Chapter 10 #2
Rosamund was on her feet before the sentence finished. She took the east corridor at a pace that would have been unacceptable in a duchess and entirely appropriate in a woman who understood what happened when a six-year-old entered the private domain of a man who had not invited the intrusion.
The study door stood open. She reached it, rounded the frame, and stopped.
Tristan sat on the floor.
The Duke of Rathbourne—a man who commanded half of London, who had faced down Parliament and courts and the full combined fury of men more powerful than most people would encounter in a lifetime—sat on the carpet of his study with his legs crossed and his back against the desk, holding one end of a length of string while Clara held the other.
Between them, a complex web of string stretched from chair leg to desk leg to doorknob, creating a structure that defied both geometry and purpose.
“No, no,” Clara was saying, sounding surprisingly commanding for a girl of such small size. “You have to go under the chair and over the inkwell. It does not work if you go over both. That is not how castles are built.”
“I was not aware there were building regulations for string castles.”
“There are. I made them. You are not following them properly.”
Tristan’s expression occupied territory that Rosamund had not previously believed his face capable of reaching. The severity was gone. The granite had cracked, and what lay beneath it was something so unexpected that she had to grip the door frame to steady herself against its impact.
He was trying. That was the unbearable part.
He was not a man to whom play came naturally.
The string tangled in his fingers. His posture suggested a body that had never been asked to fold itself onto a carpet and resented the indignity.
But he held his end of the string and followed Clara’s increasingly elaborate instructions and did not, at any point, suggest that a duke might have better things to do with his Tuesday afternoon than construct imaginary architecture under the direction of a girl whose qualifications consisted of six years of existence and total confidence in her own authority.
“You are here,” he said, without looking up.
Rosamund realised he was speaking to her. He had known she was in the doorway. Of course he had. The man missed nothing.
“I came to retrieve Clara. She was not meant to disturb you.”
“She is not disturbing me.” He fed string around the chair leg with the careful concentration of a man defusing something delicate. “She is educating me in the structural requirements of string castles, which I confess are more rigorous than I had anticipated.”
“They have to be,” Clara interjected, “or the dragons get in.”
“A valid concern. One cannot have dragons.”
Rosamund stood in the doorway and felt the ground shift beneath her for the second time that day.
The first crack had come on the terrace, watching him defend servants he could easily have ignored.
This was the second—wider, deeper, running through the foundations of everything she had built her survival on.
Because the man on the floor was not performing.
There was no gallery watching, no society to impress, no political advantage to be gained from sitting cross-legged on a carpet while a child ordered him about.
He was here because Clara had found him, and he had chosen—without ceremony, without calculation, without any visible expectation of reward—to set aside whatever occupied his afternoon and give a frightened, displaced child the most valuable thing a powerful man could offer.
His time. His attention. His willingness to be ridiculous.
“Come, Clara.” Her voice emerged steadier than she felt. “His Grace has work to attend to.”
“I do not.” Tristan looked up, and his gaze caught hers, and for one unguarded instant he looked at her, as though her reaction to this scene mattered more than he could afford to let it.
Clara tugged the string. The structure collapsed, scattering thread across the carpet and draping a loop over Tristan’s shoulder like a makeshift decoration.
“Oops,” Clara said, without the faintest trace of remorse.
Rosamund’s mouth betrayed her. The smile arrived before her defences could intercept it—small, involuntary. Then she caught it, smothered it, pursed her lips together until the muscles ached.
But Tristan had seen it. She watched him see it—the way his gaze sharpened, the way his breath seemed to hesitate, as though her smile were something fragile that had landed unexpectedly in his vicinity and he was afraid of startling it away.
He said nothing. He did not smile in return, because he was not a man who took what was not freely given, and a smile wrestled away from its owner against her will did not count.
But the string stayed draped over his shoulder, and he did not remove it, and when Clara demanded that he begin rebuilding the castle immediately with improved dragon-proofing, he complied without protest.
Rosamund retreated to the corridor. From inside the study, Clara’s voice rose, imperious and delighted.
“Under the chair, Your Grace. I said under!”
“My apologies. The regulations, as you say, are quite specific.”
“They are. Try again.”
Rosamund closed her eyes. The dandelion Clara had given her that morning was still tucked in her sleeve, crushed now, its brightness fading.
He was not what she had expected. Not what she had needed him to be.
The villain she had carried in her chest for four years was dissolving, and the man left behind was someone she could not afford to see clearly, because seeing him clearly meant acknowledging that the world was more complicated than grief had permitted her to believe.
She opened her eyes. Straightened. Smoothed her skirt with hands that trembled only slightly.
From the study, laughter—Clara’s, bright as struck crystal. And beneath it, too quiet for anyone but Rosamund to catch, a sound she had never heard before and could not have prepared for: Tristan Rathbourne, laughing.