Page 36 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“Not yet.”

Pearce bowed and withdrew, taking the quiet scratch of his quill and the knowledge of Wrenfield with him.

Ellen came down at the usual hour, composed, pale, and already wearing the countenance of a lady firmly prepared to marvel at nothing. Theodore let her take her tea first. She poured with neat hands, set the pot back without a tremor, and glanced at him only when courtesy required it.

“We leave for the country on Thursday,” he said, when her cup had been filled and she had taken her first careful sip. “A house of mine in Hertfordshire. It is called Wrenfield.”

Her hand remained steady around the cup. “For how long am I to be kept there?”

The word kept told him the whole of her reasoning without requiring her to lay out a single accusation. He had walked her through the worst rout in London, the town had said its piece, and now, the morning after, he was carrying her off to a place where no one would be troubled to look at her. She had arrived at that conclusion overnight. It was reasonable. It was also wrong. A sentence across the breakfast cloth would not unmake it.

Theodore picked up his knife, though there was nothing on his plate he intended to eat. “You make it sound like a sentence.”

“You have not given me the length of it,” Ellen said, lowering her cup into the saucer without sound. “That is generally how sentences are described.”

“As long as it suits us.”

“Us,” she repeated, and there was no challenge in the word, only a small, polished care that made it worse than challenge would have been.

“You will find it quiet,” he said.

“Quiet.” Her gaze moved briefly toward the window before returning to the table. “Yes. I imagine it will be very quiet.”

“That does not recommend it?”

A small pause followed. It was not hesitation so much as the stillness of a person long accustomed to setting aside what she wanted before anyone could refuse it.

“I have not yet decided whether I am permitted preferences.”

Theodore’s fingers stilled on the knife. “You are.”

“How generous,” she said, with such perfect softness that it barely counted as insolence. “Then I shall prefer to know what is expected of me once we arrive.”

“Nothing beyond what you choose to do.”

“That is not an expectation. That is an absence.”

“It may be an improvement upon London.”

Her lashes lowered. “London has at least been candid in its dislike.”

The words were lightly spoken, but something in them struck harder than accusation would have done. There was no bitterness in it and no self-pity, only a tired acceptance that she had been disliked and had expected little else.

He looked at her then, properly.

She sat exactly as she always did, composed and neat and impossible to fault. Yet there was a sadness about her that morning, quiet enough that another man might have missed it. It showed itself only in the carefulness of her voice, in the way she held herself as though taking up less room than she was entitled to occupy.

The mere thought of it filled him with a fierce resentment.

What vexed him further was the acute consciousness that he had placed it there himself.

The temptation to offer a reply suggested itself, but his better judgment stifled it at once. What was he meant to say? That he was not ashamed of her? That he had spent half the night arranging a house because he could not bear the thought of her remaining there, merely to be sacrificed to the sport of the scandal-mongers? Every version sounded inadequate before it reached his tongue.

He consequently did what he had always done when confronted by a circumstance beyond his power to mend. He held his peace.

She had already drawn the line of the morning and placed him on the far side of it.

“You will have the day to see to your trunks,” he said.