Page 1 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

Chapter One

The cup slipped from Tess’s hands and broke against the floor in three clean pieces, and the tea ran dark across the boards to the toe of Sir Malcolm’s boot. The maid went white to the lips, for she had been three weeks in the house and already knew what a broken cup cost in it.

He laid his newspaper down with both palms flat, setting it by as a thing he meant to take up again, and considered the maid coldly over the top of it. “Spode does not come cheaper, Tess, because your hands have gone clumsy in the cold.”

Tess was already on her knees in the spill, gathering the broken china into her apron with fingers that would not hold steady, her chin tucked low against whatever he might say next.

“It was only a cup, Sir Malcolm,” the maid whispered, not daring to lift her eyes.

“It was carelessness.” He turned from the maid to the woman at the foot of his table. “You will forgive the observation, Renae, but I begin to think you train them to it.”

Renae Whitmore, who had been a great lady once and kept his joyless house now, set her own cup down without a sound and rose. She crossed to Tess and drew her up by the elbow, a hand resting a moment on the thin shoulder. “Then I am grateful it chose the china to break upon, rather than the girl’s nerve, which would cost us a deal more to replace and cannot be ordered down from London.”

He turned the whole of his attention upon her. “You indulge them.”

“I house them, feed them, and pay them late, as you require.” She poured herself more tea. “I have not yet found the trick of doing all three and frightening them besides. You would manage it before the tea was cleared, I daresay.”

“You will take the cost from the housekeeping.”

“I will take it from my own pin money.” She held his look down the length of the table. “You may call it generosity afterward, if the word sits comfortably in your mouth.”

“Sentiment is expensive, Renae.”

“So is a good maid replaced every quarter because the last one wept in the larder where the others could watch her do it,” she answered, just as quietly. “I have found kindness the cheaper economy. It never shows in the books you keep, I grant you, but then the truest costs rarely do.”

He folded the newspaper a second time, though he had already set it down. “You spent four shillings on candles for the servants’ hall last quarter.”

“I did. They cannot black your boots in the dark, and you mind grey boots a great deal more than you mind four shillings.”

“I mind a wife who keeps the accounts as though the money in them were her own.”

“It is the nearest thing to money of my own that I have.” She matched his stillness, the one habit of his she had ever troubled to learn. “You must forgive me the pretense. It demands nothing of you but your observation.”

He said nothing for a moment, in the particular silence nine years of matrimony had taught her to read as dismissal. “I leave for Bath on Thursday.”

“How long, this time?” she asked, without looking up.

“A sennight. Lucien has an affair of business that wants my name on the papers, and not merely my hand sent down by the post.”

“Lucien’s affairs are forever wanting the man and not the signature.” She refilled her own cup, since no one in the room was to be trusted to do it for her this morning. “And what is the affair?”

“It does not concern you,” he said curtly.

“Almost nothing does, by your reckoning, and I have long since stopped minding. It frees the hours wonderfully.” She set the pot down. “You’ll want the grey trunk packed, not the brown. The brown has a buckle gone and I have not yet had the saddler to it.”

“You keep a close watch on my luggage, for a woman so indifferent to my business.”

“I keep a close watch on everything within these walls. It is the one office I was given when I came to them, and I have grown unaccountably good at it.”

He drew on one glove and then the other. “See the Pelham dinner is managed while I am gone. I’ll not have it said the house came apart the hour I turned my back.”

“The Pelhams will dine here as well as they ever have, and never know which of us was at the table to make it so.” Her tone gave him nothing to hold. “Your guests have never once dined on the truth of this house, Sir Malcolm. They dine on what I make of it, and I make plenty out of very little. It is a skill you have had nine years to thank me for and have never once found the occasion.”

“You have an answer for everything, madam.”

“I have an answer for everything you say, which is the smaller accomplishment of the two. You say very little.”

He rose without haste and left the room, and the house closed over his going as it closed over everything, with no sound to mark that anything had gone.