Page 12 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

It was absurd, marriage to a woman he had known the length of one conversation, on the strength of nothing more than her fluency in a language most of Society had never heard of and her unshakable will.

But he had run out of other options a long time before she ever walked into his study, and Dominic was right, damn him, that three years of patience and money and every conventional method available had produced nothing but a torn page in the straw and a boy who would not look at him.

Julian drew a fresh sheet of paper toward himself, dipped his pen, and began to write a letter.

CHAPTER 6

“He will not speak to you. I feel I ought to warn you again before you go in.”

“You have warned me three times already, Your Grace, in the carriage ride from the front door to this one.” Louisa smoothed her skirts and looked toward the closed door of the schoolroom with far more calm than she actually felt. “I promise you I have taken it in.”

“I only wish to prepare you. He does not respond well to strangers.”

“Neither do I, ordinarily, and yet here we are.” She glanced at him, and something in his face, drawn tight with a worry he was clearly unaccustomed to showing anyone, softened her tone despite herself. “Your Grace, I have not come to perform miracles. I have come to sit with him. That is all I intend to do this morning. Whatever happens after that will happen in its own time, not because I have willed it to.”

“He has had six people attempt exactly that. None of them succeeded.”

“Then I shall be the seventh, and if I fail, you will be no worse off than you were yesterday.” Louisa reached for the door handle before he could offer a fourth warning. “May I?”

Julian opened it for her instead and stood back to let her enter first.

The schoolroom was smaller than she had expected, sunlit, with a scarred table pushed against one window. There, in the far corner near the empty hearth, sat a boy with dark hair falling over his eyes. There was an open sketchbook on his knees, a stick of charcoal moving in slow, absorbed strokes across the page. He did not look up when the door opened. He gave no sign that he had heard it.

“Kit.” Julian’s voice was careful, quiet in a way Louisa suspected did not come naturally to him. “This is Lady Louisa. I have asked her to call this morning.”

Nothing. The charcoal kept moving.

Louisa did not wait for a greeting. She crossed the room slowly, settled herself on the floor a respectful distance from Kit rather than looming over him from a chair, and said nothing at all for a long moment. She simply looked with open curiosity at the image taking shape beneath his hand.

“That is a very fine horse,” she said eventually, to the room in general rather than to him directly. “Better than anything I have ever managed. I once tried to draw my grandmother’s spaniel and produced something that resembled a potato with legs.”

No response.

Kit’s hand paused briefly over the paper, then resumed moving.

Good. He heard that, even if he would not admit it.

She did not ask him a single question. She had decided this on the carriage ride over, turning the problem over in her mind.

Every person who had failed with him had, by Julian’s account, tried questions first, coaxing, patient waiting for an answer that never came. She would try something else entirely. She would simply exist beside him, unhurried, undemanding, and let him decide in his own time whether she was worth noticing.

She began to sign slowly, speaking the words aloud as her hands moved, the way she always did when teaching.

“Horse,” she said, forming the sign, then let her hands fall to her lap.

She did not look at him to see whether he watched. She simply picked up a stray piece of charcoal from the floor beside his knee and turned it over in her fingers, as though the sign had been nothing at all, merely something she’d done because her hands wanted occupying.

Julian, standing near the door, said nothing. She was grateful for that. She suspected his silence cost him some effort.

“Horse,” she repeated a few minutes later, signing it once more, and this time added another. “Kind.” Her hands moved through both signs together, unhurried. “A kind horse. That is what you have drawn, I think, from the way her ears are turned.”

Kit’s charcoal stilled.

Louisa did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the drawing, as though the pause meant nothing, as though she had all the patience in the world and no particular interest in whether he responded at all. Inside, her pulse had quickened, though she gave none of it away.

Wait. Do not reach for him. Let him reach, if he means to reach at all.

The silence stretched. She let it stretch, resisting every instinct that urged her to fill it with more words, more signs, more coaxing.