The Wrong Bride

Chapter Twelve

What followed was not, precisely, the smooth domestic paradise of romance novels.

They fought about the Hargrove account, which she thought he was undervaluing. They fought about Isabel, who called eventually and spoke to Cara for an hour and to Julian for five minutes of the most clipped, technical politeness she’d ever witnessed. They fought about the gala he overbooked her for without asking first, and about the morning she reorganized his study and he said she was rearranging the world whenever she was anxious and she’d said at least I do something about it and they’d both gone silent and then simultaneously started apologizing.

They were, she was realizing, remarkably well-matched in their stubbornness.

They were also— and this she held very quietly, like something she was afraid to examine too closely— remarkably good together. In the ways that daily life revealed; the shorthand they’d developed, the way he always knew when she was about to say something important and went still, the way she’d learned that his coldness in company was not coldness at all but simply his native frequency, and that in private he was —

Not warm, exactly. Not easy.

But present. Fully, startling present. When Julian Blackwood was with her, she had his entire attention, and she’d come to understand that this was not a small thing from a man who had spent fifteen years learning not to give it.