Chapter 116: an invitation she didn’t expect

Chapter 116 — An Invitation She Didn’t Expect

Lucien was waiting outside the classroom when Roxanne finished her morning lessons, standing with his hands clasped behind his back and the expression of a man about to deliver a verdict. Students flowed around him the way water flows around a stone.

Roxanne’s stomach tightened. Lucien never waited for anyone without a reason, and the reasons were usually bad. She stopped in front of him. "What happened? Is it the academy? Has someone changed the royal protection arrangements again?"

"Nothing has happened."

"Then why are you standing here like a statue?"

"I am going into town this afternoon," Lucien said. "I wondered whether you would like to come."

She looked at him for a long moment. "Are you asking me to accompany you on royal business?"

"No."

"Then why do you look like you’re preparing to negotiate a treaty?"

Lucien glanced at her. "Would you prefer I look unprepared?"

"Honestly? I’d pay to see it."

For once, he almost smiled before turning his face away. "I have an errand to run. It will not take long. But I would rather not spend the whole afternoon among people who only wish to discuss obligations."

Roxanne studied him. It was a strange, stiff, careful invitation, and she was far too curious to refuse. She wanted to know what Lucien Moonstone considered an enjoyable afternoon. "All right. I’ll come."

"Good." He sounded faintly relieved. "The carriage leaves in twenty minutes."

"Of course it does."

They travelled alone, without his brothers or any attendants. The carriage rattled down the long road through the pines, and Roxanne watched Lucien unfold a small card from his coat and check it against the position of the sun.

"Is that a schedule?"

"It is a rough outline."

"For an afternoon off."

"A person should know where they are going."

"Lucien, you’ve timed the bakery."

"The bakery is on the way."

She laughed, and he looked out of the window with great dignity. In town, he handled his errand swiftly, a parcel collected from a tailor and a letter posted at the corner office. But once it was done, he stood on the pavement with the parcel under one arm, checking the time again, and Roxanne saw how much more easily he breathed out here. His shoulders had dropped half an inch. He was still planning, though. She could see him doing it.

"You’re scheduling this as if it were a military operation," she said.

"My responsibilities rarely leave room for spontaneity." He said it plainly, without self-pity, and she was glad he did not make it sad.

"Then do one thing without planning it. Just one."

"Such as?"

"Let me choose the next stop."

He hesitated. She watched him weigh it, as though she had asked him to walk blindfolded across a bridge. Then he inclined his head. "Very well. Within reason."

"I make no promises about reason."

She led him down a side street between a chemist and a shop that sold only umbrellas, to a narrow doorway with a faded sign. Inside, the air smelled of dust and old paper, and shelves climbed to the ceiling, crooked and overloaded. A bell jingled above the door.

Roxanne drifted along the shelves with her fingers trailing over the spines. She found battered fantasy novels with dragons on the covers, an atlas with half its pages missing, and a whole row of romances with titles so ridiculous she laughed aloud. She pulled one out. *The Duke’s Unfortunate Secret*. On the cover, a woman in a billowing gown clung to a man with unreasonable hair.

"Look at this," she said, holding it out.

Lucien took it and turned it over. He read the back cover with perfect gravity, his brow slightly furrowed, as though it were a diplomatic cable.

"Are you judging the heroine?" Roxanne asked.

"I am attempting to understand why she keeps making decisions that create unnecessary problems."

"She hides the letter."

"She does. In the first Chapter. For no reason."

"That’s the plot."

"It is a very inefficient plot."

Roxanne put a hand over her mouth. "If you hold romance novels to that standard, you’ll never understand them."

He lowered the book. "Do you think real relationships are supposed to be simple?"

The question was lighter than it sounded, but it had a weight beneath it, and she felt it. She met his eyes, and for a moment the shop seemed very quiet. "I think people make them complicated when they refuse to say what they want."

Lucien looked at her for a heartbeat longer. Neither of them said anything else. He set the book back on the shelf, precisely where he had found it, and Roxanne pretended to examine a shelf of atlases.

