Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
“Do not cling to my coat, Aaron. You will drag it crooked,” the words came out lower than Rowan intended, and he felt the small tug on the dark fabric at his side ease at once.
Aaron lifted his hand obediently, his dark eyes moving over the bright sweep of lawn ahead of them with the solemn caution that had become too familiar these past days.
The garden party spread out before them in ordered clusters of elegance and noise, ladies beneath parasols, gentlemen drifting with glasses in hand, children darting along the trimmed paths.
The host, Lord Blackmere, came toward them at once.
“Ironford,” he said with an easy smile, clasping Rowan’s hand. “You honor us. And Lord Aaron as well. Delighted, delighted.”
Rowan inclined his head. “Blackmere.”
He had barely finished the word when his eyes caught her.
Lady Emmeline stood not thirty yards away beneath the pale shade of a sycamore, her father beside her and Miss Margaret Godwin just beyond.
She wore a soft green afternoon gown that made her skin look warmer, her hair brighter, her presence more quietly arresting than all the silks and jewels around her.
She was not even looking at him. That, absurdly, made the pull of her stronger.
He turned back to Blackmere before the lapse became noticeable.
“You have chosen a fine day,” he said.
Blackmere laughed. “For once I may thank heaven rather than my gardener. Come, come, there are a few people eager to congratulate you properly.”
Of course there were.
Rowan moved when expected, Aaron close at his side again, and together they crossed toward a knot of lords and ladies already brightening with interest at the sight of him.
Blackmere introduced him, then the boy, and the attention that had first settled on Rowan with the usual polite hunger shifted at once toward Aaron.
“And this is your son?” Lady Fairford said, bending slightly as though children were some delicate foreign species. “How handsome.”
Aaron said nothing.
“Yes,” Rowan answered.
“How old are you, my dear?” asked Lady Hartwell, smiling too widely.
Aaron’s mouth opened. “S-s—”
“He is seven,” Rowan said smoothly.
Lord Pembroke laughed. “Shy, is he?”
“No,” Rowan replied. “Discerning.”
That won a few small smiles, but the attention did not ease. Questions kept coming, light at first, then sharper in the way idle questions often became when asked by people who had never been denied the right to satisfy their curiosity.
“Do you ride yet?”
“Does he read Latin?”
“Will he go to Eton?”
Aaron tried once more. “I—”
“He rides adequately for his age,” Rowan said. “And reads what he ought.”
Mrs. Willoughby, all powder and confidence, tilted her head. “Why does the boy stammer?”
The question landed like a slap.
Rowan looked at her. “He is speaking to strangers.”
“Yes, but does he always speak so?” she pressed, as though discussing a flaw in a horse’s gait.
Blackmere attempted a laugh. “Come now, Mrs. Willoughby—”
“I only ask out of concern.”
Aaron had gone very still beside him. Rowan felt the change in the boy’s breathing and his small hand curling into itself at his side.
“It is nothing that concerns the company,” Rowan said.
The woman blinked, then smiled but it did not reach her eyes. “Of course. I only thought perhaps, if he were encouraged to slow down and speak clearly—”
“I s-speak c-clearly,” Aaron burst out, and the effort of forcing the words made his face flush at once.
Lady Hartwell bent toward him, smiling as though coaxing a skittish pet. “There now. Again, but slowly. Take your time.”
Aaron’s eyes widened.
Blood rushed to Rowan’s head. He should end this. He knew he should. Yet for one second, he hesitated, because of that cursed instinct to control the damage himself.
That second was enough.
Aaron shook his head sharply, turned, and bolted.
“Aaron—”
He was already gone, small body cutting across the grass between chairs and skirts and bright summer silk.
Rowan swore under his breath and strode after him.
The boy ran straight to Lady Emmeline, colliding with her skirts.
“Aaron,” she turned at once with immediate softness. “What has happened?”
The boy shook his head, breathing too hard.
“Aaron,” Rowan reached them a moment later. “Come here.”
Aaron’s fingers clutched at the side of Emmeline’s gown. He shook his head again.
“Aaron.”
“No.” The word came muffled, but firm.
Emmeline lifted her gaze to Rowan’s, and in that instant the warmth she gave the child vanished from her face. She looked at him with that steady opposition he had come to recognize too well.
“He is upset,” she said.
“I can see that.”
“Then do not speak to him as though he has committed an offense.”
Rowan’s jaw tightened. “He ran from a conversation.”
