The Duke Hid His Royal Crest to Watch How She Handled His Deaf Brother— He Fell for Her Immediately

Chapter 2

The ring stayed in his coat pocket for eleven days.

In that time, Julian Carrick did three things, and it was the doing of them that marked the true beginning of the story — though he could not have said so then, not with any certainty, and in truth the whole shape of the change only declared itself to him later, the way a letter’s meaning only becomes legible once you are holding it at the right distance.

The first thing he did was write to his aunt, declining her further introductions for the season. The second was to write to his steward, with long, uncharacteristically precise instructions that the travelling carriage sent to Kent should go unbranded and uncrested, and that the coachman should be drilled, thoroughly and without a word to the kitchens, to call his master only Mr. Carrick for the duration. The third was to write to Lord Ashcombe — his late father’s oldest friend, the man who had held the household together at arm’s length through the terrible winter of the fever — and it was to this letter that an answer came back by return of post, in the loose, unpunctuated hand of an old man who had long since stopped wondering why anyone did anything.