Page 13 of Miss Ashbury and the Anatomy of Mending a Heart

Ah, here it is. The inquisition.

“A couple of weeks now.” She kept her tone light.

It had actually been well over two months, but he didn’t need to know that.

“And how long are you planning on staying?”

Though they walked quickly, the baron didn’t feel the need to watch where he was going. Instead, he stared down at her as they went. Vera kept her face resolutely forward, tried not to let on how distracting she found his gaze. He was a full head taller than her, with sharp brown eyes that took everything in at a glance. If he were a kind man, and if he lost the beard and got a proper haircut, he might have been very pleasing indeed.

But he wasn’t kind. Or welcoming. Or anything close to the sort.

“I’m not quite sure.” Vera tried to sound carefree, breezy, as if she were the sort of fashionable lady who was often invited to stay in grand houses for indeterminate lengths of time. She thought her tone pulled off the illusion, even though she clenched the handle of her basket so hard it creaked.

Stephen’s eyes flicked down and she loosened her grip. She was unreasonably irritated that he’d picked up on the single detail that betrayed her inner turmoil.

“How long are you staying?” she snapped.

She regretted the words the instant they left her mouth. This was not the way to obtain his sympathy, his welcome. But there was something about him that she couldn’t even bring herself to pretend to like.

“It’s my house. I can stay as long as I like.”

Vera coated her lips with another cloying smile and tried again. “I only meant that you’re so dedicated to India. Surely you’re going to head back soon?”

Please, she thought, desperately. Please just go back to India.

“No.” It was a clipped, curt answer that left no wiggle room in interpretation.

“Why not?”

“I hardly see how that’s any of your business.”

She stopped in the lane, whirled to face him. “And yet, it’s your business how long I’ll stay?”

“It’s my house,” he repeated, doggedly. “Of course it’s my business how long guests stay.”

The emphasis he put on the word had her narrowing her eyes. He said it as if he doubted its truth, as if it meant something completely different than the traditional definition, but for the life of her, Vera couldn’t figure out what.

What he said was true—it was his house. It was his business how long guests stayed. As the owner, he could see her out on the front stoop that very instant, and she wouldn’t have anything to say about it.

Vera turned her face down the lane and began walking once more.

“Where did you say you were from, again?” he asked.

“I’m from London.”

“You grew up in London?”

She nodded. It was mostly the truth. Of course, she’d been to the countryside a few times in her youth, but the bulk of her life had been spent behind the brick walls of the London townhome of her parents, Lord and Lady Ashbury, of middling fortune and even lesser fame.

Now, she didn’t even have claim to that.

“How did you end up in Devon?”

“I came with the Duchess of Canterbury.”

It was the truth, though Candace hadn’t been the duchess at the time. Another story for another day—Vera certainly wasn’t going to tell the baron the truth of that. He seemed to want to believe the worst of her for some reason; she wasn’t about to tell him that Candace had been running from a scandal when she left London, and that Vera had been running from home.

“But she wasn’t the duchess yet, was she?”