Anne smiled faintly. “Three.”
“Your Grace?—”
“Three,” she repeated.
The trainer shook his head. “I do not know when everyone started listening to you.”
“Probably around the time things started improving.”
That elicited another laugh from the stablehand, as well as Dorian himself. Only then did Anne finally notice him standing by the fence. Her expression shifted immediately into something halfway between surprise and suspicion.
“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.
“Long enough,” he replied.
Anne narrowed her eyes slightly. “That sounds concerning.”
“It was educational,” he said. “I had no idea my Duchess had begun terrorizing the entire stables.”
“I am not terrorizing anyone.”
One of the stablehands coughed loudly into his sleeve. The trainer shot him a warning look, and Dorian failed to suppress a smile.
“You negotiated one of my longest-serving employees into surrender.”
“I solved a problem.”
“You bullied a man twice your size into obedience.”
Anne looked entirely unrepentant. “And yet he agreed with me.”
The trainer sighed heavily. “I did not agree.”
“You did,” Anne insisted. “Reluctantly.”
Dorian watched her as she said it, listened to the quiet certainty in her voice and the ease with which everyone around her responded.
Weeks ago, she would have stood at the edge of these conversations, careful not to overstep. Now the stables moved around her without resistance, the staff listening instinctively whenever she spoke.
What unsettled him most was that she herself had not changed. She had always been like that, he was certain of it, but at last she was being taken seriously by all, himself included.
“You realize,” Dorian said after a moment, “that you have become alarmingly difficult to argue with.”
Anne looked almost pleased. “I learned from experience.”
“Oh?”
She met his gaze properly then. “You are very argumentative.”
The stablehands suddenly found their work fascinating.
Dorian laughed despite himself, quieter than usual but entirely genuine. The sound startled him slightly.
“You wound me,” he said.
“I believe I can live with that.”
He did not know whether she was being lighthearted or not, and that alone fascinated him.