“He is a child.”
The words struck too close because they were not wholly untrue.
“Aaron,” Rowan said, forcing his attention back to the boy, “come here.”
Aaron pressed himself more firmly against Emmeline’s side.
Something in Rowan snapped taut. The child was his son. His son. And yet, when frightened, he had run not to him, but to the woman Rowan had known for scarcely a fortnight.
“Do not make him more afraid of you than he already is,” Emmeline said, low enough that only he could hear.
He took one step closer. “You presume too much.”
“And you insist on too much,” she shot back, her own voice dropping. “He is not a soldier, Your Grace.”
He barely had time to answer it before Aaron suddenly pulled back enough to look up at him.
“Don’t tell Lady Emmeline off.”
Rowan froze.
There had been no stammer. None.
The realization struck all three of them at once. Aaron seemed not to understand it, only to know that he had spoken and that his father had gone still. Emmeline looked from the boy to Rowan, and the astonishment in her face mirrored his own.
He opened his mouth.
Then Frederick appeared like a man sent by fate solely to rescue the moment.
“There you all are,” he said brightly, approaching with a well-dressed couple and a fair-haired boy near Aaron’s age. “I had begun to think Ironford had frightened half the company away.”
The other child smiled uncertainly at Aaron.
“This is Peter Ellsworth,” Frederick went on, clearly taking in the scene and deciding not to name it. “Peter, this is Aaron Huntley. I understand you both possess excellent opinions on horses and very questionable judgment about cake.”
That, at least, made Aaron look away from Rowan.
Emmeline bent slightly toward him. “Would you like to go play with Peter?”
Aaron looked at Rowan then, cautious now, waiting.
“May I, F-Father?” he asked.
This time the stammer had returned, though lighter.
Rowan hesitated. He did not know the Ellsworth child. He did not know whether some careless word from another boy might undo what little calm Aaron had recovered. He did not know whether permitting it would heal anything or merely delay another humiliation.
Then Emmeline looked at him.
She said nothing, but there was too much quiet meaning in the steadiness of her gaze, in the fact that she was asking him, without one word, not to choose fear for the boy again.
Rowan exhaled once. “Go on, then.”
Aaron brightened so quickly that something tightened painfully in Rowan’s chest. A second later, he had gone off with Peter across the lawn, wooden horse in hand, already pointing toward something.
“Well,” Frederick said into the silence that followed, “that was almost ruinously tense. Shall I make some remark about the weather or the church banns to rescue us?”
Emmeline’s mouth softened despite herself. “You may try.”
Frederick placed a hand against his heart. “Bless you. Most ladies merely suffer my rescue in silence.”
Emmeline’s eyes sparked. Rowan watched the light in them and felt the world shift. Just like that, she altered the air around him, stripping away the crowd and the noise until he saw nothing but her. For a heartbeat, he forgot to be a duke. He forgot the ton. He simply forgot.
“It was announced on Sunday,” Frederick continued, turning to the couple. “The first reading of the banns, I mean. All very proper. Another two Sundays and they will be tied together.”
Emmeline answered with more ease than Rowan expected. “I had not realized you attended our parish service so attentively, Lord Calham.”
Frederick smiled. “I attend everything attentively when there is sufficient possibility of scandal.”
She laughed, the sound light and brief.
It went through Rowan with a sharpness that pierced his chest, and he despised himself for it instantly.
Frederick could charm laughter from stone. Yet Rowan still found himself wanting the sound turned elsewhere, wanting it not handed so easily to another man, even one who had been his friend since boyhood.
He looked toward Aaron before the feeling could take deeper root.
The boy was kneeling in the grass with Peter now, Comet between them, speaking with animated hands even if the words themselves did not fully carry.
He looked… happy.
Rowan felt something in his chest loosen, only to tighten again with the awareness of how narrow the difference had been between this and another scene altogether.
“Do not glare so viciously at the crowd,” Frederick said as he adjusted his cuffs beneath the theatre lamps. “You are meant to look like a man attending for pleasure, not for execution.”
Rowan, who had already found the entrance too crowded, turned his head just enough to give his friend a look that ought to have ended the conversation.
Frederick only smiled wider.
The theatre blazed with movement. Rowan endured it because it was expected, because appearances still mattered while the banns were being read. The second Sunday had passed two days before and all of London now knew, if they had not before, that he meant to marry Lady Emmeline Greene.
He began to guide Frederick toward the stairs—
And there she was.