Page 64 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

Regret bit through Joseph’s skin. In London, there were any number of people like her, Blacks, Indians, visitors native to the Americas, the Moor who ran the bookshop Amaranthe frequented. There was every shade of skin color on display. But he’d brought her to Cornwall, where she was bound to stand out.

She’d known that, and so insisted he give her a position of respect. Being the upper servant of a great house was no small standing in a neighborhood like theirs; servants and tradesmen and land owners alike would recognize and defer to her status.

His clever, soft-hearted, beautiful Inez. It was impossible not to love her.

“How bad is it?” Joseph couldn’t wait until Thaker had finished spooning up the salad, buttered cabbage topped with roasted Cornish earlies, the new potatoes roasted in their skins and sticky with butter and parsley.

“Hmm. What’s that?” Hoskyn was watching Inez with interest, but Joseph also recognized the wariness of the profession.

“You can speak in front of them. Thaker doesn’t hear, and Inez is the soul of discretion.”

Drat it. He’d called her Inez.

“You may call me Mrs. Da Costa,” she said in her musical tone. Not chiding. Simply stating.

She did not wish to use her father’s name? Interesting.

“She is fully informed of my circumstances,” Joseph added, aware he was digging himself a hole. Was he trying to write a sign and place it around her neck, advertising to other men that she belonged to him?

Yes. Yes, he was.

Hoskyn sipped his wine and waited until Thaker and Inez had withdrawn before he turned to Joseph with a regretful air.

“I wish I had better news,” he said.

Much later, sodden with wine and despair, Joseph climbed the narrow servant’s stair to the second floor.

Inez was not on the ground floor, which held the kitchens and offices and a tiny room that doubled as a silver pantry and the housekeeper’s parlor. The kitchen fire was banked for the night, the tables and counters cleaned and scrubbed, the scullery empty.

Wenna had promised she would start looking for staff on the morrow; she vowed there would be likely hands for the indoor and outdoor work to be found in Haye and Trevigro, Frogwell or Kelly Bray, or down to Newbridge, if need be.

How he was to pay them, Joseph didn’t know, but he couldn’t leave two women to run this house by themselves. Inez would know what they needed.

She hadn’t taken a room on the first floor, with the family chambers, and his stomach turned and twisted like a stoat burrowing into a tree trunk. He wanted her nearby. He wanted her in his bed.

The rooms on the second floor were attics and servant quarters, tucked under the sloping roof, plain and small and tidy. Her chamber did, as she’d noted, boast a window, and through it shone the moon, bright enough to light Hoskyn on his way. Inez had offered the solicitor a room for the night, and Joseph knew she had spent their leisurely dinner readying a guest chamber for the man who was at the moment sealing Joseph’s doom with black wax.

But the solicitor declined, saying he had a sister in St. Ive who would put him up for the night, not caring what hour he knocked on her door, and Joseph did not argue to keep him. Not when he knew Inez was waiting, though not like this, sitting in her chair mending something while the candle in its stick burned low on the small chest of drawers. The shadows it drew over her face were loving and mysterious, hinting at the depths of this woman he might never know.

She yawned and put her mending atop the drawers. It appeared she was darning a stocking—one of his. “You should be in bed,” he reproved her.

“I meant to come help you undress.”

“Very well, then. I could use your assistance. And company.”

He swept her into his arms. She bit back a shriek as her feet left the floor, before she realized, like he did, there was no one to hear.

They were alone in the house. They were entirely, completely alone together, as they never had been before and might never be so again.

“I don’t— You’ll drop me,” she reproached him, though she didn’t struggle. Instead she linked her arms around his neck, trusting. He savored the warm weight of her, his lush, soft, woman.

“Bring the candle. I left mine in my room.” He swerved his arms so she could lift the stick and holder, holding it away from their bodies.

“Joseph. I can walk,” she said as he navigated back down the stairs, angling his body so he didn’t bump her head or feet on the walls.

“I want you in my arms. I want you in my arms at all times, as a matter of fact.”

“Bad news?” she asked softly.