“Wilson did attempt to tell you that before you got on the horse’s back,” Penvale pointed out. Wilson was James’s stablemaster at Audley House.

“I know,” James said ruefully. “I really don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Do you think it odd,” Jeremy said with an air of casual unconcern that instantly set James on his guard, “that you are far more willing to speak to Worthington than you are to speak to his daughter?”

“No,” James said shortly, using the tone he reserved for whenever Violet was mentioned—one that clearly indicated that further inquiries would not be welcomed. Generally this worked well for him; after fifteen years of friendship, Penvale and Jeremy did not expect much—or anything at all, really—in the way of heartfelt confessions from James. This morning, however, was clearly destined to be the most irritating of recent memory, because Jeremy, for once, took no notice of his tone.

“Does he find it strange that when he asks you how his daughter is, you cannot give him any sort of reply with certainty?”

“He might,” James said shortly, “if it ever occurred to him to ask such a question, which it of course does not.” Because Worthington was an ass. A benign ass, it was true—he had given his daughter a generous dowry and left the rest of her needs to his wife—but still an ass. James knew enough about neglectful fathers to know that Violet had minded her father’s lack of attention, even if she’d never said as much.

“But don’t you think—” Jeremy began, clearly with a death wish.

“Jeremy,” Penvale said warningly as James opened his mouth to snap back at Jeremy. “Didn’t the physician instruct us not to upset him?”

This merely had the effect of worsening James’s temper. “I am not a child, nor am I in my dotage,” he said. “So I would appreciate it if you were to refrain from discussing me as though I weren’t here, as you sit at my breakfast table, eating my food.”

Most men would have subsided at this—James’s demeanor of icy calm had, on numerous occasions, proved quite effective at ending an argument—but, unfortunately, Penvale and Jeremy had known him for far too long to be intimidated.

“Are you certain you wish to journey back to London with us?” Penvale asked. “Perhaps you had better rest for another day—that fall yesterday was nothing to take lightly.”

“I’m going back to London today, whether you want me to or not,” James said precisely, taking a sip of his tea. A shaft of morning sunlight streamed through the windows, burnishing Jeremy’s golden hair. Jeremy stared across the table at James with an eyebrow raised, toast in hand, and in the silence that followed, James became fully aware of the extent to which he sounded like a petulant child. He heaved a sigh, then set down his teacup with a clatter.

“My damned head aches, and I just want to sleep in my own bed,” he said, leaning forward to meet Penvale’s and Jeremy’s eyes in turn.

“You have a bed here that, last I checked, belongs to you as well,” Jeremy pointed out.

“It’s not the same,” James said shortly, and shoved his chair back from the table as he rose. Logically, he knew that Jeremy was correct; Audley House was his, along with everything within it, including the beds. He had some frightfully official-looking paperwork buried somewhere in a drawer in his study back in London to prove it. But he could never quite manage to shake the feeling he had when he was here—the feeling that his father was nearby. And, of course, there was the other damned fact: that here in the country, Violet wasn’t.

“I’m going to pack,” he said. “We’ll depart in an hour.”

Without another word, he strode from the room.

It was absurd, he reflected as he climbed the stairs. Ludicrous, really. It had been four years since he and Violet had shared a bed. In London, he slept in his bedchamber and she in hers, separated by a wall, a dressing room, a connecting door, another dressing room, another wall, and four years’ worth of cold silences. And yet he still slept easier knowing that she was under the same roof. It was just the sort of sentimental nonsense that, prior to his marriage, he would have had no time for.

Of course, before his marriage, he wouldn’t have thought himself the sort of man to let one argument with one woman ruin four long years of his life.

And yet he had.

Violet had refused to accompany him on any of his trips to Brook Vale since the day of their argument—a day he had taken to referring to, in the privacy of his own head, as the Die Horribilis. Each time he departed, he asked her, with his usual politeness—with the voice that he knew made him sound like an ass, even as he was using it—whether she would like to accompany him. Take a bit of the clean country air. Et cetera. Her answer was always no.

And James was always disappointed and relieved in almost equal measure.

He shouldn’t have minded. She hated those stables—he’d lost count of the number of times she had told him that she wished he’d spend less time at them, leave the day-to-day running of them to his—entirely competent—staff. They were hardly in dire financial straits, not with her dowry and his inheritance—it wasn’t as though they needed to worry about his inattention to the minutiae of the stables’ operation sending them into ruin.

It had always irritated him that she couldn’t see that all those hours spent at the stables were, in large part, for her. That he had to prove to her, to his father, to himself that he was the sort of man who could make something. Manage something. He’d had no title to offer her other than a courtesy title; he wasn’t responsible for the running of the dukedom, like his brother would one day be. But he somehow felt that these stables gave him a purpose, and in so doing made him worthy of her. He wanted to be better than whatever feckless, idle, perhaps better titled aristocrat she would have married if she hadn’t met him on that balcony, and that she never understood this had therefore been a constant source of friction.