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She nodded. “Then he loved your mother quite a lot, didn’t he?”
He caught his breath at her words, the loss as bleak and frozen as if it’d happened yesterday. “Yes.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Lucky” wasn’t an attribute most people assigned to him. “Why?”
She closed her eyes and tilted her face to the sun. “My father was mad.”
He looked at her sharply. Craven had made his report last night. The late Viscount Kilbourne had been estranged from his own father, the Earl of Ashridge, and the rest of his family, and had been known for making wild, unfortunate investments—and, at his worst, raving in public.
He supposed the normal thing to do would be to offer some word of sympathy, but he’d long ago used up all his tolerance for polite, meaningless phrases. Besides. She’d been brave enough to forgo the usual false comfort when he’d told her of his own loss. It seemed only just to offer her the same dignity.
Still, he couldn’t help a small frown as he thought of her as a small girl, living with an unpredictable sire. “Were you frightened?”
She glanced at him curiously. “No. One always thinks one’s upbringing—one’s family—is perfectly normal, don’t you think?”
He’d never considered the matter: dukes weren’t, generally speaking, considered normal. “In what way?”
She shrugged, her faced tilted toward the sun again. “One’s own family and situation are all one knows as a child. Therefore they are, by default, normal. I thought everyone had a papa who sometimes stayed awake all night writing philosophical papers, only to burn them all in a rage in the morning. It was only when I was old enough to notice that other fathers didn’t act like my own that I realized the truth.”
He swallowed, oddly perturbed by her recitation. “And your mother?”
“My mother was an invalid,” she said, her voice precise, unemotional. “I rarely remember them in the same room together.”
“You have a brother,” he replied, testing.
Her brow clouded. “Yes. My twin, Apollo. He’s in Bedlam.” She turned to look at him, her eyes wide open and sharp. “But then you already know that. My brother is notorious and you’re the type of man to find out all he can about a prospective wife.”
There was no reason to feel shame so he neither denied nor confirmed that he’d had her investigated along with her cousin. He simply held her gaze, waiting.
She sighed, turning away from the wall. “Lady Penelope will want me soon.”
He followed her down the short staircase, watching her level shoulders, the vulnerable angle of her nape as she bent her head to watch her steps, the companionable bump of Percy against her skirts. It would be the height of idiocy for the Duke of Wakefield to pursue the cousin of the woman he wanted as wife. And yet, for the first time in his life, Maximus wanted to let the man rule him instead of the title.
Greaves merely looked a little curious. “Your Grace.”
Percy, who had been investigating the tall reeds by the edge of the pond, lifted his head at the sound of her voice and appeared to take it as invitation to run to her and attempt to hurl himself against her legs.
Miss Greaves gave the dog a stern look before he’d even reached her, and said simply, “Off.”
Percy collapsed at her feet, his tongue hanging out the side of his jaws, ears back as he gazed up at her adoringly.
Maximus shot the dog an irritated look as he turned and began walking back around the ornamental pond. Miss Greaves fell into step beside him.
“I trust that you rested well last night, Miss Greaves?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” she replied.
“Good.”
He nodded, unable to think of anything else to say. Usually he disliked company on his morning walk, but for some reason, Miss Greaves’s presence was almost… soothing. He glanced sideways at her and noticed for the first time that her feet were bare. Long, elegant toes flexed against the ground as she walked. They were quite dirty from the forest floor and the sight, if anything, should’ve filled him with disgust for such a shocking display of impropriety.
Yet disgust was the exact opposite of his reaction.
“Did you build this?” Her voice was low and rather pleasing as she gestured to the tower folly they were approaching.
He shook his head. “My father. My mother saw something similar on a trip to Italy and was quite taken with the idea of a romantic ruin. Father had a tendency to indulge her.”
