table, and he could damn well use it as he saw fit, whenever he very well pleased.
In theory.
In practice, he was more or less hiding from his own wife. It was thoroughly embarrassing. Discretion was the better part of valor and all that rot, though, and he found the idea of another argument in the same vein as their last one to be extremely trying.
Yes, better to give her a few days to cool off before resuming the normal froideur of their dinners. Dinnertime in the Curzon Street house tended to be just shy of unbearable, in truth. Nothing terribly outrageous, of course—no blistering rows or other such unseemly displays of feeling. They were English, for God’s sake. But the reality was somehow worse—sitting across the table from Violet, always painfully beautiful in her evening gowns, her low-cut bodices a hellish temptation for a man who’d had nothing more than his hand for company in bed these past four years. And the silence—the silence was the worst. Violet, who could rarely cease her chatter long enough to take a breath, so full of life and ideas and curiosity about everything, everywhere—to sit across from her in silence was worse than any argument could have been.
The only thing that made these dinners tolerable was the strength of his cellars, in truth—if he one day squandered his entire fortune on rare vintages, he would lay the blame entirely at Violet’s feet. One could not sit across from her in silence without fortification.
With that less-than-pleasing thought in mind, James had spent yesterday and much of today meeting with his man of business and his solicitors. This was the aspect of owning the stables he had once enjoyed the most—the horse chatter at Tattersalls, less so. He loved to ride—loved the feel of being on horseback, loved the clarity of mind his morning rides afforded him—but he wasn’t the sort to willingly spend an hour debating the merits of a particular filly. However, of late, even the cool logic of the Audley House finances had lost its appeal. What had once been satisfying—taking a task assigned to him by his father and performing it better than the duke could possibly have expected—had lost some of its allure as time wore on. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone—not when he had fought with Violet so often over this very issue—but he was beginning to wish the stables occupied rather less of his time.
The stables at Audley House had been a wedding present. “Getting too old for it myself,” his father had said on James’s wedding day. And James—who had prided himself on the distance he had created between himself and his father, who hated the mere thought of being reliant on the duke in any way—had found himself powerless to resist. Because of Violet. He was about to marry Violet Grey—Violet Grey! A rather hasty wedding, it was true, but this was all to James’s liking. Those ten minutes on that balcony had been the most fortuitous of his life. While he’d planned for them to live in the house on Curzon Street on which he’d spent a chunk of his inheritance from his mother, he loved the idea of being able to offer her a country house as well.
The fact was, he’d been twenty-three and foolish, and he’d have agreed to just about anything if it offered him the chance to make Violet happier.
James had surprised himself with his own competence at managing the stables—and this fact was deeply satisfying to him. He was good at mathematics—not a genius, but very good. He excelled at working out the finances of the stables, maximizing their profits. He didn’t find the buying and selling of horseflesh to be particularly fascinating—he found, in truth, poring over the books related to the home farm at Audley House to be far more interesting—but it was certainly not beyond his abilities. The time spent in the stables—an issue that had caused no small amount of friction between himself and his wife in their happier days—also quickly grew old. But he was determined to make a success of it—to prove to his father that he could, to show Violet that he could lay the world at her feet.
He immersed himself in every aspect of the running of the stables, and it was, if he were to be honest, not entirely satisfying—except for each time he was able to reply to an inquiry from his father with an informed report of his