tenant farms. Nothing of consequence to you.”