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He could spare an hour.

“Three nights,” he relented. “To begin with.”

Laura’s whole face changed, relief and something warmer flickering across it. She smiled through perfectly straight white teeth. “Tonight?”

Her smile is breathtaking.

“Tonight,” he heard himself say, and felt absurdly lighter for it, as though he’d set down a weight he hadn’t noticed he had been carrying. “Tell Mrs. Holt to have the kitchen hold supper until I’ve had time to wash the Aldridge farm off me.”

“I’ll tell her.” Laura turned for the door, then paused with her hand on the handle and glanced back at him. “Thank you, Nathaniel.”

Nathaniel.

It was one of the few times she’d used his Christian name, and it landed somewhere low in his chest, warm and unwelcome and entirely undeniable.

“Laura,” he said, and watched a flush climb up her throat. “You have a smear of dirt just here.” He pointed to his own cheekbone, unable to let the moment linger any longer.

“Oh, I shall go and wash at once,” she mumbled, her cheeks pinkening.

She touched the wrong spot, missed it twice, and left without another word, looking flustered in a way that did absolutely nothing to help him return to his ledgers.

He sat there for a long while after she’d gone, the work forgotten beneath his hands.

Her words echoed in his mind, and he found himself picturing Isabella at nineteen. He could see her laughing beneath the same oak before their father’s disapproval had taught her to laugh more quietly.

He thought of the letters she used to send him from Grantham House in the early years of her marriage, full of small, foolish joys—a foal born wrong-footed and thriving anyway, Iris’s first stumbling steps across the nursery.

He had kept every one of those letters. He hadn't been able to bring himself to read them again since she died, though he knew precisely which drawer they sat in.

He thought of the years after, when her letters had grown shorter and further apart, and he had told himself it meant nothing. He had told himself that marriage simply occupied a woman’s time, that after the scandal she had endured, his hunt for Cumberlea’s secrets was more urgent than her silence.

He had been wrong about that in ways he was still paying for.

He suspected he would keep paying for it for the rest of his life.

But what unsettled him now was not the grief itself. It was the fact that he had been sitting across the desk from a woman who refused to let him hide behind it. He felt open and raw, and had wanted something other than the weight of it all on his shoulders.

I want supper. Ordinary, foolish, unremarkable supper, with a niece who names tulips Gerald and a wife who sees straight through me.

He acknowledged the wanting but did not know what to do with it, or what it could mean for a man like him.

He only knew that he had agreed to it, and found, turning the thought over once more before he rose to wash the farm off himself, that he did not regret it.

CHAPTER 12

Iris arrived with Miss Borden, wearing her best dress and her hair plaited so tightly it pulled at her eyebrows.

“Lady Iris insisted on dressing in her finest,” Miss Borden explained.

“She looks splendid,” Nathaniel said, rising to his feet and pulling out a chair for his niece. “Thank you, Miss Borden. You may take the rest of the evening. My wife and I will see her to bed.”

My wife…

“Thank you, Your Graces,” Miss Borden said, then exited the room.

Iris wasted no time, taking her seat and launching into conversation before anyone had even picked up a fork.

“Uncle Nathaniel, did you know that Mr. Whipp says a tulip can live for years and years if you don’t dig it up? And did you know that there are seven whole Geralds now because Laura let me name the ones we planted today too? And did you know that I found a beetle that was purple, actually purple, not just black that looks purple in the sun? Mrs. Holt says that purple beetles attract good fortune.”