Hazel blinked. “Now?”
Cordelia’s teacup nearly slipped from her fingers. “I beg your pardon?”
“I have to tell him everything: my thoughts on the schoolhouse, the well, the new carts for the vendors. Oh! And the hedge by the chapel that’s grown so wild it’s practically threatening small children.”
Cordelia collapsed in a fit of laughter. “Evelyn, it’s nearly half past ten!”
“You make it sound like I’ve announced I’m off to elope with a poet,” Evelyn said, already halfway to the door. “I’ll bepreciselyfive minutes. Perhaps six. But I must tell him now, or I’ll forget something, and then it’ll gnaw at me all night, and I’ll end up waking him at some ungodly hour with a half-written list about wheel spokes and?—”
Hazel raised a brow. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Evelyn paused, only to toss a teasing look over her shoulder. “Oh, do stay seated. Honestly, you behave as if I were abandoning you to the wolves. I’ll return in a blink.”
Cordelia flung a cushion at her. “Tell your brooding duke that we want youback,Duchess of Urgency.”
“He’ll probably be grateful to be interrupted,” Hazel added dryly. “If only to have a moment’s peace from that dreadful steward ledger.”
“I shall pass along your affection,” Evelyn called with a grin, already sweeping through the doorway. “Don’t drink all the tea without me!”
The girls’ laughter trailed after her, muffled by the walls as she disappeared into the hallway. The moment she reached the stairs, she gathered her skirts and began to climb while her thoughts raced ahead of her.
She had to tell him…had to! Before it scattered, before the excitement faded, before the memory of that goat in the bakery dulled even slightly.
Her mind spun with plans and purpose.
But most of all, it spun towardhim.
The ink had long gone cold. Numbers danced in tidy columns across the parchment before Robert’s eyes, orderly and restrained. They were exactly as he preferred them to be. He was bent over the latest of the estate’s ledgers, brow furrowed in stern concentration, when the door to his study burst open without so much as a knock.
He wasn’t startled. He didn’t even need to look up to know who would dare such a thing.
“Robert, I amsosorry,” Evelyn breathed, already halfway across the room, her cheeks flushed, and her hair was in charming disarray from running up the stairs. “But if I don’t say this now, I’ll forget, and it will bother me all night, and you know how I get when something bothers me, like that time I misplaced my pearl hairpin, and I was convinced a magpie had stolen it?—”
“I recall,” he said, dry as dust, but she was already off.
“I’ve thought about it, and we absolutely must repair the schoolhouse. No, not repair,restore.The plaster’s cracked like old bark, and the windows barely keep out the wind, and the teacher, bless her, uses a rock to prop the door open. Arock, Robert. That cannot continue. And I know it’s not a disaster by London standards, but if you had seen the way the children looked at me when I said I’d come back soon…”
He leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed, watching her with a look that might have seemed impassive to anyone else. But in truth, he was… well, amused wasn’t quite strong enough of a word. He was enthralled. She was pacing now, her hands gesturing wildly, the fabric of her gown swishing at her ankles like an impatient tide.
“And the widow Barrow’s roof is barely standing. Thatch is falling off like it’s been insulted. She smiled at me, Robert. With two teeth missing and a kind of dignity that made me feel like I was the one in need of help, not she.”
She turned, eyes bright and alight with purpose. “And the well in the southern field is dry. Entirely dry. The tenant farmers arewalking a mile and a half for water, and it’s not clean, and I just—I can’tlet that continue.”
He gave a quiet nod. Just enough to let her know he was following.
“And someone ought to look at that hedge by the chapel,” she added. “It’s attempting murder, I’m certain of it.”
He blinked once but still didn’t interrupt. She looked like a thunderstorm in silk.
Finally, finally, she stopped, still breathing hard, her hands on her hips, and her eyes wide with a fire he’d never been able to look away from.
“So,” she finished, “I was wondering if that would be… all right.”
There was a breath of silence as Robert rose from his chair slowly with the quiet, deliberate grace that made people instinctively step back. He didn’t move toward her, not yet. He just stood there, one hand braced on the desk, looking at her like she’d just rewritten the order of his world again.
“All of that,” he said evenly, “is more than all right.”
Relief softened her features for a moment before curiosity narrowed her eyes. “You’re not going to say anything else? No notes? No objections? Not even about the hedge?”
