Page 44 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“Not to my knowledge, though I confess I have never gone looking hard to find out.” He glanced sideways at her, warmth rather than teasing entering his expression now. “You are better company for midnight wandering than my own thoughts, Louisa. I find I have rather enjoyed this small distraction from worrying about Vane.”

“I might say the same.” She studied the portrait a moment longer, acutely aware of how close he stood beside her, close enough that she could feel the faint warmth radiating from him against the gallery’s night chill. “Though I confess I am somewhat surprised to find you so easily distracted, Your Grace. I had rather thought you the sort of man who worries a problem until it surrenders, rather than abandoning it for portraiture.”

“I am, ordinarily. This past week, I have found that my usual methods have grown considerably less reliable than they once were.”

“Why is that?”

Julian was quiet for a moment, though something in his stillness told her the question had landed somewhere he had not entirely prepared for.

“I could not properly say,” he said eventually.

Louisa suspected, watching his jaw tighten faintly, that this was not entirely true.

The candle guttered between them, throwing their shadows long and close together against the gallery wall.

She became aware of her loosely tied dressing gown, of his shirt open at the collar in a state of undress she had rarely seen outside their most private hours together, of the charged quality the silence had taken on in the last several seconds.

Julian turned his head and found her already watching him, and neither of them looked away.

His eyes moved briefly to her mouth, and Louisa felt her own breath catch, her pulse suddenly loud in her ears, some old careful voice in her head reminding her too late that this was precisely the sort of moment she had spent weeks telling herself did not exist between them, not truly, not beyond ordinary friendship and partnership.

“Louisa.” Her name came out low, almost rough, and she felt it land somewhere beneath her ribs with considerably more force than a single word had any right to carry.

“Yes?” she whispered.

He did not answer immediately.

The candle flickered again, and somewhere in the house, a floorboard settled. The small, ordinary sound seemed to startle them both back into some semblance of sense at precisely the same instant.

Julian cleared his throat and stepped back, putting a proper distance between them that had not existed a moment before. “You ought to fetch your book before you catch a chill standing in this drafty gallery.”

“Yes.” Louisa’s voice came out unsteady, and she gathered her dressing gown closer, grateful for something to do with her hands. “Yes, I ought to.”

“I shall walk you back to the library, if you like.”

“That is not necessary, Your Grace.”

“No,” he agreed quietly, something regretful in it that she could not properly interpret in the dim candlelight. “I suppose it is not.”

They parted at the gallery’s entrance, Julian returning to his chamber, Louisa continuing toward the library with a book she no longer wanted, her heart still beating far too quickly for a woman who had done nothing more than admire an unfashionable portrait with her own husband.

That was nothing, she told herself, climbing the stairs a while later, book unread and forgotten under her arm. A midnight conversation. Nothing more than that. Right?

She did not entirely believe it and suspected, from the careful distance Julian had kept from her at breakfast the following morning, that he did not entirely believe it either.

CHAPTER 21

“Have you a quarter hour to spare this morning, before your correspondence claims you entirely?”

Louisa looked up from her letters, spread across the small writing desk in the blue morning room, to find Julian in the doorway, still in his riding coat, a faint dampness in his hair suggesting he had come straight from the stables rather than pausing to change.

She felt her pulse quicken at the sight of him, some unwelcome echo of the previous night’s candlelit gallery rising unbidden, the way he had looked at her mouth before the floorboards’ settling had startled them both back to sense.

Do not be foolish.

She almost shook herself.

“I have considerably more than a quarter hour, Your Grace, provided you tell me what you mean to spend it on.”