Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
“Off,” Rowan gritted out.
Biscuit lifted his head from the pile of correspondence on Rowan’s desk, blinked once, and then laid his chin back down upon the folded letters.
Rowan stood in the study doorway with one hand still on the brass handle, staring at the dog.
“No,” he said more firmly. “Off.”
The puppy’s tail thumped once against a stack of ledgers.
Rowan closed the door behind him very slowly.
It had been a long day. A long, irritating, airless day of estate matters, tenant petitions, accounts that refused to settle neatly, and the lingering memory of Emmeline’s fingers tightening around the book he had given her outside the village bookshop.
He had thought of that moment far too often.
Of the crackle of brown paper beneath her grip, the sudden stillness in her eyes, the quiet way she had looked at him as though he had not purchased a book, but placed something far more precious in her hands.
That look had followed him into his study, where he had intended to bury himself in work until exhaustion made thought impossible.
Instead, his desk had been conquered by a dog.
Rowan crossed the room and stopped beside the chair. “This is not a negotiation.”
Biscuit wagged his tail.
He should ring for a servant to remove the animal, but he was not going to call for assistance because a creature small enough to fit beneath a carriage seat had decided to assault his accounts.
He was a duke, not a defeated man battling a dog.
“Down,” he ordered, using the edge of the cloth to nudge Biscuit away from the wet patch.
Biscuit scrambled upright, slipped slightly on the papers, then hopped down from the desk, looking like a drunken lord leaving a card table. He landed near Rowan’s boot, shook himself, and looked up.
“No,” Rowan said immediately.
The puppy sat.
Rowan sat as well, because if he continued standing there addressing the dog, the dog would win by making him ridiculous.
He leaned back in his chair and forced his eyes over the first line. Something about drainage on the western field. A broken boundary wall. An argument over rights of passage near the lower road.
A warm weight pressed against his boot, and Rowan looked down. Biscuit had settled his chin atop the leather.
“Stop.”
The puppy’s eyes closed halfway.
Rowan nudged him with his foot. Gently. Biscuit slid an inch, then immediately wriggled back and pressed himself more firmly against Rowan’s ankle.
“I said stop.”
The puppy sighed.
Ridiculous animal.
He should have moved. He should have lifted his foot, summoned a servant, and sent the creature back outside where it belonged. Instead, he remained very still.
The fire burned low in the grate. The study smelled of ink, singed wood, and the faint dampness the dog had brought in from the garden.
Somewhere beyond the walls, the house settled into its evening sounds: a footman’s distant step, the soft closing of a door, the rustle of servants moving through unseen corridors.
And, faintly, Emmeline’s laughter.
Rowan’s gaze lifted from the letter.
The sound did not last. It never did. A brief, warm thread of it from somewhere down the hall, likely the smaller drawing room where she had taken to reading with Aaron after tea.
But his body reacted as if the sound had entered the study and touched him.
His hand tightened around the paper until it creased.
He hated how quickly he knew her now.
The pitch of her voice when she was amused.
The quieter tone she used when Aaron struggled with a word.
The breath she drew when Rowan stood too near, and she did not wish him to know she had noticed.
It had become impossible to move through his own house without being caught by some trace of her, the blue poetry book on the table beside her favorite seat, the scent of her soap lingering in a corridor after she passed.
Biscuit twitched in his sleep, paw jerking against Rowan’s boot.
Rowan looked down again.
“Traitor,” he muttered.
The puppy slept on, but Rowan did not move his foot for a very long time.
“Biscuit sat,” Aaron announced at dinner the next evening, with the grave pride of a military commander delivering news from the front. “Twice.”
Emmeline looked up from her soup at once, her face brightening in that quiet way that always struck Rowan before he could prepare for it. “Twice? Then he is becoming a gentleman.”
Aaron’s mouth twitched. “No. He ate the carrot after.”
“A gentleman may still appreciate a carrot.”
Rowan cut into the meat on his plate, pretending to attend to it rather than to the way Aaron sat less rigidly than he once had.
The boy still glanced at him before speaking, still measured the room before allowing himself too much sound, but there was a small, unmistakable difference.
Sentences came a little more cleanly now.
Not always, but with fewer retreats into silence.
Especially when talking to Emmeline.
Rowan should have felt only grateful. Instead, his hand tightened around the knife, because Aaron was turning toward her, and Rowan, who had married her out of duty, now wanted her with a hunger that made his own skin feel too hot.
“Did he obey when you told him?” Rowan asked before he could stop himself.
Aaron’s head turned to him quickly. The table went quieter. Even the servants seemed to move with more care along the walls.
Aaron’s fingers tightened around his spoon, then loosened.
“Yes,” he said. Then, after a visible breath, “I said sit. He did.”
The words were simple. Clear. Rowan felt something shift in his chest, as if a lock had moved but not yet opened.
“Good,” he said.
Aaron’s eyes lifted fully to his for a brief second, startled by the answer.
Emmeline’s gaze moved to Rowan.
He felt it. He did not look at her at once, though every nerve in him noticed her attention. When he finally allowed his eyes to shift, she was watching him with that same softness he resented. Hope, perhaps. Or the willingness to believe he could be better than he was.
It made him want to stand. It made him want to lean across the table and put his mouth on hers just to erase that expression before it found some place inside him to live.
Instead, he reached for his wine.
Aaron pushed a pea across his plate with the back of his fork, eyes fixed on it.
Emmeline noticed immediately. “You have gone quiet, Aaron.”
Aaron looked down. “I am thinking.”
“What are you thinking about?”
Rowan’s shoulders tightened at the question. He did not like open-ended roads with children. They wandered too quickly into places no one could govern.
Aaron’s fork stopped. His face changed with such sudden seriousness that Rowan set his glass down.
