Chapter 8 #3
He looked at her, surprised. "Where?"
"Your manor. I went to speak with the staff, before we formally took the case. I needed to understand who I was agreeing to defend." A faint smile. "There is a landscape in the living room. A wheat field, gold under a grey sky. I stood in front of it longer than I meant to."
Damon was quiet for a moment. "And what did they tell you? The staff."
"Let me guess," he added, before she could answer, the dryness returning to his voice. "That I am a high-maintenance scandal in waiting, kept solvent only by my tailor and my charm."
She laughed — a real laugh, warm and unguarded. "Not exactly the words they used."
"How reassuring. I shall have to ask precisely which words, someday, when I have the stomach for it."
"Someday," she agreed.
He set the sketch down on the desk, and for a moment neither of them moved.
"Come," he said finally, his voice gentler. "Whatever you have made for us, I am told it is wise not to let your cooking go cold. I learned that lesson the hard way."
She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her, and she turned toward the door.
He followed — but paused, for the briefest moment, his gaze flicking to the drawer where the second sketch lay hidden beneath a stack of letters no one would think to read.
Then he closed the door behind them, and went down to eat.
◆◆◆
Dinner had been good — better, certainly, than anything that had emerged from that kitchen before. They had eaten mostly in comfortable silence, the kind that no longer needed filling, and when the last of it was cleared, Elizabeth gathered the plates before Damon could reach for them.
He reached for them anyway.
"Allow me," he said, lifting two bowls from the table with the slightly exaggerated care of a man demonstrating competence he had only recently acquired. "I believe I have earned the right, having survived an entire meal without incident."
"You may carry them to the sink," she said. "That is the full extent of the privilege."
He carried them to the sink. Then, rolling his sleeves with evident intention, he reached for the washing cloth.
She took it gently from his hand.
"Despite everything," she said, not unkindly, "you are still a Duke. I appreciate the offer. But I think your talents are better spent on rather more than dishwater." A small pause. "I saw what those hands can actually do tonight."
He considered this with theatrical gravity. "Is this, then, an indirect request for another drawing?"
"Perhaps," she said, and did not deny it further.
He inclined his head, accepted the dismissal with good grace, and left her to it — his footsteps retreating toward the study, the faint scratch of charcoal beginning again somewhere behind the closed door not long after.
Elizabeth stood at the basin alone, her hands moving through the warm water without her full attention, the way hands do when the mind has wandered elsewhere.
Charles's voice returned to her, unbidden.
Or he feels guilty. The photograph. The paper cutter buried near the hedgerow.
The bruises that someone had left on Sarah Thompkins's arms — fingers, not accident.
She made herself hold the thought rather than flinch from it, the way Charles had trained her to hold every uncomfortable possibility until she had turned it over completely and was certain of what she saw.
What if I am wrong about him?
She let the question sit. She did not rush to silence it.
But the longer she held it, the less purchase it found.
She thought of the sketch — Sarah mid-laugh, drawn from a memory he had clearly turned over a thousand times since, never once rendering her as anything but radiant.
She thought of the single tear striking the floorboard, and the rage that had followed it, not directed at his own innocence but entirely outward, toward whoever had taken her.
She thought of a man who had not touched a pencil in years because the woman who taught him to use one was gone, and who had picked one up again only because something in this house, in this strange suspended captivity, had loosened something he had kept shut for a long time.
A man capable of that kind of grief was not, she thought, incapable of imagining capable of violence in the abstract. Men were complicated; she knew that better than most.
But this particular violence — calculated, deliberate, hands closing hard enough to bruise — did not belong to the same hands that had drawn that sketch.
He was murdering his own potential, she thought, setting the last plate in the rack. Burying it under charm and performance and a title he had never wanted to wholly inhabit.
But he could not, she was nearly certain, have harmed a single soul.
Nearly, said some small, disciplined corner of her mind — the part Charles had built, brick by careful brick, over twenty years of teaching her not to trust a feeling simply because it was strong.
Nearly will have to be enough for tonight, she answered it, and dried her hands, and went to find her notes.