Page 34 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Julian did not stop reading immediately, continuing another full minute in the same low, even voice, as though testing the depth of her sleep before he dared trust it. Only once he was satisfied did he let the page fall to his knee, resting his head back against the chair with something that looked like quiet relief.

Louisa did not go in. She stood a moment longer in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of his chest beneath the sleeping child, watching his hand still resting against Eleanor’s small back long after the reading had stopped serving any practical purpose, and felt something in her chest tighten.

Then she withdrew, quietly, before he could notice her there, and made her way back down the corridor toward her rooms. She pressed her hand to her flaming cheek.

He is simply a kind man. A kind man who notices things other people overlook, and who happens to be better with a fretful infant than most gentlemen of his rank would trouble themselves to be. It means nothing beyond that. Nothing at all.

She did not entirely believe it, but she made herself repeat the thought once more regardless, as though repetition alone might make it true.

* * *

“Fingers together. Thumb across the palm. Not—” Julian frowned down at Piers’s hastily sketched diagram, attempted the shape again, and produced something that looked more like a man shooing away a fly than any letter of the alphabet, spoken or signed. “Not that, apparently.”

He glanced toward the study door, confirmed it was closed, and tried again to no audience but the crackling fire and a stack of his brother’s notes covered in small, hurried illustrations, hand shapes rendered from three different angles with Piers’s characteristically unhelpful commentary scrawled beside them.

This one is trickier than it looks. Ask Louisa if you get stuck; she’ll set you right in half the time it took me to learn it from a book.

“I have no intention of asking Louisa,” Julian informed the empty room, flexing his fingers into the shape a third time. “The entire point of this exercise is to manage without her assistance, which I cannot do if I am obliged to ask for her assistance at every turn.”

The shape still felt wrong.

He turned his hand over, studied it from the angle Piers had drawn, and attempted the correction, only to find his wrist bent at an angle that felt neither natural nor, he suspected, remotely legible to anyone actually fluent in the language he was so determinedly failing to learn.

“Kit.” He said it aloud, testing the sound of his own voice forming the boy’s name alongside the sign he’d just attempted, a habit Louisa employed constantly and one he had begun, without quite admitting it to himself, to imitate. He held the shape for a moment, considering it. “That cannot be correct. Piers’s drawing does not agree with what my hand is presently doing.”

He tried once more. Then again. By the fifth attempt, he had progressed from mild irritation to something closer to genuine frustration, an emotion he was not accustomed to feeling over anything in his study, where he generally commanded every problem set before him with reasonable efficiency.

“This is considerably harder than she makes it appear.”

A knock sounded, brisk and familiar, and the door opened before he had properly gathered breath to answer it.

Louisa stepped into the room with a ledger under one arm before she registered the scene in front of her—papers scattered across his desk, his sleeves pushed back, his hand still caught mid-gesture in some shape that plainly matched nothing on the page beside it.

Julian’s hand dropped immediately, and he reached down, with rather more haste than dignity strictly permitted, to gather the papers into some semblance of order.

“Your Grace.” Louisa’s eyes moved past him to Piers’s unmistakable hand scrawled across half a dozen sheets, and whatever composure Julian had hoped to salvage collapsed thoroughly under her steadily dawning understanding. “Are those signs?”

“Correspondence.”

“They are very clearly signs, Your Grace, unless your steward has taken to illustrating his letters with diagrams of the human hand, which I confess would represent a considerable departure from his usual style.” A smile was building at the corners of her mouth. “You are teaching yourself sign language.”

“I am attempting to. With middling success, as you have probably gathered.”

“Why did you not simply ask me?”

Julian set down the papers and found, meeting her eyes, that there was little use in further pretense. “Because I did not wish to rely on you for every word I might one day wish to say to Kit directly. I thought, if I learned enough on my own, I might manage a conversation with my own ward without requiring a translator standing between us.”

The teasing edge softened into something warmer, and she set her ledger down on the corner of his desk and crossed to stand beside him, studying the scattered pages with more serious attention than her earlier amusement had suggested.

As she drew near, the scent of clean linen touched with lavender that always seemed to cling to her tickled his nostrils. It was subtle, scarcely more than a whisper, yet it caught him entirely off guard.

His breath hitched. Before he could stop himself, his eyes drifted shut for the briefest moment as he drew in a quiet breath, committing the scent to memory before sense returned and he opened them again, hoping she had not noticed.

“These drawings are correct,” she said, turning one page toward the light. “Piers has a fair hand for it, actually, better than I’d have credited him. But a drawing can only show you the shape at its finish, Your Grace. It cannot show you how the hand ought to move to arrive there, and that is very often where the whole sign goes wrong.”

“That would explain a great deal.”

“Show me what you were attempting.”