Chapter 21
“You’re simply flipping pages, Duchess.”
Isadora jumped and looked up. James was leaning in the library doorway with his arms folded, the late afternoon light behind him catching the dust that always seemed to hang in the room due to the old books and even older furniture.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Holt inclined her head and excused herself.
“I am not,” Isadora said.
“I doubt you’re reading it, which is strange for you.”
She looked down. The book was open to page thirty-four. She had just picked it, she realized, and she could not remember anything she had read.
James came further into the room, glancing at the new south shelving with the proprietary satisfaction he still hadn’t quite outgrown.
He looked at her for a moment in the unhurried way he had taken to looking at her lately—not the assessing look from the early days of their marriage, but something slower, more deliberate, as though he were in no particular rush to finish looking.
“You look like you have read the same page eleven times,” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re holding your book closed with your thumb still inside it, which means you stopped reading some time ago. Do not fret, I do that myself.”
“I was thinking,” she said.
“About the book?”
“About the house.” She closed the book, her thumb slipping free of the spot it had been marking.
He tilted his head slightly. “The house is quiet.”
“It is.”
“You miss them.”
“Three days is hardly enough time to spend with them. It never feels enough,” she sighed. “Of course I miss them.”
Something in his expression softened.
A maid passed in the corridor with an armful of fresh linens and another behind her, both wearing carefully neutral expressions.
James seemed to notice them noticing.
“Will you dine with me this evening?” he asked. “Properly. In the small dining room, not the hall. I find the hall makes conversation feel like a parliamentary session.”
Isadora blinked. It was not what she had expected him to say.
“I would like that,” she said, and was annoyed at how quickly warmth spread through her chest at the invitation, given that they dined together most evenings already and this should not, by any reasonable measure, have felt different.
It felt different.
“Good,” he said. “I find I am looking forward to it.”
“As am I,” she returned, though it cost her slightly more to say it plainly than it had apparently cost him.
He held her gaze a moment longer than necessary. Then he inclined his head and left for his study.
Isadora stood there for a moment, watching him go.
You are going to have to manage this considerably better than you currently are, she thought, with some exasperation directed entirely at herself.
* * *
She wore a green gown.
She had not given it excessive thought. She had chosen it for comfort, for ease, because it did not require Mrs. Holt’s assistance with the laces at the back.
James was already seated when she came in. He rose, pulled out her chair, and his hand rested on the back of it after she sat.
“You look well,” he complimented, settling back into his seat.
“I looked as I did this morning.”
“This morning, you had the expression of a woman arguing with an empty room. That has resolved itself considerably.” He reached for the wine and poured hers first. “What were you arguing about?”
“I was not arguing. I was reading.”
“That was not reading. That was like a man at his club pretending to read the newspaper so no one would speak to him.”
“I have never seen you pretend to read a newspaper.”
“I have done it extensively. It is an art.” He handed her the glass. “The trick is to occasionally turn a page at a plausible interval, regardless of content.”
“And if someone asks what you’ve read?”
“You say ‘shocking, is it not,’ and nod gravely. It works on nearly everyone.”
“That seems like a deeply dishonest system.”
She laughed and stopped immediately when she noticed him watching her.
“You’re staring,” she remarked.
“I’m observing.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Staring is rude. Observing is simply attentive.” He tilted his head slightly. “I’m allowed to be attentive at my own dinner table.”
“You were not this attentive a month ago.”
“A month ago, you would have left the room if I’d been this attentive.” He said it lightly, but something underneath it was not entirely light.
She reached for her wine instead of answering.
He watched her do that too.
“You do that when you do not want to answer something,” he noted. “You find your glass.”
“I do not.”
“You have done it twice this evening already.”
“I have not been counting.”
“I have,” he said, with no apology whatsoever.
She set the glass down with more composure than she currently felt.
“Tell me something true that is not about the harvest, or the tenancy figures, or anything either of us has any obligation to discuss,” he demanded.
“That’s a very broad request.”
“I’m aware. I’m asking it anyway.”
