Page 71 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

She turned away from him, gathering Eleanor from the cradle with hands that did not shake despite everything simmering beneath her composure, and walked out of the room without another word.

Julian did not follow. He stood alone in the nursery and knew exactly what he should have said instead, the words arranging themselves too late with perfect clarity.

I am terrified of losing you, and I do not know how to protect you from Vane without also protecting myself from ever having to find out what that loss would cost me.

He had not said that. He had said something else entirely, something that handed her back every careful word of the arrangement she had proposed months ago, as though nothing had changed between them since, as though their kiss had meant nothing, as though months of dinners and dances and quiet mornings in the stables had taught him nothing at all about the woman he had just wounded, however unintentionally.

I am right to send her away, he told himself, though he felt less confident now than he had a quarter hour ago. Whatever I have just cost us, she will be safer at Henswick House than here.

He stood a long while in the empty nursery, the cradle rocking faintly still from her hurried departure, and found no comfort in being right.

CHAPTER 29

The carriage disappeared down the long drive, gravel crunching beneath its wheels, and Julian stood alone in the entrance hall long after the sound had faded into the ordinary quiet of the afternoon.

The house had never struck him as particularly loud, even in the best of times. Louisa did not fill rooms with noise the way some women did, all chatter and rustling silk. And yet standing here now, in the same hall he had crossed a thousand times before her arrival, Julian found the silence sitting differently against him than it ever had before, heavier somehow and pointed.

He went to his study and closed the door, and did not, for a long while, do anything beyond stand at the window and watch the empty drive.

An hour passed this way, perhaps more. He had lost track of time, his thoughts circling the same sentences over and over, turning them each way in search of some angle that made them sound less damning than they had the moment they’d left his mouth.

“I am only trying to give you the life you asked for. A marriage without burdens you never wanted to carry.”

He poured himself a brandy he did not want, simply for something to do with his hands, and had barely lifted the glass to his lips when a soft knock sounded at the door.

Kit stood in the doorway, his sketchbook tucked beneath one arm as always, his dark eyes moving across the room, the empty chair Louisa usually occupied, before settling on Julian with an expression far too knowing for an eight-year-old.

“Where is Louisa?” he signed.

Julian set the glass down. “She has gone to visit her parents for a few days.”

Kit’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

“I asked her to go.”

The boy went very still, his hands lowering slowly to his sides, and fixed Julian with a long, searching look that made him feel absurdly smaller than a grown duke had any business feeling before an eight-year-old.

“Why?”

Julian could have sworn Kit sighed.

“There is trouble, Kit. A man has said cruel things about our family in print. I feared what he might do next, and I wanted her and Eleanor safely away from whatever comes next.”

“Does she know why she left? Or did you just tell her to go?”

Julian hesitated, the question landing somewhere he had not properly prepared for. “I told her why. I do not think she agreed with my reasons.”

“Then she did not want to go.”

“No,” Julian admitted. “I do not believe she did.”

Kit’s hands lifted again, slower this time, deliberate. “That was wrong.”

Julian felt the words land somewhere beneath his ribs, plain and unadorned like children’s honesty so often managed to be, stripped of all the careful diplomacy an adult might have wrapped around the same accusation.

“I was trying to protect her.” He kept the edge out of his voice.

“You always say that.” Kit’s hands moved faster now, some old frustration finding its way into the signs. “You said it after the man came to the ball and made you angry. You said it when you would not let me ride Rosalind to the far field alone. You say it about everything, and I do not think it means what you think it means.”