Page 50 of Lord Hartwell’s Refuge

Athena tilted her head and looked past the bacon at her. Hmm.

Tamsin held it closer to the dog’s snout. “Well, you may have it anyway, with my thanks. I will feel far less alone with you by my side, Athena.”

The large dog took the bacon delicately, snapping it in her mouth once Tamsin’s hand was clear. The behavior was remarkable. Tamsin had brothers who snatched and ate bacon faster than Athena had—and as for the rare times she got between Charles and chocolate cake…

The thought made her chuckle, and she settled back into her chair to finish her breakfast. She had a long day ahead if she wished to show her new husband she could be a proper baroness.

Dinsdale held up the dark blue coat, then the black, weighing some private thoughts of his own before offering the blue. “This one, my lord, I think. Given the occasion.”

“The occasion being, dinner in my own home?” Roman said, but turned without further argument and slipped the coat on with his valet’s assistance.

“The occasion being your lady’s first proper dinner as mistress of the house.” Dinsdale spoke as always: without inflection, requiring no response. He’d been with Roman six years and had long since stopped expecting reprimands for sharing his opinions, which perhaps was why he never withheld them. “Mrs. Briers tells me the new baroness asked this afternoon what your favorite pudding was. My lady wished to be certain it was on the table tonight.”

“Did she.” Roman held still while his valet settled the coat over his shoulders, and found he was absurdly pleased; that Tamsin had thought to ask, had wanted to get some small thing right for him specifically, rather than simply managing dinner the way she’d have managed any dinner in any house.

He had not stopped thinking of her all day. Not in any manner that interfered with his correspondence—he had answered Sir George’s letter on the corporation’s funding scheme with his usual clarity, had reviewed Lyness’s figures for the northern tenancies without error—but in the spaces between tasks, when his mind was permitted to wander, it wandered reliably to the same place: to the previous evening.

Their wedding night.

Roman had been careful. He had been, he believed, as careful as a man could be with a woman who’d had no mother these fifteen years to prepare her, and a stepmother whose notion of preparation had apparently amounted to very little.

He had gone slowly. He had watched her face more than perhaps was usual, watched for any sign she was frightened, or in pain, or simply enduring him rather than wanting him. He believed—that is, he was fairly certain—that what he’d found in her gaze was something akin to trust.

But belief was not certainty, and Roman did not care for uncertainty in this matter.

How did one really know without asking directly? Speaking of such delicate matters was not precisely something anyone had prepared him for at any point in his life.

“You’re expected at the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall Thursday next,” Dinsdale said, adjusting the line of the coat at his master’s shoulders with the small, proprietary tug he always gave it. “A card came by hand this evening. I set it on your desk.”

“Thursday,” Roman repeated, half attending the conversation. His thoughts were far too persistent for more than that.

Had she been happy, afterward? He had asked her, in the dark, whether she was well, and she had said yes in a voice that sounded steady enough. But Tamsin had spent a decade learning to say I am well to people who did not particularly wish to hear otherwise, and Roman was uncomfortably aware he did not yet know the difference between her honest yes and her practiced one.

He wanted, most sincerely, for last night to have been the former. Hated the thought of her pain uncomforted. Longed for her to have felt cherished.

He did not examine too closely why it mattered to him more than he’d expected it to. Some things were better left in the dark where he’d first considered them.

This morning, at least, had gone some way toward reassuring him. Tamsin had blushed at the mention of the previous evening but had not flinched from him—had, if anything, softened once Athena settled the matter of allegiance so thoroughly in her favor. He had left for his appointments in a better humor than he could remember leaving the house in some time, spent hours turning over the memory of her laugh, the picture of her sitting with his dog’s head in her lap.

“You will want your blue-stone cufflinks,” Dinsdale said, already retrieving them from the case without waiting to be asked. “Those ones look well enough from a distance, my lord, but not across a dinner table with your bride studying you.”

Roman raised a brow, his attention focusing on his valet. “Studying me.”

“New wives generally make a study of their husbands, in my experience. First fortnight or so.” Dinsdale held out the cufflinks, entirely unbothered by having offered an opinion on matrimony he had no personal authority to hold. “Nothing to be done for it. Best to simply be studied while looking one’s best.”

Roman said nothing, though privately thought there was more sense in it than Dinsdale likely intended. He had spent the whole of his adult life being watched: by his mother, by his political rivals, by half of York, all of them waiting to see whether he would perform his role correctly. He had never once minded being watched in that way; it required nothing of him beyond competence, which came easily.

Being watched by Tamsin was different, and he was not yet certain why, only that it unsettled him more than it should. He wanted her good opinion in a manner distinct from wanting his mother’s, or Sir George’s, or the Corporation’s. He wanted, if he were honest with himself, her to find something in him worth keeping. Not mere toleration; wanting him there, in her presence.

It was an uncomfortable thing to desire from a woman he had married for entirely sensible reasons just the day before. He was a man who understood his own motives as a matter of habit and instinct, and he did not care for the sensation of not fully understanding this one.

His valet gave his coat a final assessing look and stepped back. “That will do very well, my lord.”

“Thank you, Dinsdale.”

“Shall I let the kitchen know you are ready to go down?”

Roman glanced once more at his reflection, straightened a cuff which did not need straightening, and thought, with some private and unfamiliar hope, he would like very much for the evening ahead to go well.