Harper looked up from his glass. “I beg your pardon?”
“Miss Hosmer.” Edmund leaned back in his chair. “She looms rather large, and I suspect she is the reason that you are here.”
The club was quiet at this hour, most of the other members having gone home to their wives and their beds and their sensible evening routines.
“Oh, you’re assuming things,” Harper grumbled, but at this point, it almost seemed like he was lying to himself.
Which was one of the things that he had told himself never to do. There was no worse sin than a man who cannot tell himself the truth.
“I have known you for eighteen years, Harper. I have seen you navigate your estate, your title, a difficult marriage, and any number of situations that would have undone a lesser man, and I have never once seen you sit in this club at this hour drinking about any of it,” he paused, and shot him a look. “So.”
“I am not drinking about anyone,” Harper said. “I am having a glass of brandy.”
“You have kept the same hours since you were twenty-two years old and you have never once deviated from them without cause. So I will ask again, she looms rather large, does she not?”
Harper said nothing, and took a sip out of his glass.
“Has she always had this effect on you?” Edmund asked. “Or is it a recent development?”
“She does not have an effect on me,” Harper said. “She is a responsibility as the estate came with her and her mother. I have an obligation to see them settled, and that is the extent of my involvement.”
“Right,” Edmund looked at him. “You expect me to believe that.”
“She is a puzzle,” Harper said, after a moment, which he had not intended to say but perhaps the drink had loosened up his inhibitions. “That is all. She is an unusual person and I have not yet fully understood her and I find that…”
“You find that what?”
“Occupying,” Harper said.
Edmund considered this for a moment.
“You have had responsibilities before,” he said. “But you’ve never beenthisoccupied about any of them.”
Once again, he did not answer. But Edmund took it as an opportunity to go on.
“You have not been affected by a woman like this,” Edmund said, “Not in all the years I have known you.”
“It is not like that.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes,” Harper said, but it came out as a hesitation.
“Harper,” Edmund said.
“Mmm.”
“You have never been properly in love before,” Edmund said, “I think perhaps it has finally knocked on your door.”
Harper looked at him then he let out a short laugh, “You are being ridiculous,” he said.
“Am I.”
“Completely,” Harper said. “You are reading a great deal into a glass of brandy and a late evening.”
“I am reading a great deal into eighteen years of knowing you,” Edmund said, “and the fact that you have said her name four times in the last twenty minutes without appearing to notice.”
Harper said nothing..