She considered him across the candlelight with his easy and unguarded posture, the way the formality of the early weeks had simply dissolved somewhere along the way without either of them deciding when.
“I used to hate this house,” she admitted.
“When I stayed as a guest with my brother and Cecily before the wedding. I thought it was the kind of place that swallowed people. Too large, too cold, too much history pressing in from every wall.” She turned her glass slowly by the stem. “I do not think that anymore.”
“What changed your mind?”
“You’re going to make me say something sentimental.”
“I would very much like you to say something sentimental. I rarely get the chance to hear it.”
She looked at him. “The house did not change. I think I simply stopped feeling like a guest in it.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “Good,” he said quietly. “I’m glad.”
The room had gone very warm, and not entirely from the fire.
When the last of the dishes had been cleared, James stood and held out his hand. “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting tonight.” He was still holding out his hand. “Trust me.”
She looked at it for a moment, then placed hers in it and let him pull her up. He did not release it once she was standing. Neither did she pull away.
He led her through the side door onto the terrace, where the evening had gone cool and clear, the sky deepening to that deep blue that came just before true dark, the lake below catching the last gold light like something poured rather than reflected.
She had not been out here in weeks.
When he released her hand, she curled her fingers into her palm, feeling the loss of his warmth acutely.
“It’s colder than I expected,” she said.
“You’ll survive a few minutes.” He stepped toward the south wall, where the rosevine climbed in a tangle that had been bare and unpromising in her first week at Ashbourne and was now entirely in bloom.
It was deep pink and heavy-headed, catching the last light with the kind of color that was unique to this hour.
James reached out and brushed one bloom between two fingers—an absent-minded gesture.
“I noticed this morning,” he said, not quite looking at her, “that it is in bloom. The color is the same as the pink gown you wore to dinner two nights ago. The one with the… uhh—” He stopped abruptly, as though the words had escaped before he’d given them permission. He looked faintly startled by himself.
Isadora stood very still. She didn’t know what to think.
“I do not know why I said that,” he admitted.
“Neither do I,” she said, “but I find I’m glad you did.”
He turned to look at her, and she immediately reached for the only defense available to her.
“James Harcliffe,” she teased, “I’m beginning to suspect you are considerably more romantic than you have spent years insisting you are.”
“I am not romantic.”
“You just compared my gown to a rosevine. Unprompted. With visible regret immediately afterward.”
“I observed a similarity. That is different from romance.”
“It is the entire foundation of romance. Keats built an entire career on precisely that kind of observation.”
“Keats would have made it considerably worse,” James countered. “Four stanzas, minimum. Possibly an entire ode.”
“And you managed it in one sentence, which you instantly tried to take back.”
“I have not taken it back.” His voice had lost its teasing edge. “I find I do not want to.”
The space between them had closed at some point without either of them knowing. She could not have said exactly when, only that the careful distance from a moment ago no longer existed, and his attention had shifted entirely off the roses and to her face.
“This is a far more romantic evening than I ever expected to have with you,” she said, a little unsteadily.
“I contain multitudes.” His voice was low. “I did warn you.”
She almost laughed. It caught somewhere in her throat because his expression had shifted again, and the teasing was replaced by something more serious—the same thing she’d glimpsed at the lake, in the nursery doorway, in a hundred unguarded half-seconds she’d been collecting without meaning to.
“Isadora,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Why do you fear it so much?” he asked quietly.
“Fear what?” she whispered.
“Love. You believe in it. You told me that yourself years ago, with absolute conviction. You believe in it more than anyone I’ve ever known.” He held her gaze in the fading light. “And yet you keep it at arm’s length every single time it gets close. Why?”
Her smile faded. She had no ready answer for his question.
The roses were heavy and dark in the last of the light. The lake lay still below them. James was close enough now that she could see every inch of his face, open and unguarded in a way she had rarely been permitted to see.
She opened her mouth.
She was not entirely certain what she meant to say. She felt the easy defense go, the one she had been hiding behind all evening—the teasing, the deflection, all of it dissolving under the steadiness of his gaze until there was nothing left to reach for.