He dressed himself with hands too precise to be calm. Toggles fastened, collar straightened, boots polished. He looked like the Duke of Greystone, but he did not feel like him.
Downstairs, a footman greeted him. “Your Grace, breakfast is?—”
“It is cold.”
The footman blinked. “It was prepared moments ago, Your Grace.”
“Then it should be warmer.” Victor strode past him.
The dining room was immaculate, the fire banked to the proper warmth, the china gleaming. It irritated him profoundly.
Perfection should have soothed him. Today, it scraped along his nerves like gravel.
He sat. He tasted the tea.Bitter.Offensive.
“The roast beef is overcooked,” he remarked.
“It is exactly as you prefer it, Your Grace,” the butler answered.
“It is not,” Victor snapped, though he could not have explained what precisely displeased him. He pushed the plate away and rose.
He should not have been so short; he knew that. But something thrummed inside him, some agitation that would not settle.
By midmorning, the entire house felt it. Servants scattered like startled birds whenever his footsteps approached. Every small infraction sharpened in his vision: a tray angled a hair too far to the left, a letter set slightly crooked on his desk, a draft in the corridor he had walked a thousand times without noticing.
“Your Grace,” his steward ventured as Victor reviewed estate accounts, “the tenants’ ledgers are arranged in the manner you requested, however?—”
“You missed a miscalculated yield here.” Victor tapped the page with more force than needed. “And here. And here.”
The steward flushed. “I apologize, Your Grace.”
Victor rewrote the entire column himself. The scratch of the quill irritated him, too.
“Bring me the correspondence,” he ordered.
It arrived. He wrote the same line four times before accepting the fifth. He sealed the letter too hard; the wax smearing only caused another spike of annoyance.
“Victor,” came his mother’s voice from the doorway.
He did not turn. “Yes, Mother?”
“Do you intend to attend the Ranleigh dinner this evening?” she asked. “It would be… social.”
“I have engagements.”
Dorothea’s silence held meaning. “Very well,” she said. “But you are unsettled. I can see it.”
“I am fine,” he replied coldly.
Her gentle sigh followed her out.
By afternoon, he attempted to work. Tried to force his attention through the tangle of land negotiations and timber demands waiting in his study. He read the same sentence four times without absorbing any part of it.
He saw the curve of a young woman’s throat as she tipped her head back, breathless beneath his hands. The way her voicehad broken. The tremors in her limbs. The way she had looked afterward, soft and trusting and unbearably real.
He shut the folder with a violent snap.
Absurd. Entirely absurd.
