He exhaled, the fight draining out of him until even his hands felt unfamiliar at his sides.
There was nothing in the room worth breaking, nothing he could smash that would restore what had just walked out the door. But that did not stop his hands from itching for something to do, some way to occupy his mind, to escape his own thoughts.
So he did the only thing he had ever trusted himself to do when the world threatened to unravel.
He retreated to his workshop.
For hours and hours the hammer fell, the plane whispered, the scent of shavings gathered thick in the air. The servants wisely kept their distance. Angus and Sable did not.
The great dog lay stretched near the door, chin upon his paws, amber eyes tracking Julian’s movements without comment. Close enough to follow, far enough not to crowd.
Sable occupied the windowsill, tail curled neatly about herself, observing with that inscrutable feline patience that felt suspiciously like judgment.
And Julian…
He constructed a chair. A new design.
It began as lines on parchment. It became something else entirely.
Sturdy. Balanced. Beautiful without being overly ornamental—save for the carved rosebuds winding along the crest rail.
He swore when he realized what he was doing.
Damn it.
It was the sort of piece one built for permanence. For comfort. For someone who might sit beside one’s hearth for a lifetime.
It was, most inconveniently, forher.And as he worked, his anger thinned.
She might have withheld the truth. She might have maneuvered him.
But she could not have fabricated all of it.
Her determination—incomprehensible as it was—to… save him, had not been rehearsed. The tremor in her voice when she spoke of the estate’s future had been real.
Why the lie, then?
The answer came to him slowly, unwillingly. One that she had already provided him, though he had been in no place to hear it at the time.
If she had arrived announcing herself as the daughter of a duke… as the sister of Kenbrooks… Would he have permitted her to remain?
No.
He would have had Finch and Mrs. Wetherby escort her home immediately.
Not because he could not be hospitable, but because he wasn’t an idiot.
He had withdrawn from society, yes. But he was not ignorant of its machinery. A noblewoman discovered alone in his house? The implications would have been immediate. Irreversible.
Which meant…
Lying about who she was had been the only way she could stay.
Her deception may still have been designed to trap him, but if that had been her intention, it was a very poorly planned trap indeed.
Her brother had never demanded that Julian marry her, no—quite the opposite.
Four days. He’d allowed her to stay for four days!