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She brushed aside the brothers and uncle with a dismissive hand. Her shawl slid to the floor. “You seem to think a woman wants to be a spectator of her own life. I assure you we do not.”
“So you took the reins in hand.” He wanted to see how far he could push her.
But she regained that cool command he’d seen in her from the beginning. “I opened the ledgers and applied myself to understanding them. I made myself acquainted with our solicitor.”
“You handle the ledgers?” he asked. “Surely, if your brother is dealing with the estate’s tenants, he needs to study the books.”
“He is learning,” she said through tight lips.
Gray came around the table and scooped up her fallen shawl, offering it to her. Some other thought took hold, and her expression changed.
She took the shawl, casting him a bewildered glance. “Is that what you think our father is doing in London? Trying to feel alive?”
“Isn’t he? Did he gamble much before your mother died?”
“No,” she said, her voice wistful. “I don’t think he ever did.” For a moment, the idea of her father seeking to feel alive appeared to unsettle her. Then she turned away to the second trunk.
He wondered what she knew of her father’s London life. It would be easy in Delamere, he suspected, to hear only the most scandalous details of her father’s career as a widower. And Gray knew how even a single act of folly could cling to a man.
Gray had been passing through the club card room when he’d overheard a snatch of conversation among three men of his father’s generation.
Knowles is going to take him.
The old fool will lose the castle.
Where will the daughters be then?
Maybe if it had been any other man about to triumph over a luckless opponent, Gray would have kept going, but it had been Knowles, a man capable of easy cruelty, for the satisfaction of making his victims suffer. So, Gray had joined the game.
The rustling of paper and cloth, and another wave of the lavender scent, recalled him to the present. Cordelia Staveley rummaged among the contents of the second trunk.
“Why does this ball matter so much to you?” he asked, speaking once again to her back. “It seems unlikely you’ll find a husband there.”
“I won’t be looking.”
“Did you look once?”
“For a husband? You mean, did I have a Season? Yes, before my mother died.”
It gave him a rough idea of her age. She was younger than he had at first surmised. Still, their paths would not have crossed in London. He had long avoided girls making their come-out. “Were you as careless of the proprieties then as now?”
“Heavens, no. I knew all the rules.” She closed the lid on the second trunk with a snap.
“And followed them?” He doubted it. There was something in her nature that chafed against constraint.
“It is easy for gentlemen to speak of proprieties,” she said, coming to her feet and facing him. “When have the proprieties ever constrained you?”
He thought it a fair question, but he meant to keep pushing. “You swim alone. If you rode a horse for your morning exercise, you’d have a groom with you.”
She laughed at that, a rueful sort of laugh. “If I had a horse or a groom! The proprieties can hardly apply when there are no funds for grooms or chaperones. Country girls walk alone in Clifton-on-Sea.”
“Is that what you are? A country girl?”
Her chin was up, her fists tucked inside the folds of her shawl, the flash of combat in her eyes. “Well, I’m not really a girl at all, so again, what do the proprieties have to do with me? You needn’t worry about us. When Papa made himself such a … such a figure of fun in London, it may have cast disgrace on us in town, but here, where our neighbors know us, we are as respectable as we have always been. My sisters will find partners at the ball.”
“You have to win our wager first, don’t you?” A thought occurred to him, a way to win.
“As I mean to do. May I send my brother and our servant to collect these trunks?” The illusion that she had a softer, gentler side passed.
