Page 4 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

He set the papers down on the desk and turned to her. “You’ll not want to rattle about this great cold house on your own besides. You will come to us at Trelawney Court, where there is family about you and no call to keep a household single-handed in your grief.”

“How thoroughly you have thought of me, on a two-day road, with my husband not yet in the ground.”

“Cousin. I am only trying to be kind to you.”

She kept her hands still at her sides. “You are trying to be necessary to me. They are not the same article, though I will grant they go about in a very similar coat.”

“You are overwrought, and it is natural that you should be. Grief makes a muddle of the clearest head, and yours was never one built for figures at the best of times.”

“My head is the one thing in this house that has never once been in a muddle, Lucien, and you know it, and that is preciselywhat troubles you. I have kept a household single-handed for nine years, in every way that signifies. I shall keep my own grief by the same method, and my own accounts, when once I have had sight of them.”

He almost smiled at that. “The trust is not a simple thing for a woman to read.”

“Then I shall read it slowly, and twice, and set a clever man to check my sums. There is no shortage of clever men in England. There is only a shortage of disinterested ones.”

“You wound me, cousin.”

“I doubt that very much.” She held her ground, moving neither towards him nor away. “You would have to be reachable to be wounded, and you have spent all your life seeing to it that you are not. It is the single quality you and my late husband ever held in common.”

The courtesy cooled and warmed again, and he crossed the room to take her hand a third time, and this time he did not give it back.

“You are quite alone now, Lady Renae.” His voice had gone gentle, the kind of gentle that costs the speaker nothing at all. “A woman alone needs family about her. You shall lean on me.”

His hand closed over hers and did not open. At his hip, her deceased husband’s keys caught the lamplight.

Chapter Two

“You’ll be wanting to hear my method with idle girls, my lord.”

Declan had wanted nothing of the kind, but the woman across the desk wore the look of a person who would arrive at it whether or not the road was offered. “Continue, Mrs. Gorse.”

“I dock their supper. A hungry maid is a quick maid, and I cleared a whole still-room of idleness inside the month at my last place.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Lost only the two girls in the doing of it, and that is no great price for good order.”

“Lost them how?”

“One to a better situation, and one to a fever she’d have thrown off easy enough with the eating in her. There’s no economy without its cost, as I tell the young ones.”

The fire had not been lit. The cold had got down into the inkwell so that the nib dragged and spat, and Declan set the quill aside rather than spoil another the estate could not spare. “Thank you, Mrs. Gorse. Wells will see you out. Mind the third stair on the way down. It is the one thing left in this house with any spirit to it.”

She went, affronted, and a younger woman came in and sat at his nod and twisted a handkerchief into a rope between her hands.

“You need not be frightened, Miss Dable. The house is large. The man behind the desk is not. Where did you last keep?”

“My mother’s house, my lord, these six years, since my father passed. I have made a little stretch over a great while. Only the advertisement said the situation was far, and I thought…” Her voice went thin and stopped. “I am sorry. I am very able, truly I am. It is only that my mother is poorly, and it is so very far from her.”

“Then you must not take it, and I will not let you.” The words were out before the careful man in him could argue otherwise. “A woman cannot keep a house this size with her heart fifty miles off keeping another. Go home to your mother. Wells will see you have your coach fare from the petty cash, such as it is.”

The third arrived already talking, and did not greatly slow herself for the next two minutes.

“I keep a quiet tongue, my lord, more than some could say, the Pelhams’ woman for one, though it’s hardly my place to mention it. At Lord Marbury’s I knew the business of every soul under that roof before they knew it themselves, the upstairs and the down, if you take my meaning, and there was plenty of it to know the spring the young master came to grief, which between ourselves was no accident, whatever the inquest found.”

Declan laid the quill down with great care. “Mrs. Tewkes.”

“My lord?”

“You have shown me in two minutes exactly what would be said of this house in three counties within a month of your engagement. I am obliged to you for the economy of the demonstration. Wells is in the hall.”

The fourth came armed with a character so glowing it might have warmed the dead grate, and a memory that deserted her the instant he asked a question the letter had not foreseen.