Page 47 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Good heavens.

His gaze was steady and searching in a way that asked nothing and yet seemed somehow to ask everything at once. She could hear her own pulse in her ears, entirely too loud for so small and ordinary a moment as correcting the angle of a man’s thumb.

The moment lingered. One breath. Two. Neither of them moved to end it, and Louisa felt something in her chest tilt dangerously close to a precipice she had spent weeks carefully refusing to name.

She suddenly became aware that she was still holding his hand, so she withdrew hers.

“You have it,” she said too quickly and smoothing her skirts with hands that were not nearly as steady as she wished them to be. “That is exactly the shape. I am certain Kit will understand you perfectly, whenever the day comes that you wish to say it.”

“Louisa—”

“I ought to see to the household accounts before luncheon,” she declared, already moving toward the door, not trusting herself to look back. “Mrs. Whitfield will have questions about the linen order, and I promised her an answer before noon.”

She left before he could say anything further, her heart beating far too quickly for a woman who had done nothing more than teach her husband a single sign. She kept her gaze fixed ahead as she walked down the corridor, resisting the temptation to glance back.

She could feel his eyes on her all the same, following her as she crossed the room and disappeared into the corridor.

There had been puzzlement in his expression, but that was not everything she had seen. Warmth had been there too, and that made her pulse stumble.

* * *

The better part of a week had slipped quietly by, each day settling into the comfortable rhythm that was beginning to define life at Ashvale.

“Only a few lines, and then I will stop bothering you,” Louisa murmured to herself, dipping her pen and smoothing the paper flat against the desk in the blue morning room.

Dear Father,

I hope this letter finds you and Mother well. I write with an odd request, and I trust you will forgive its oddness, given how little I have troubled you with such things since my marriage.

Do you know anything about the Whitmores, Thomas Whitmore’s late father in particular, who I understand was ruined some years ago in a matter involving false allegations? I have reason to believe the circumstances may bear looking into, and I would rather have your honest recollection than rely on secondhand gossip. I trust your discretion in this above anyone else’s.

Your loving daughter,

Louisa

She sealed it before she could second-guess the wording, and had scarcely set it aside for the post when Mrs. Whitfield appeared in the doorway to announce that Lady Fiona Blackwood’s carriage had been sighted coming up the drive.

Tea was laid in the drawing room by the time Fiona swept in, her golden curls coming loose from their pins within the first quarter hour exactly as they always did, and greeted Louisa with an embrace fierce enough to rattle the teacups on the tray.

“You look positively glowing! Whether it’s married life or the air in Kent, I cannot tell,” she gushed, settling herself into the nearest chair with the ease of a woman entirely at home in any room she chose to occupy. “And where is your Duke? I confess I have been dying to properly examine him since the wedding, when I was rather too occupied crying into your mother’s handkerchief to form any useful opinion.”

“He will join us shortly. He had some business with his steward that could not wait.”

“How dutiful of him.”

Julian appeared not ten minutes later, and Fiona, Louisa noted with some private amusement, conducted herself through the whole tea with the sharp attention of a woman determining whether a man deserved her approval or not.

“Your Grace,” Fiona said pleasantly as he accepted the cup offered him, “Louisa tells me that Kit has taken rather well to his lessons.”

Julian inclined his head. “He has. Better than I expected, if I am being honest.”

“And when he does not cooperate?”

“Then we wait until he is ready to try again.”

Fiona regarded him over the rim of her teacup. “You do not compel him?”

“No. He has already had enough of being compelled.”