Page 3 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Henry saw the movement and pressed on, more urgently. “I have nothing left to sell. I have nothing left to borrow against. I have asked where I could ask, swallowed what pride I could swallow, and discovered that pride is a poor meal even when one has chewed it thoroughly.”

“How very poetic.”

“It is not poetry when the butcher will no longer extend credit.”

Theodore studied him for a moment. The boy was afraid, certainly, but there was anger under it, and something fouler than anger. Guilt, perhaps. That was appropriate. A man ought to feel something when he brought his sister to market.

“You have nothing left,” Theodore said.

Henry’s mouth tightened. “Except.”

Theodore allowed the silence to stretch.

Henry inhaled. “She is twenty. She is not promised. She has no fortune, which Your Grace would not require, and no scandal attached to her name, which Your Grace might.”

“Might I?”

“A duke requires many things in a wife, I imagine. Money is not likely to be first among them.”

“Do not imagine my requirements. State what you came to state.”

Henry bowed his head once, accepting the rebuke. “She keeps a house well. She has been keeping mine on nothing for two years.”

“Many women keep houses.”

“Not as she has done.” His voice roughened, and he corrected it with visible effort. “She has managed servants when wages were late, tradesmen when patience was exhausted, and accounts when the numbers had become more wish than arithmetic. She has done it quietly.”

“Quietly is convenient.”

“It is also undeserved,” Henry said, then stopped as if the admission had slipped out before he could restrain it.

That caught Theodore’s attention.

Henry shifted under it. “I only mean that she has not complained.”

“And this recommends her to me?”

“It should recommend her to any man with sense.”

“Sense has very little to do with matrimony.”

“Then perhaps usefulness will serve where sense fails.”

Theodore regarded him across the green leather of the desk. A living person was being auctioned in careful sentences, and some disciplined chamber of his mind, the place where figures arranged themselves and sentiment was denied admission, had already begun to weigh whether the auction was worth attending, a calculation he disliked and could not stop.

“Is she accomplished?” he asked.

“Enough.”

“That is evasive.”

“She reads well, writes a better letter than I do, understands household accounts, and can speak in company without disgracing herself.”

“A glowing tribute.”

Henry’s jaw tightened. “She is better than I deserve to describe.”

“Most sisters are.”