Page 28 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“Hrmm.”

“What?” He asked as he crossed his arms over his chest.

“Perhaps don’t betoo goodthen.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and closed the door.

Then, he stood at the top of the front steps and watched the carriage go down the drive until it turned through the park gate and was gone.

He did not go back to the papers.

He stood at the window in his study and took in the park view, the oak, the long slope of the east lawn. No, he did not go back to the papers because the papers required him to think about drainage contracts and tenancy renewals and a letter from Barnes that he had already read twice, and his mind was doing something else. No matter how hard he told it to think about papers.

You went very still.

He had. He was aware of that. He had been in the middle of a completely ordinary dinner, and Anna Cartwell had laughed. She had been surprised into it, he could tell, by his godmother’s observation about Percy, and the laugh was…

Beautiful, genuine, real.

It was not a social laugh. It had not been managed or modulated or produced for the benefit of the room, like most women had been groomed to do. It was the real thing, unguarded, and it had lasted only a moment.

He pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose and pinched hard. He needed a stiff drink.

She has been under this roof for a month; the curve of her soft lips pulls at me as much as her sharp wit, like a moth to a flame. Yet, she is legally bound to another man. At least for now. Even so…

She was frightened in ways she was too composed to show entirely, and she was writing statements for his solicitor and hoping her lady’s maid was brave enough to speak. He closed his eyes, and all he could see was soft honey-blonde locks of hair, bright hazel eyes beneath full eyelashes…

She is not…

She was nothing he was going to think about in the way he was currently thinking about her. At least not in the future. He was certain of that, or hoped he was. He had removed himself from enough situations in his life to know he was capable of it, and this was considerably less complicated than most of those situations because the reasoning was entirely clear.

He picked up Barnes’s letter, and put it down, and picked it up again. Then, he strode to his decanter and poured himself a tumbler of scotch to still himself.

From somewhere below him, carried through the old bones of the house, he could faintly hear Rachel and Anna in the entrance hall. It was some exchange, Rachel’s voice and then Anna’s, and then both of them, some ordinary conversation about some ordinary thing.

He put the glass down on his desk.

He paced to his window and stood there for what may have been minutes or hours. He looked at the oak tree, which had been there for three hundred years.

He was grateful it had no opinions about any of this. At this point, the tree was the most restful company he’d found in months.

CHAPTER 11

The rain had started after dinner and continued through the evening in the steady way of autumn rain. It was not a summer storm, just a persistent grey curtain that made the windows dark earlier and the fireplaces more necessary, and the whole house drew inward around itself.

Rachel had produced a pack of cards after dinner and taught Anna a game she claimed to have invented herself, which Anna suspected was a modified version of something she had learned elsewhere and improved to her own advantage. They played for two hours at the small table in Rachel’s sitting room, with the fire going properly and a plate of biscuits.

“You’re cheating,” Anna said, studying her cards.

“I am notcheating,” Rachel said. “I am playingstrategically.”

“Those are different things.”

“They are very different things. One of them is dishonest.” She rearranged her hand with great serenity. “Your turn.”

Anna played a card. Rachel played two, which was not how the game worked as had been explained to her, and Anna set down her hand and looked at Rachel, who looked back with perfect equanimity.

“Explain.”