Page 14 of Duke of Sapphire

“That is a very practical way of describing what you just did out there.”

Henry eased her boot back into place and smoothed the protective linen wrap beneath her cuff. “You are not to put weight on it for the remainder of the day.”

Charlotte looked down at her neatly bound ankle, then up at his stern, unyielding features. "Thank you," she said softly.

With a slight nod, Sappherton rose, moved to his own seat, and picked up the correspondence he had left on the bench.

Charlotte settled back against the squabs and opened her book. She found the same stanza she had read four times in the yard and read it a fifth time without taking in a single word.

Over the edge of the page, she watched him. He had claimed that his helping her was guided solely by cold, unfeeling practicality. Yet he’d dropped to his knees to bind her ankle, which made that claim rather difficult to believe.

She filed that thought away as something worth understanding.

CHAPTER 5

Two days out of Kirkfield, Henry had worked through forty pages of correspondence and Lady Charlotte had appeared to read the same page of her book three separate times. He had noted it. He chose not to mention it.

Her ankle was propped on a folded traveling rug and her cap pushed back slightly. Her restlessness occupied the carriage the way an additional passenger might—taking up space, requiring management, and declining to be ignored.

He annotated another margin.

“What is that?”

He did not look up. “Correspondence.”

“Yes,” she said. “I gathered that. What kind?”

He considered not answering and then decided that answering was more efficient than the silence she would fill with other questions. “A timber supply dispute. Two contracts in conflict, both referencing the same northern estate. My solicitor cannot determine which takes precedence.”

“Which estate?”

He looked up then. She was studying him. And it was not the politely interested expression he received at dinners, the one that meant the other party was waiting for him to stop talking so they could redirect to something more agreeable. This was different.

“Hartley Cross,” he said. “In Northumberland.”

“And the second contract—is it with the same supplier, or a competing one?”

He paused. “Competing. A local mill that underbid the original by twelve percent.”

“Then the original supplier will claim breach,” she said. “Unless the second contract was conditional.”

“It was not conditional. It was poorly drafted.”

“Then your solicitor knows perfectly well which takes precedence,” she said. “He simply does not want to be the one to tell you the cheaper option is going to cost you more.”

Henry set down his pen.

She looked entirely unruffled. “Am I wrong?”

“You are,” he said, “approximately correct. But the situation is more complicated than that.”

“How?”

He explained. She listened, and when he got to the point of friction—the gap between the mill’s delivery schedule and the estate’s seasonal building window—she frowned.

“Could you not stagger the deliveries? Use the mill for the initial phase and bring in the original supplier for the remainder? You would satisfy both contracts in sequence and avoid a breach claim entirely.”

He pondered this solution. “The original contract has an exclusivity clause.”