They bought nothing but a fat, scruffy fantasy novel for her, and stepped out into the afternoon light. Down the street, music drifted from somewhere, and a strip of coloured bunting hung between two lampposts.

"A market," Roxanne said. "Let’s look."

Lucien glanced at his watch. "We have rather less time than I anticipated. The carriage will wait only until four."

"We can leave, if you have somewhere important to be."

He looked at the watch for a long moment. Then he slipped it into his pocket.

"Which stall first?" he asked.

She stared at him. Then she grinned and took his sleeve and towed him into the crowd.

They spent the next hour wandering aimlessly. They looked at handmade jewellery laid out on velvet, and old records stacked in crates, and paintings of the same harbour from forty different angles. Roxanne tried on a ridiculous hat. Lucien declined to try one, then, after thirty seconds of her stare, tried one and removed it with great speed.

At a stall of curiosities, he stopped. An old fountain pen lay in a tray of brass buttons, its barrel worn smooth. He picked it up and examined the nib with the intensity he gave to treaties.

"How much?" he asked the stallholder.

"Eight silver."

"It is chipped."

"It has character."

"It has damage. Five."

"Seven."

"Five and a half, and I will not discuss it further."

Roxanne stood behind him, shaking with silent laughter. His negotiating face was magnificent, cold, level, and absolutely serious, as though the fate of a kingdom hung on a pen. The stallholder, to his credit, was matching it. They settled at six. Lucien tucked the pen away with a nod of grim triumph.

"You are enjoying yourself far too much at my expense," he said as they walked on.

"You invited me. Your suffering is your own fault."

"I am not suffering."

"Your ears are red."

"It is cold."

"It is not that cold."

He said nothing, and she grinned at the cobbles.

Before the carriage, they stopped at a small café with tables on the pavement and a striped awning. A waiter brought tea and a plate of sugared biscuits. Lucien stirred his cup slowly, and Roxanne watched the street, feeling pleasantly empty.

"What would you do," he said, "if nobody expected anything from you?"

"Sleep for a week. Never attend another class."

"That is not your answer."

"It’s a very good answer."

He simply waited. It was one of the things he did better than anyone she knew. The silence stretched, and eventually she put down her cup.

"I’d try different things," she said slowly. "Without worrying whether people would judge me, or compare me to someone else, or decide what I ought to become. I’d get things wrong and nobody would write it down."

"I understand that more than you might think," Lucien said.

She looked at him. "Do you ever wish you could walk away from being the eldest?"

"No." He considered the word. "I do not regret my responsibilities. But sometimes I wonder who I would be if I had never needed to carry them."

She did not tell him to abandon his duties. She would not have wanted him to. Instead she asked, "What do you enjoy when nobody needs you to be responsible?"

Lucien was quiet for longer than she expected. He turned the teaspoon over in his fingers.

"I don’t know," he admitted.

"Then you should probably find out."

On the journey back, he was quieter, but not distant. The carriage swayed along the pine road, and the light turned gold through the trees. Roxanne read the first page of her new novel and listened to the wheels.

"Thank you," Lucien said, "for accompanying me."

"You could simply have said you wanted company."

"I am not certain I would have known how to ask for that."

She did not push. She let the answer sit, warm and honest, between them.

At the academy steps he paused. "I would like to do it again. Sometime. Without errands, or schedules, or an excuse."

Roxanne smiled. "Careful, Lucien. That almost sounds like you want to spend time with me."

"I thought that was already obvious."

She opened her mouth and found nothing in it. By the time she thought of a reply, he had bowed his head and gone up the steps, and she was left standing in the lamplight with a paperback and warm cheeks.

Back in the dormitory, Isla looked up from her forms. "How was your afternoon?"

Roxanne told her about the bookshop and the heroine who hid the letter, and the pen, and the six silver coins. By the end Isla was laughing so hard she had to put down her pencil.

Then she grew thoughtful. "You know, you talk about him differently when you forget you’re supposed to be figuring out what you feel about all four of them."

Roxanne threw a pillow at her.

But later, in the dark, she remembered Lucien sliding his watch into his pocket just to stay a little longer, and she found herself smiling at the ceiling.