Page 39 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

She drew the shawl loose and gathered it over one arm. “It is a great deal of house to call a cottage.”

“And?” he asked.

She looked past him toward the staircase, then back to him, still holding the wet shawl half gathered against her gown. “And I have not decided what I think of it.”

“No,” he said, more gently than he had intended. “You would not, on the first evening. It would be unlike you to settle a thing before you had counted it twice and checked your own sum.”

She went still.

The shawl remained half off her shoulders, the rain darkening the fabric where her hand held it. She looked at him as though he had set down on the table a fact about herself she had not known anyone in the house had troubled to learn.

For a moment, she did not answer.

He could have said more. He knew it, and he said nothing.

At last, Ellen lowered the shawl fully from her shoulders. “Good night, Your Grace.”

The words were formal. The voice was not one he had heard from her before.

Theodore inclined his head and stepped aside from the foot of the stairs. “Good night, Duchess.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“You’ll want to mind the grey, Your Grace. He bites strangers on principle, and he hasn’t yet decided you’re not one.”

Ellen stopped a little short of the stall and kept her hand at her side. “What is his name?”

“Sefton. After the course. The old duke liked his racing.”

“And you are the head groom, and you have not said so.”

“Hibbert, Your Grace.” He shifted the halter on his shoulder. “I was deciding whether you’d want a horse to look at or a horse to ride.”

“The second sort. You can stop deciding.”

She turned her shoulder to the door, let her gaze slide off the grey’s eye to the wall behind him, and made a low sound in her throat that went nowhere in particular.

“Now then,” she told the wall. “Nobody is asking you anything.”

The grey’s ears came up a quarter of an inch.

She let the back of her hand drift into the air near his shoulder without reaching for him, and after a long suspicious moment he brought his muzzle round and breathed hot over her knuckles.

“He has not done that for a stranger in nine years.” Hibbert had gone very still. “Took the top of my thumb off in the spring. Where does a duchess learn to stand like that at a stall?”

“In a stall. My father kept hunters.” Her hand fell away slowly, lingering for a moment without the slightest trace of abruptness. I was put up before anyone thought to tell me it was unsuitable, and I cleaned tack until they told me that was unsuitable too.”

“Then you’ll know what you’re looking at down the row. Come and see.”

He took her down the line, and she read the horses as she passed them, the way another woman might read faces at a ball.

“That bay is favouring his near fore.”

“Aye, and the farrier says I’m an old woman for fretting it.”

“May I see the leg?”

“You’d want to go in to him?”