Wynford House was dark when he returned. His butler held the door and said nothing about the state of his employer’s face, which was one of the qualities Anthony paid him for exhibiting. He was halfway to the stairs when the man cleared his throat.
“You have a visitor, Your Grace. Lady Caroline Marfront.” His voice had the scrupulous neutrality of a man committed to having no opinion about this whatsoever. “She arrived some forty minutes ago.”
Anthony crossed the hall and pushed open the drawing room door.
She was at the far window, still in her cloak. She turned when he entered, and for one bare unguarded moment, she looked at him, the way people looked at things they had been quietly worried about and were relieved to find still standing.
Then she saw his face. “Good God,” she said.
“Good evening,” he said.
She took the lamp from the side table and held it up so the light fell across his jaw and cheekbone with the focused attention of someone who had stopped observing and moved directly to doing.
“Sit down.”
Anthony tried to ignore the kick in his chest at her overbearing tone. “I am perfectly?—”
“Sit. Down.” Her chin was up, and her hazel eyes told him that he was now speaking to a determined woman who was not entertaining a counterargument.
So, he sat.
She found a cloth and the basin with the efficiency of someone who had surveyed the room during the forty minutes she had been waiting, poured water, and brought both back. She pressed the damp cloth to his jaw gently.
He had been struck four times tonight with the intention of having something knocked sensible into him.
He was fairly certain it had not worked.
“This isn’t the first time.” She moved the cloth carefully, reading the bruising with the methodical attention she brought to everything. “The cheek is recent. The rest has had time.”
“I’ve been boxing since I was twenty-five, my lady,” he drawled, deciding that a bit of verbal distance would help him control himself with her so close.
Her hands stilled. “That is eight years.” She paused and chose the next question rather than the diagnostic one. “Does it help?”
“Sometimes. When the alternative is worse.”
She pressed the cloth gently to his cheekbone, and the silence between them had weight. The good kind. Outside, a carriage passed in the street. The lamp guttered once and steadied.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
She was quiet long enough that he thought she would not answer. Then: “I saw your face…in the park. After you walked away.”
The lamp threw soft arcs across the ceiling, and she was close. The thing he had been managing at a distance had less room to manage itself.
“I was never supposed to have the title.” He had not decided to say it; it came out the way things came out at midnight with a bruised jaw and a woman watching you without performing patience. “I had an older brother. William. He died when I was seventeen from a sudden fever. The kind that takes a person in three days and does not negotiate.” He paused. “I had been the spare for seventeen years. I had not been trained for anything else.”
She waited because she was actually listening.
“My father spent the previous seventeen years making clear I was the second son in every sense that mattered. After William died, he did not revise this view…he required me to become my brother, which I found I was unable to do, as a matter of basic arithmetic.” He paused. “He said he would endeavor not to die before I was ready. Because he would do anything not to pass the dukedom to me.”
“He was wrong,” she said without the softening preamble people usually added when they thought a subject was delicate.
He looked at her. “I thought you would say he was right. That is generally the considered assessment.”
“Whose?”
“My own, on certain evenings.”
“I have watched you this entire Season,” she said. “Manage estates, attend to your tenants as though they are your particular responsibility rather than an institutional inheritance. I know you have tried to convince everyone you don’t care about any of it. That you are simply a well-dressed man who enjoys a good evening.” Her voice was steady. “But I have been watching, Anthony. And it doesn’t hold.”