Page 17 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

The side door turned on its quiet hinge unheard. The boots, the lane’s mud still drying on them, halted in the dark of the passage a yard short of the turn in the stair, and those too went unheard. For the length of one long and undefended moment she had no notion that the man she could least afford to be seen by had come home three hours early and soft-footed, and had stopped there, and had heard her say it.

Chapter Seven

He stopped in the dark of the passage with the lane’s mud drying on his boots, and did not go in, and could not make himself go away.

He had seen women in tears, some pitched to move him and some pitched to manage him, and learned young to read the weather of a room and wait it out. This was neither. This was her, folded into the angle of the old service stair as though her chest had come apart along a seam she had held shut a whole year, and the sound she made was the worst there was, the one a proud person makes when they have run, at last, clean out of pride.

“Mrs. Trelawney.”

Her head stayed bowed where it was. “Do not call me that. Not now. I cannot bear the name and the keys both at once.”

He crouched at the turn of the stair, a yard off and no nearer. “Renae, then.”

“And do not be kind to me either, I beg you. Anything in the world but kind.” Her voice scraped on the way out. “I have no defenses left standing for kindness tonight.”

“No one in this house believes him. He is dismissed, and gone by morning, and forgotten by the morning after.”

“That is kind, and untrue, and I am too tired to be grateful for the half of it that is meant.”

“Then take the truth instead, since the kindness is wasted.” He kept his voice level, the voice he kept for figures. “Thomas is a small man who has watched a better one do in a month what he could not manage in twenty years. He has paid you the single compliment a small man owns. He has tried to break the thing he cannot match.”

“That is very logical, my lord.” She pressed the heels of both hands hard to her eyes. “I am not, this evening, very logical. You will have to bring it back to me in the morning, when I have the wit to be grateful for it.”

He should have left her the privacy she was too proud to stop wanting, and could not.

“Come with me.”

“No.”

He straightened. “You require air.”

“I require privacy, my lord.”

“You have had privacy in plenty this past hour.” He put out his hand. It went untaken. “It has not improved your condition noticeably.”

She turned her face to the wall for her whole answer, and he ran clean out of arguments, which in him wore the same face as running out of patience. He bent, put her over his shoulder like a rolled carpet, and stood.

“Lord Declan!”

“You may scold me thoroughly once you are breathing like a person again.”

“Put me down this instant, you, you, oh, this is outrageous.” She struck a fist against his back. He bore it without remark.

“Yes.” He was already walking. “It is also the only idea I have left, so we shall both of us have to endure it.”

He carried her out the side door and across the black fields, the house falling away small behind them. She went rigid with fury for the first field and gave it up in the second. He set her down among the reeds at the lip of the old pond, the moon doubled on the black water, and stepped out of reach of her hands.

She was furious, and mortified to the roots of her honey blonde hair, and no longer sobbing.

“You have abducted your own housekeeper,” she said weakly.

“Temporarily. I intend to return her in rather better condition than I found her.”

“That is not a defense, my lord.”

He lowered himself into the reeds a careful distance off. “It is considerably more defence than I had five minutes ago, so I shall keep hold of it.”

“You will be the talk of three counties by Sunday.”