Jeremy stood behind him with three ties draped over his arm, holding each one up in the mirror with the focused consideration of a man who took this seriously, which Val had long since stopped finding strange. Val watched him through the glass and then his eyes drifted to the bandage sitting neatly on Jeremy's forehead and he hadn't asked about it yet because when he'd walked back into the office Lora had been sitting there and the question had gotten buried under everything else.
"Your forehead," he said.
Jeremy's eyes flicked up briefly in the mirror. "Small accident. Nothing worth mentioning."
"She threw something at you."
"I said nothing worth mentioning."
Val looked at him for a moment and then looked back at his own reflection. "She used your name," he said. Not an accusation exactly. Just something he'd noticed and was setting down on the table between them to see what Jeremy did with it. "In the office. She said your name quite casually."
Jeremy selected the dark tie and stepped forward to loop it around Val's collar. "She's easy to talk to," he said simply. "And a genuinely decent person, from what I could tell. Someone like that is good for a household like this one." He said the last part with the mildest possible tone, which was how Jeremy said things he knew would land badly and wanted deniability for.
Val looked at him in the mirror.
Jeremy kept his eyes on the tie. "All I did was speak to her without threatening her. Which, as I have mentioned on several occasions, is not a particularly advanced technique. People tend to cooperate when you ask them like a human being rather than —"
"Did you tell her she needs to be presentable tonight?"
"I've asked the maids to help her dress." He smoothed the tie flat and stepped back. "It's been arranged."
Val turned around. "Which maids."
"Not Foxy," Jeremy said, before the sentence was finished. "I made sure of it."
Val turned back to the mirror. "Good. I wasn't worried. I was thinking of Foxy, actually — the woman tackled her to the floor approximately four seconds after waking up from a coma. I'd hate for Foxy to find herself in a similar situation before dinner."
Jeremy said nothing but the corner of his mouth did something small and quickly suppressed.
The dining room was already arranged when William took his seat, and Joshua settled into his place beside him, and Michael sat across from them all with the comfortable ease of a man who had been invited and wanted everyone to remember it. The food was nearly served. The table was set for two more. The clock on the mantle had already passed the hour.
William looked at the empty chairs.
He did not look pleased.
Outside the dining room doors, Val checked his watch and looked at the empty corridor and then at the doors and then back at the corridor, and the calculation he was running — how long to wait before going in alone and buying her another two minutes — arrived at its conclusion. He pushed the door open.
Behind him, from somewhere down the hall, came the rapid sound of heels hitting marble, slightly uneven with hurry, and then a breathless voice — "I'm sorry, I got lost in the hallways —"
He turned around to tell her exactly what he thought about that.
The words didn't come.
Aqua blue silk, deep halter neckline, the kind of dress that looked like it had been fitted specifically for her because somehow it had. Her hair was swept up, clean and severe, long earrings catching the light at her jaw. The makeup was light enough that it looked like almost nothing and clearly wasn't. She was slightly out of breath from hurrying and her eyes were wide and she was looking at him waiting for the scolding she clearly knew was coming and he stood there for a full second with absolutely nothing available to say.
Then he turned around, lifted his arm, and looked at the door.
"Don't be late again," he said, stiffly.
She took his arm without a word and he felt her hand settle into the crook of his elbow and pushed the door open.
The room was vast and candlelit, the table long enough to make the three men already seated look like a painting, crystal and silverware gleaming in the warm light. Lora's grip on his arm tightened the moment they crossed the threshold — not dramatically, just a small, involuntary press of her fingers that he felt through the fabric of his jacket and said nothing about.
Michael looked up and something happened to his expression that he didn't manage to hide quickly enough.
Joshua's face remained exactly as it always was — a plain, weathered nothing that gave no information to anyone.
William had already opened his mouth — to address the lateness, clearly, the particular set of his jaw said exactly that — and then his eyes moved past Val and found Lora and whatever he had been about to say simply stopped. Not paused. Stopped. Something crossed his face that Val couldn't immediately name, something that moved through and was gone so fast that if he hadn't been watching his father's face specifically he would have missed it entirely — a look almost like impact, like a man who has just been shown something he wasn't prepared for.
Lora noticed it. Val saw her notice it — the small twitch of her brows, there and gone, her head tilting a fraction before she pulled her attention back and smoothed her expression over.
Val stepped forward, his tone shifting so completely that Lora turned her head toward him with the slight, bewildered movement of someone checking they hadn't imagined it.
"My apologies for the delay," he said, warm and easy, one hand covering hers where it rested on his arm. "My wife needed a little more time to get ready. Entirely my fault for not accounting for it."
Lora looked at him.
He could feel it — the sideways look, the slight stiffening, the mental process of a woman confirming that yes, this was the same man who had placed a loaded gun on a desk between them not two hours ago and was now standing in a candlelit dining room being a completely different person — and he kept his eyes on his father and his expression exactly where he needed it and gave her absolutely nothing back.
William looked at them both for a long moment.
Then he gestured toward the empty chairs.
"Sit down," he said quietly. And said nothing else.