Page 32 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“I know the history of it. Some of the worse parts I drew up myself.”

Her hands settled in her lap and stayed there. “Then you know the end before I tell it. The roof held, Elias. It held beautifully, for nine years. And the rain still got in, by a way I had not thought to mend, and I lived out all nine of those years dry and drowning in the very same hour. I made myself a promise standing over Malcolm’s accounts. I would not sign for that particular weather a second time, however decent the landlord, and however cold the night he chose to offer it on.”

He set his hat back upon his knee, settling in to be refused properly. “You would want for nothing in my house, Renae. You would not be crowded. I am a man of regular habits and small demands, who has lived alone long enough to have learned the worth of another person’s quiet.”

“I do not doubt one word of it. That is the cruelty of the offer, Elias. There is nothing in it to refuse. It is a good life, freely given, and I am refusing it for no better reason than that I have lately learned the difference between a life a woman could bear and a life she could want. I only learned it this past month, and the learning has ruined me entirely for the bearing.”

“That,” Elias said, after a silence that did him credit, “is the most graceful no any woman has handed me, and I have been handed a respectable number of them, being precisely the sort of man women are careful to be graceful to.”

“You are determined to make me laugh at my own funeral.”

“It is the one service I am still qualified to render you, it seems. The legal ones have all turned out to be condolences in a stiffer collar.” He stood, and gathered his hat. “It is not a no, then?”

“It is a not yet, and an I am afraid, and a thank you that has nowhere to set itself down. Will you let it be those three things a while longer, and not press it into a tidier shape before it is ready to hold one?”

“I will let it be anything you wish, on a single condition, and I make it as your friend and not the suitor you have just so kindly declined.” He paused with his hand on the latch, and would not turn fully back to her. “Do not refuse me for a grander shelter wearing a finer coat. A duke’s heir can out-rank your cousin where I cannot, and out-spend him, and I would be a poor friend and a worse solicitor if I let you walk past the surest answer to your trouble out of pride. It does not live nine miles off in a cold gig, Renae. It sleeps under this very roof, and I have eyes in my head, and I drove in past the manner in which a certain gentleman contrived to be near the door you would come through.”

“Elias.”

He paused with his hand on the latch. “Only be certain it is joy, and not merely a taller roof dressed up as one. You above every woman I know have earned the difference between the two, even where the world has not troubled to offer it to you. Now I have said it, I will not say it again, and you may have the satisfaction of telling me I overstepped.”

“You did not overstep. You drove nine miles to be honest with me, and there is no overstepping in honesty.”

“There is one thing more, then, and then I am done.” He let the latch alone a moment. “You speak of him as though holding him close to your heart would ruin you. You did not see the dinner I have heard described. The county has already decided what I am to that house, Elias, on no evidence at all, only the look of a warm word across a table. If I wedded where you point, I should not be solving my trouble. I should be confessing to it, in front of every hostess in three counties, and handing my cousin the one weapon he has not yet thought to forge.”

“Then the matrimony would have to be the answer to the whisper, and not its proof. There is a difference between a kept woman and a duchess, Renae, and all that difference comes down to a church, a settlement, and a ring, and it is the only difference the county has ever consented to respect. You would not be confessing to anything. You would be ending the argument by the simple expedient of winning it.” He opened the door at last. “But that is a calculation for a clearer head than either of us has tonight. There is only a debt between us now, and it is the most uncomfortable kind to carry up a cold staircase at night.”

She walked him to the door, because she had walked a great many people to a great many doors and it was the one courtesy that had never failed her. At the gig he took her hand briefly, the only time in the whole long afternoon that he had.

“Whatever you decide, send to me. Not as a suitor. As the man your father left to mind the account when he no longer could. That post at least is still mine, and I have no intention of resigning it.”

“I will send. I promise you I will send.”

She stood in the cold a moment after the gig had gone, working her face back into the shape a housekeeper’s face was permitted to wear in the corridors.

Declan was in the doorway of the small parlour when she came in, a doorway he had no earthly reason to occupy, the room being cold and unused and a good nine doors from anywhere his business properly lay.

“You walked him out to his gig yourself,” he said stiffly, before she had got the parlour door fully open.

“It is customary to see a guest to the door, my lord. I do as much for the rector and the coal-merchant, and read no almanac into either. You need not read one into this.”

He held his place in the frame of the doorway. “Mr. Thornbrook stayed some while.”

“He did. The roads were poor, and the matter was not a short one.”

He asked the next as though the asking cost him nothing, and the show of ease told her exactly what it had cost. “Is Mr. Thornbrook handling your legal affairs now?”

“Among other considerations, my lord.”

“What other considerations?”

She set the last cup on the tray without hurry. “The sort one does not customarily lay before one’s employer over the breakfast accounts.”

The word landed where she had aimed it. She watched it strike, the flat of it catching him across the face he was usually so careful to hold level, and for once he was not dry. He had spent a month being warm at her in a hundred deniable ways, and shehad told him in one chosen noun exactly how the world filed the two of them, and the filing sat plainly on him in a place he could not reach to tidy away.

He said it nearly to the floor, in the manner of a man afraid of the answer he has asked for. “You are angry with me.”

“I am a housekeeper, my lord. I am not permitted to be angry. I am permitted to be efficient, and I am being extremely efficient about it. You will observe the brass has not once suffered for my temper.”