Page 12 of The Winter Companion

“He didn’t notice them.”

She huffed a short laugh. “I can well believe that. He doesn’t seem to notice much of anything these days.”

He guided her not to the main staircase, but down a narrow corridor in the opposite direction. It opened onto a set of curving stone steps.

The servants’ stairs.

Miss Hartwright gave him a questioning look.

He shrugged. “It’s easier.”

Easier for him, anyway. It saved him from running into anyone. From having to talk. The servants he passed along the way rarely engaged him. Unlike the Abbey’s guests, they hadn’t any time for conversation.

Miss Hartwright didn’t seem to be interested in conversation either.

At least she was no longer upset about her dog.

It hadn’t occurred to him that he was being high-handed by introducing Paul and Jonesy to Bertie. He’d been trying to be helpful. To do her a service. The idea that he’d put any animal in danger was so far from the truth as to be laughable. But how was Miss Hartwright to know that? She was a newly arrived stranger. A lady who didn’t know him at all.

He went down the narrow steps ahead of her with an ease born of familiarity. When she didn’t follow, he looked back, brows raised in question.

She was poised at the top of the stairs, her skirts clutched in her left hand, revealing a glimpse of sturdy leather half boots—and a rather trim pair of ankles. “If you wouldn’t mind?” She extended her right hand to him.

He hesitated for what seemed an interminable length of time. And then he took her hand, engulfing it carefully in his. He was grateful the staircase wasn’t properly lit. Had it been, she’d have no doubt marked the heat that rose in his neck and face. He felt it everywhere, that peculiar warmth, as if he were a furnace that had been stoked with a sudden shovelful of glowing coals.

It was unsettlingly intimate. Bare skin to bare skin. But Miss Hartwright didn’t appear to notice it at all.

“I don’t know how a lady is meant to navigate such stairs in the present fashion,” she said. “My skirts are as wide as the steps.”

An image of the Abbey’s housemaids in their smart dark dresses and white aprons formed in Neville’s mind. Miss Hartwright was equally smart and starched. Neat as a pin, in fact, in a long-sleeved gray dress with a form-fitting bodice and a set of delicate buttons that marched from her impossibly small waist all the way to her collar.

But unlike the dresses worn by the maidservants, Miss Hartwright’s skirts were full, standing wide over layers of petticoats and crinoline.

“The housemaids don’t…” Neville faltered. “They…” He tried and failed to get the words out. It was impossible when his thoughts kept drifting to the sensation of Miss Hartwright’s slim hand clasped so snugly in his.

“Their skirts aren’t quite like mine? I daresay they aren’t. It wouldn’t be very practical.”

“N-no.”

She stepped down after him, clutching tight to his hand.

It was two flights before they reached the kitchen. A line of evenly spaced gas wall sconces lit the way into a cavernous room with a stone floor and a long wooden table and chairs. A footman was seated there, absorbed in polishing the Abbey’s collection of silver. Nearby, Cook stood in front of a steaming pot on the stove, talking loudly to one of the kitchen maids.

At the opposite end of the room, a fire roared in the hearth. Bertie was asleep in front of it, along with Paul and Jonesy.

Miss Hartwright dropped Neville’s hand as she crossed the floor to her dog. Her steps were brisk and purposeful. Though small, she wasn’t weak or timid, he didn’t think. Not in the normal course of things. And if she required assistance—as she had on the stairs—she seemed to have no qualms about asking for it.

Neville flexed his fingers. He could still feel the delicate curve of her hand cradled in his. The sweet, uneasy warmth of it. As if she’d branded herself on his skin, leaving an indelible mark.

Jonesy chose that moment to lift his head and growl.

Miss Hartwright stopped short.

Neville strode to her side. “No,” he said to Jonesy.

The mastiff obeyed, though he continued to watch Miss Hartwright with a hostile eye.

“That’s Jonesy,” Neville said. The older mastiff was crochety at the best of times, downright aggressive at the worst. “And that’s Paul. Paul is… He’s younger.”