Page 38 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“It did,” she replied, and the faintest ghost of amusement touched her mouth. “I liked it better for that.”

He almost smiled. He caught the impulse before it could become visible.

She lowered her gaze to the table. “There has been nothing to ride for two years. One does not keep hunters on credit. They were the first thing to go.”

“There are horses at Wrenfield.”

“I am sure His Grace’s stable wants for nothing.”

“I did not say my stable.”

Ellen looked up.

He left the words where they were, because that was as near as he could come, on an inn chair across a small table, to telling her a thing he had arranged and did not wish to spoil by announcing. She studied him for a moment as though she had heard a note beneath the sentence and could not place the instrument.

“For whom, then?” she asked softly.

The servant came in before he could decide whether to answer.

Theodore leaned back as the cloth was lifted, and the moment closed with the quiet efficiency of cleared plates and lowered eyes. By the time the servant withdrew, they were a duke and his silent wife again, seated across from one another with the fire between them doing all the work of warmth.

The shadows of the late afternoon were fast deepening as they advanced up the long avenue of beeches toward Wrenfield.

It was no cottage. Grey stone rose in three storeys beneath a pediment, with a row of tall windows holding the last of the light. The stable block ran off as long as the house, the lawns were scythed close, and two dozen of the household stood drawn up on the steps to meet their mistress.

Theodore watched the misreading of the morning meet the evidence of the drive and find nowhere left to stand.

Ellen turned and looked at him directly, which she had not done in he could not say how long.

“Cottage,” she said.

The word was quiet, but it was freely given, the first such thing she had offered him since the ring. It moved something in him he did not stop to name, and he let none of it reach his face.

“My mother named it,” he said, reaching for the carriage door before the footman could fully open it. “She thought the great house too grand to be happy in, and called this one the cottage to spite it. After her, it would have been disloyal to call it anything else.”

Ellen looked back at the house, then at him. “Your mother must have had a decided sense of humor.”

“She had a decided sense of many things.”

He stepped down first and offered his hand. “Mind the step. The gravel is loose at the edge.”

She placed her hand in his and descended carefully. Her fingers were warmer than they had been at the altar, and the foolish fact lodged somewhere in him before he could dismiss it. The housekeeper came forward at once, all curtsies and welcome, and Ellen was ushered off to rooms better aired and more comfortable than anything Pillard House had offered her.

Theodore did not follow.

He did not tell her that the roses on her dressing table would be there every day of her life by his order. Telling asked for an answer, and he was not ready to be answered. That failing was beginning to look to him like the whole shape of his character.

He found her again near dusk at the garden door, coming in with rain on her shawl and color high in her face from the cold. He had not gone looking for her. He had, he told himself, merely been crossing the passage.

“You will take a chill,” he said, stopping beside the door as she unwound the damp shawl from her shoulders.

“I wanted to see the front of it,” Ellen replied, glancing back toward the dim garden beyond the glass. “From outside.”

“In the rain?”

“It was only a little rain.”

“Rain is rarely improved by being minimised.”