Not Quite a Husband by Sherry Thomas

now, with an expression that was almost a smile. “And then what happened?”
    “And then something wonderful happened. I went home that summer and found out that indeed, nothing had changed. My father was thrilled to see me. We cloistered ourselves in the library for hours every day, read the latest papers, debated the insufficiencies of Euclidean geometry, and developed our own list of axioms as a foundation for a new approach to geometry.”
    When Leo finally plucked up the courage to ask the earl whether it bothered the latter in any way that he had under his roof someone who was not ofhis own flesh and blood, Lord Wyden had only smiled and said, “All you need to know is that you are the son I’ve always wanted.”
    Later, on the fjords of Norway with his godfather, with whom he was no longer angry, Leo had related the conversation with the earl. Sir Robert had sighed wistfully—the closest to sentimentality the ever-practical man ever came—and said, “I will always envy Lord Wyden for that. That you are his son—and not mine—in the eyes of the world.”
    In the end, there had been more than enough affection and esteem to go around. He grew closer to both Sir Robert and his father. He became so close to his father, in fact, that when the earl disowned Matthew for a youthful infraction, then disowned Will for standing up for Matthew, for the longest time Leo had refused to believe that the severity of Lord Wyden’s action might not have been entirely justified.
    Bryony sighed. “He knew and he loved you all the same.”
    His bishop took out her knight that had knocked off his queen. “Is that why you don’t speak to your father, because he doesn’t love you enough?”
    She moved not a single muscle, yet he sensed her tremor. Her response was to summon her queen to lay waste to his king knight.
    He took out her queen knight pawn. After she’d ransacked his queen, he’d moved aggressively to endanger her king. But she’d been equally fearless in coming after him.
    She used her queen to check his king. “Watch out.”
    He whisked his king out of harm’s way. “Watch out for what?”
    She menaced his king bishop. “Imminent defeat.”
    He sacked her queen knight. “Yours?”
    “No, yours.” She sailed her queen across the width of the board. “Checkmate.”
    He didn’t understand immediately. He surveyed the board with the laborious incomprehension of a middling student forced to master calculus. Then, shock. It was a true checkmate, with no escape for his embattled king that he hadn’t even realized was embattled.
    Her lips twitched again. She rose. “I will go tell Saif Khan he may serve dinner whenever it is ready.”
    He watched her go. “Now why did we never play chess?” he murmured.
    The question was addressed more to the river and the sky than to her. But she stopped, her head turned, her profile perfectly limned, for a moment, against the purple shadow of the mountain. Astrand of hair fluttered against her lips. Then she went on, without offering any answers.

     
    “Who taught you to play?” he asked later that evening over apricot pudding, an English preparation except for the addition of rosewater and cardamom. Until then he’d been too busy eating, his recovering appetite ravenous for innumerable helpings of food.
    “Callista’s mother,” she said.
    Day had faded. The lantern light cast copper gleams upon her cheeks and her hair. He no longer reeled back in renewed shock each time he saw the white in her hair, but he would never get used to it, the destruction of perfection.
    “Toddy?” Callista’s mother, the second Mrs. Geoffrey Asquith, had been born Lady Emma Todd, according to her tombstone—she’d died giving birth to Callista. But among the Marsden brothers, she’d always been referred to as Toddy.
    She looked up from the pudding, surprised. “You remember her? You were only three when she died.”
    “I remember her funeral. It was one of my earliest