Page 59 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Kit stared at him for a heartbeat before shaking his head with such emphatic disbelief that Julian began to suspect he had missed something obvious.

“No?” Louisa asked, unable to hide her smile.

Another vigorous shake of the head.

Julian frowned and leaned closer to the page, determined not to be defeated by the artistic interpretation of an eight-year-old. “Very well. John.”

Kit threw one hand up in the air in silent despair before pointing decisively at Julian.

Julian looked from the drawing to Kit, then back again. He examined the sketch with all the gravity he ordinarily reserved for estate maps and tenant agreements.

Good Lord.

That was supposed to be him.

He cleared his throat. “Ah.”

Louisa was watching him now with entirely undisguised amusement. “You see it?”

Julian considered the question with appropriate honesty. “No,” he admitted. “Though I am beginning to understand why I ought to.”

Louisa’s laughter rang across the lawn, bright enough that Eleanor stirred against his shoulder. Even Kit’s exasperation dissolved into a grin that was impossible to mistake.

Julian looked once more at the drawing before shaking his head. “For the record,” he said gravely, “I am considerably more handsome than that.”

After that, he watched Eleanor’s eyes flutter shut against his shoulder, her small weight gone entirely loose and trusting against him. He glanced up to find Louisa watching them both with an expression he could not immediately read, soft and a little startled.

Kit, absorbed in his drawing, sat close at Louisa’s side, close enough that his sleeve brushed her skirts, entirely unselfconscious in his claim to that small space beside her.

This is a family.

The thought arrived with none of Julian’s usual caution attached, none of the careful qualifications he generally applied to any observation that strayed too close to the territory he had spent so much time fortifying himself against.

It simply dawned on him, whole and undeniable, watching Louisa laugh at something in Kit’s sketchbook, watching Eleanor’s small hand curl loosely against his shirt, watching the three of them settled together on a blanket in the afternoon sun as though they had always belonged here.

For one dangerous, unguarded moment, it felt entirely, uncomplicatedly natural.

Then the old promise returned, as it always did, rising out of some well-worn groove in his mind, the vow he had made himself standing alone in his study with an eight-year-old boy who would not speak.

I will never risk loving someone so completely that losing them would destroy either of us.

The happiness sitting in front of him, warm and plain and entirely undeserved by any measure of the practical bargain he had struck, suddenly felt less like comfort and more like danger, a thing he had allowed to grow far larger than the careful boundaries he had drawn around it.

This was only ever meant to be a practical marriage, he reminded himself, watching Louisa’s face soften as she reached over to tuck a stray curl behind Kit’s ear, an entirely unconscious, maternal gesture that undid something in his chest he had no ready name for. I promised her respect and protection, nothing more than that. I promised myself considerably more and considerably less both at once.

He looked down at Eleanor, asleep and trusting against his shoulder, and then across the blanket at Kit, bent industriously over his sketchbook, and then, finally, at Louisa, who had turned her attention back to him, her expression still carrying that same soft, startled warmth.

He found himself entirely uncertain whether he still possessed the strength to keep every line of the promise he had made, both to her and to himself.

* * *

A few days had passed when Simmons entered the morning room with the post arranged neatly on a silver tray.

“Your post, Your Grace.”

“Thank you, Simmons. Has His Grace already escaped to the study?”

“He has, Your Grace. Mr. Mason arrived rather earlier than expected.”