Page 125 of Duke of Sapphire

He had never told her. Not once. He had let her walk out of the study with a letter meant to spare them both, when all he had wanted, for weeks now, was to ask her to stay. He loved her. He had loved her since a coaching yard in the rain, and he had said nothing.

And now she was gone.

CHAPTER 34

“Lemon cake,” Georgiana, Countess De Clare and Charlotte’s paternal aunt, announced, setting the slice on Charlotte’s plate. “It will not fix anything, but it will make the afternoon considerably less bleak. Eat it.”

Charlotte looked at the cake. It was a generous slice, the sort that assumed its recipient had an appetite. She did not, particularly, but she picked up her fork.

The conservatory was pleasant in the late afternoon. Light came through the glass in long, golden panels, and the garden beyond the windows was the kind of orderly English countryside that looked as though it had been arranged specifically to soothe the troubled. Charlotte found it irritating.

“You are not eating it,” Georgiana observed. “You are holding the fork and thinking at the cake.”

“I am about to eat it.”

“You have been about to eat it for three minutes.” Georgiana poured herself more tea with the serenity of a woman who had long since learned to outlast stubbornness. “It is cake, Charlotte. It does not require deliberation.”

Charlotte put a bite in her mouth. It was good. She did not say so.

Her aunt watched her lovingly. Georgiana had always been like that. Charlotte had exchanged perhaps a dozen letters with her over the years, and still the woman had opened her house without a single question, installed Charlotte in the best guest room, and proceeded to feed her at regular intervals as though nutrition were the only thing standing between Charlotte and total ruin.

Perhaps it was.

“Another cup?” Georgiana lifted the pot.

“Please.”

The tea was poured. Charlotte stared at the wrought iron table and thought about nothing in particular, which was her current method of thinking about everything.

Then something orange and enormous launched itself from the garden steps, landed squarely on the table with a sound like a small cannon going off, and sent Charlotte’s teaspoon flying into the flower bed.

Georgiana burst out laughing.

The cat—Apollo, carroty as a harvest moon, with the authority of a creature who had never been seriously inconvenienced in his life—blinked at Charlotte from among the teacups.

Charlotte stared at him. Then she laughed too, just a little, because it was impossible not to. She set down her fork and lifted him off the table, settling him in her lap. He went with magnificent indifference, as if being picked up were a privilege she had earned.

“You,” Charlotte told him, “have absolutely appalling manners.”

“Oh, don’t scold him,” Georgiana said, still smiling.

“Someone must.” Charlotte stroked his ears. He began to purr, deep and mechanical, like a small engine that had found its proper setting. “He nearly upset the cream.”

“He always nearly upsets the cream,” Georgiana said. “It is one of his finest qualities.”

“It is not a quality. It is a deficiency.”

Georgiana raised her eyebrows with great good humor. “Are you saying I did not raise him well?”

“I am saying you have done your best,” Charlotte said. “But cats like Apollo have a mind of their own. They do as they please regardless of what anyone wishes.”

Georgiana smiled. Then the smile softened into something quieter. “So do you, Charlotte.”

Charlotte looked down at Apollo.

“I mean it as a compliment,” Georgiana said. “You always have had a mind of your own. You simply were not always allowed to use it.”

Charlotte said nothing. She kept her fingers moving through the cat’s fur.