Page 72 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Julian stared at him, genuinely startled by the sheer weight of the observation, delivered so plainly by a boy who had spent three years saying nothing and had apparently decided to make up for the silence all at once.

“What do you think it means, then?”

Kit considered the question seriously, his charcoal-stained fingers tapping once against his sketchbook before he answered. “I think it means you are frightened, and you would rather be frightened alone than let anyone stand beside you while you are frightened together.”

“That is not entirely fair, Kit. Like I said, I was simply doing what I could to protect her.”

“Is it not true, though?” Kit held his gaze for a long moment before signing one final question, brief and devastating in its simplicity. “Protect her from who?”

Julian opened his mouth, but no answer came out.

He stood there, a grown man, a duke, his resources and rank arrayed uselessly around him, and found he had genuinely no answer for the boy’s question.

He was not trying to protect Louisa from Vane, not really. He had not sent her away purely to shield her from a pamphlet’s cruelty. He had sent her away because standing beside her through whatever came next had frightened him considerably more than facing it alone ever could, and he had dressed that fear up as protection because protection sounded a great deal more noble than the truth.

“I do not know,” he finally signed back, the admission costing him something plain and real, offered in Kit’s own language rather than hidden behind the easier shelter of speech.

Kit considered the answer for a long moment, his expression softening slightly. “Then you should tell her that,” he signed. “Not me.”

When Julian did not respond to that, Kit simply turned and left the study, his footsteps fading down the corridor.

Julian was left alone with the unbearable silence of having been seen through by a child who had not spoken a single word aloud in years and yet had just managed to say more than anyone else had ever dared to his face.

He sat down heavily behind his desk. His eyes fell to the drawing still propped against his inkstand, the four of them close together, Kit’s small figure tucked naturally at Louisa’s side.

I promised her.

The memory hit him with brutal clarity: that written agreement they had both signed in this very room, her chin lifted, her terms laid out as plainly as a solicitor’s brief.

I will never attempt to change, quiet, or manage Lady Louisa’s character, in private or in company, and will consider any such attempt a breach of this agreement.

He had written those very words himself and had meant every syllable of them when he’d set his pen to the page. But then, the moment fear had cornered him, he had done exactly what he’d sworn never to do. He had decided on her behalf what she was permitted to face. He had managed her, quieted her, packed her off to her father’s house as though she were something fragile to be protected rather than a woman who had negotiated her own marriage across a desk with more courage than most men he had ever known.

A woman who had walked alone to learn the truth about a stranger neither of them could otherwise have reached, who had knelt in the straw and taught a silent, grieving boy to speak again through nothing but patience and her own two capable hands.

He reached for a fresh sheet of paper, dipped his pen, and began to write.

Louisa—

He stopped, stared at the single word sitting alone on the page, and found every sentence that wanted to follow it arriving wrong, too small, too careful, the same restraint that had gotten him into this trouble in the first place.

He set the pen down, rose, and paced the length of the study once, twice. He briefly caught his reflection in the darkened window pane, a man he scarcely recognized, undone by a woman he had spent months insisting he could hold at a careful distance.

He sat back down. Picked up the pen again.

Louisa, I am sorry⁠—

He stopped again, the apology sitting flat and insufficient against everything it needed to carry, and set the pen down a second time with more force than the gesture required, the nib skittering a thin line of ink across the page. He fisted his hair in his hands and swore. He rubbed his jaw, his mind racing.

I do not deserve her.

The thought arrived with none of the careful hedging he usually applied to anything this unguarded.

I do not deserve a woman who fights for the people she loves without once considering the cost to herself, and I have just proven, in the space of a single cornered sentence, that I am not yet the man who deserves to stand beside her while she does it.

He looked at the drawing again, at Kit’s deliberate rendering of a family that had never once needed his permission to exist as one, and found that he did not know how to begin making this right, only that he intended to find out, whatever it required of him, however long it took.

CHAPTER 30