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“I don’t need to change; she only needs time to realise that ruthlessness and the occasional disregard for honour when the situation demands it are not all I am, nor are they wholly terrible attributes—when the man endowed with those qualities is on your side. Our unfortunate beginning set us against one another, but marriage changes all that. I’ll make her happy, Gabriel.”

Retrieving an apple from his coat pocket, Gabriel took a bite, chewed thoughtfully. “It sounds as if you’ve everything well in hand. But there’s one thing I still haven’t quite figured out.” He paused for a second bite, letting the suspense stretch in the time-honored tradition of obnoxious older brothers. “If everything is going so very well, why are you here, performing manual labor, rather than off wooing your wife or attending to whatever unfortunate company has caught your attention?”

Because she won’t permit me to insert so much as a toe into her office.

Because the loss of her smile has me unaccountably tied in knots.

Because I’ve licked my wife to climax for eleven consecutive nights and my envious bollocks have disavowed any undertaking that requires concentration.

Gabriel knew bloody why.

“I’ve elected to keep my attention close to home for the moment. It’s not as if I need the additional coin.” Not untrue. “And I wish to be useful to Gwen.” Also wholeheartedly true. “Speaking of wives, where is yours… and those troublesome nephews of mine?”

“If you mean the wife of the Anson brother who has not forbidden her spouse from her private sanctum, she is enjoying an afternoon nap. Benedict and Julian are with Nanny Bryant.”

“I’m surprised a single nanny can keep pace with the pair of them. I imagine you’ll be forced to employ a second soon enough. Though I confess, I was rather astonished to hear you’d risk another pregnancy after securing the requisite heir and spare.”

Gabriel’s expression twisted with anxiety.

“Violet’s looking very well,” Michael added with a heaping dose of too late reassurance. God, he was a lout.

Gabriel’s gaze dropped to his apple. “She is well, but her robust health has done little to quell my fears. I’m afraid I’m driving her rather mad with my coddling. Of course I didn’t want to risk travel at all, but Violet's temperament is not well suited for confinement, a truth of which she reminds me regularly.”

The loss of Gabriel’s first wife in childbirth had been crippling. And no matter the successful birth of Violet’s twin boys, Gabriel’s fear would not relent. Pressing him to examine those fears now had been a wretched thing for Michael to do. Whether what he felt for Gabriel could be called love was a matter of semantics—he would walk through fire for his brother. Accepting a bit of sibling raillery, if it might ease the worried wrinkles from Gabriel’s brow, was nothing at all.

He dragged in a breath.

“I may have overstated my confidence with regard to my marriage. I had not, in fact, anticipated that Gwen would keep me entirely from her offices, nor that our shared hours of daylight would be so limited.” He held his brother’s gaze, the edges of the sanding block biting into his too tight fist. “I’ve plenty of work to occupy myself but I can’t even look at it. It’s not what I want anymore.”

“And what is it you want?”

He shot his brother a beleaguered glare.

“I want what we had before—or what it might have been, if I hadn’t been trying to steal her company, and she hadn’t hired me to save it. I want to feel like that man.” He threaded his fingers through his hair and blew out a breath. “I miss the rhythm of our work, the sparks we struck off one another. I miss her. We remained at cross purposes, yes, but it felt like partnership. It felt… real.”

A note of sour, hopeless longing had crept into Michael’s voice, and he cleared his throat in a fruitless attempt to scrape it away. When it did nothing to ease the tightness there, he fixed his gaze on a distant rowboat, fighting the choppy sea, unwilling to let his brother witness the full weight of his frustration—the sharp sting of humility that came with having to fight for every scrap of Gwen’s attention. Attention she so freely gave to everyone else. From across the yard, he’d watched her attentive gaze flit from one person to the next, heard the bright lilt of her laughter. She blazed a swath of light and joy wherever she went, but that luster had not been for him in well over a month. Michael could feel the memory of it still like a latent touch, and its absence made the cold, uninhabitable space between himself and Gwen all the more unbearable.

And so he’d clung to their hours of love making, stretched them for as long as she could endure, well beyond what he thought he could tolerate before bringing her to climax. Afterwards, with his prick throbbing and need scraping at him like a wild animal, he would hold her body against his and wait for contentment to wash over him, to overwhelm the clawing insistence of his own satisfaction. It always did… eventually.

When his heart finally slowed and his muscles relaxed, he allowed himself to imagine what life might be like once they’d moved past all this bitterness and resentment. When they would work side by side all day, then return home together, that same rhythm—the collaboration, the synchrony—spilling over into their lovemaking.

Those hours, holding her slight sleeping form, lost in his own quiet longing, had become the only thing keeping him sane and the best part of every day. A peace unlike anything he had ever known. Each time, with the memory of her arms wrapped tightly around him still fresh in his mind and wreaking havoc with his hope, he could believe tomorrow might mark the beginning of something different. Nothing drastic, of course. He wasn’t an idiot. But perhaps the slightest shift toward forgiveness.

Inevitably, morning would come, and the sun would burn away those shared hours of intimacy like morning dew, leaving Michael a dry, brittle thing once more.

Yes, it had indeed proved difficult to woo a woman who allowed him only begrudgingly into her bed and not at all anywhere else, but despite his disadvantage, he’d found ways to make himself useful to her… sidling along in the margins of her life and scratching good deeds into the spaces she couldn’t help but notice. She wore a new, finely made winter coat and found her favorite foods packed in every lunch. He’d mediated squabbles between workers and scrubbed the rust from brine-laden fixtures until they gleamed. On more than one occasion, he’d stepped in to smooth difficulties with merchants and contractors, using both his title and practiced skill at negotiation to keep problems from ever reaching her desk.

None of it he’d minded and some he’d found legitimately enjoyable. Tutoring young Davie in his mathematics, for instance, had turned out to be deeply fulfilling, almost fun. The boy took to every lesson with boundless enthusiasm. What began as a way to insinuate himself back into her good graces had eventually become something else entirely. He liked this version of himself… better than he’d ever liked the man he was in London, and it had surprisingly little to do with Gwen.

When Michael looked up again, Gabriel was studying him with an expression so commonplace in his childhood, so entirely absent in the years that followed, that its unexpected return sent him reeling—struggling to place it, and to understand why the sight of it now made his heart feel too large for his chest.

“You’re rather fond of your wife, I think, and of the life you’re building here.” Gabriel’s voice was unbearably gentle.

“Good. That’s good. Hold on to that fondness, even when she doesn’t come around as quickly as you’d like. One day, you might be surprised to find how easily love can take hold when given half a chance, whether you believe in its existence or not.”

“Speaking of love,” Michael said, eager for a change in subject now that Gabriel’s mood had rebounded, “is that baron’s son still sniffing around my niece? She is entirely too young for romance, a fact I made quite clear when last I wrote to her.”

Gabriel made a sound of agreement, but he was smiling again. “Yes, and she’s enjoying every moment of his attention—and every other lad who falls at her feet the instant she bats her eyelashes. She’s counting the days until her coming out, never mind that it’s still years away. It’s enough to make a father consider locking his daughter in her chambers indefinitely. God willing, someday you’ll have your own adolescent daughter and then you’ll understand.”