“I am sad,” Aaron said.
The words landed in the room with an awful softness.
Emmeline went still.
Rowan looked at his son. “Why?”
Aaron swallowed. His small throat moved visibly. He glanced toward Emmeline first, then Biscuit, who was asleep beneath a side table with his nose tucked under one paw. Only then did he look toward Rowan.
“I do not remember Mama.”
The air left Rowan’s lungs in a slow, silent pull.
Across the table, Emmeline’s hand stilled against the stem of her glass. Her expression did not crumple. She was too disciplined for that. But her thumb shifted, pressing once against the crystal before she eased her grip and lowered her gaze to the tablecloth.
Aaron kept speaking, each word careful, as if he had rehearsed them alone and feared they might disappear if he did not place them quickly enough.
“I know she was my mother. I know she… she h-held me. People say she loved me.” His brow furrowed, and frustration pulled at his mouth. “But I c-cannot see her in my head. I try. There is nothing. Only Aunt Juliet s-sometimes. And you. And…” His gaze flickered to Emmeline. “And now Emmeline.”
Emmeline’s eyes shone.
Rowan saw it and felt something sharp twist behind his ribs. Aaron had placed her there so simply, among the few faces he could trust. Rowan’s hand tightened against his knee.
Perhaps she could help. Perhaps if he told her what had happened, if he let her see the river and the ice and Catherine’s hands locked around their son, she would understand why he could not bear to remember.
“There is no fault in that,” Rowan said at last.
Aaron blinked.
Rowan continued, choosing the safest ground, the practical ground. “You were very young when… when she died. It is natural that you do not remember her clearly. There is no purpose in distressing yourself over what cannot be recovered.”
Emmeline’s head lifted.
Rowan saw it from the corner of his eye and knew, even before she spoke, that he had failed.
Aaron’s face did not collapse. That might have been easier. Instead, it folded inward, his mouth pressing tight as though he were trying to be reasonable about his own wound because Rowan had told him reason was required.
“I know,” Aaron said softly.
The obedience of it struck Rowan harder than tears would have done.
Emmeline set her glass down carefully and cleared her throat.
“Aaron,” she said gently, leaning forward just a little, “it is perfectly all right to feel sad.”
Rowan’s gaze cut to her. Her eyes remained on the boy, but he heard the challenge in the words. Aaron looked between them, uncertain.
“You may miss someone, even if you do not remember them clearly.” Emmeline’s voice softened further. “Sometimes what we miss is not a picture. Sometimes it is only the place where the person ought to have been.”
Rowan felt the old cold begin to rise as images flashed before his eyes. The river air. The shawl around Aaron’s little body. Catherine’s wild, terrified face as she stepped backward over the ice, whispering that they would not take him, they would not take him, no one would take her boy.
He remembered the sound of Aaron crying, high and broken, and the crack beneath her foot that had turned the whole world white.
“You think tenderness solves everything,” Rowan said, his voice dropping until he scarcely recognized it as his own. “You think because you can coax him into smiling that the rest of it is simple.”
Emmeline’s lips parted.
“Rowan,” she whispered.
The sound of his name from her mouth should have pulled him back. Instead, it pressed against something already brewing inside him.
“You do not know what this house has endured,” he said. “You do not know what happens when softness cannot be enough.”
Her throat moved once. “I am not saying it is enough.”
“No?” He stood then, the chair scraping harshly behind him. “Then what is this? Another correction? Another lesson in how I ought to speak, how I ought to mourn, how I ought to father my own son?”
Color drained from her face.
Aaron whispered, “F-father.”
Rowan heard him, and the small, shaken sound of it should have stopped him. But Catherine’s memory was too close now.
The river. The ice. Aaron crying in his mother’s arms. The months of fever after. The silence that had followed.
All of it crowded the dining room until he could hardly breathe around it.
His gaze remained on Emmeline because if he looked at his son, he might see what he was doing.
“There are limits, Emmeline,” he said, each word rougher than the last. “You cannot come into this house and mend everything by wishing it so.”
Emmeline went very still.
“I know that,” she said softly.
But he was too far inside the old fear to stop himself.
“Then stop pressing where you do not understand.”
Emmeline went very still.
Her lips remained parted around whatever answer had died before it reached them. Her hand lay beside the napkin, pale against the white linen, and for one second her fingers pressed down so hard the fabric creased beneath them.
Then, slowly, she let go. She lowered her lashes, drew one quiet breath through her nose, and smoothed the napkin once with the tips of her fingers.
Rowan’s own mouth went dry. He looked at the small crease left in the linen where her hand had been and felt, too late, the impact of what he had done. In that instant, he would have given anything to pull the words back into his own mouth and choke on them.
Aaron stared at him, stricken.
Emmeline rose with more grace than he had ever seen.
“You are right,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
Rowan’s chest tightened. “Emmeline.”
She looked at Aaron instead of him, and the softness that came into her face for the boy made Rowan feel flayed. “Forgive me. I find I have lost my appetite.”
Aaron’s eyes filled at once. “I d-did not mean—”
“No.” Emmeline stepped around the table quickly, bending just enough to touch her fingers lightly to his shoulder. Her touch was brief, but Aaron leaned toward it. “No, darling. You did nothing wrong.”
Rowan’s fingers curled against the table edge.
Emmeline straightened, and for one second her eyes met Rowan’s. There was no anger in them, but he wished there had been. Anger would have given him something to answer.
This was worse.
She turned and left the dining room.
The servants stood frozen.
Aaron looked down at his plate, his small shoulders curved inward. Biscuit woke beneath the side table, lifted his head, and whined softly, as if even the dog understood that something had been broken.
Rowan remained standing at the head of his own table, every inch of him locked in place.
He had wanted silence. He had it now.