Page 49 of Baron Bolt

“Do you not think so, Damian?”

“Possibly.”

“The east room, though. You were an east-room baby yourself, you know, and look how⁠—”

“Mm.”

Across the table his wife ate her breakfast and did not once glance his way again. Every bite in its place. Every minute exactly what he had silently commanded. He sat in the middle of his own success and it felt like he was back in the dark cellar with the madman.

He gave the meal as long as decency required. Then he set down his cup, folded his napkin, and rose.

“Ladies. You will excuse me?”

His mother stopped with a word half-said. He bowed to all three of them equally. Nothing singular. Nothing warm. If Ophelia lifted her eyes to him as he turned away, he did not let himself know it.

The study was at the back of the house. His boots sounded loud in the empty hall. Behind him, faintly, his mother’s voice started up again, and under it, once, Ophelia’s. Light. Easy. Giving nothing away. That was his doing too.

Retreats saved lives. He had commanded them. One gave up ground. One had bled for it because holding it would cost more than it was worth, and one did not let oneself love the ground. One marched the men out in good order and one did not look back at it.

He had never hated an order more. He had never been more certain he was right. She would not have an undead man’s hands on her. If the price of that mercy was the anger in her eyes when he called her Lady Archer, then he would pay it every morning for the rest of whatever this was. The alternative was unspeakable. Last night he had wanted the unspeakable so badly his teeth had ached with it.

Damian let himself into the study and set his hand to the key. He stood one moment. One weak, unpardonable moment. Listening to the far-off sound of her voice.

Then he turned the key. The door clicked. He was alone with the ledgers, exactly as he had stated.

* * *

Ophelia had come down to breakfast with a joke in her pocket.

The joke was still in her pocket when he shut himself in the study.

She knew what had changed. That was the worst of it.

Not the child. He had known about the child before he married her. Had claimed it, protected it, sat through wet-nurse correspondence and nursery schemes without once making her feel the weight of what he had undertaken.

There had been only one new card on the table since yesterday morning.

The kiss.

Last night she had leaned against the one person in her life that did not move and discovered, with something perilously close to happiness, that he could warm.

By breakfast he had stepped away.

Papa had loved her, and gone. Edward had liked her, and died. And now Damian had called her Lady Archer and had shown her, as plainly as any man could without saying the words, where the boundary lay.

Very well.

She would not chase him. She would not ask what she had done wrong and give him the satisfaction of knowing how much the answer mattered. She had played bad hands before.

But there was one difficulty she had never encountered at any table.

Every gentleman she had ever played had wanted something. Money. Flattery. Victory. Her. Find the stake and she could understand the play.

For one evening she had thought she knew what Damian wanted.

By morning he had buttoned the want away with everything else he kept beneath that coat.

Ophelia had no idea how to play a man whose desire she could not guess.