Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone?
The arts of pleasing a man, indeed. Drive his house steward to resign. Drive her husband out of his own house. Oh, yes, how pleasing that was!
As pleasing as his house was at this dreary hour. Dark and quiet as death. All of them abed except the night porter…and Hoare waiting and no doubt whimpering upstairs…and the husband who’d been driven out of his own abode.
He strode more or less steadily across the entrance hall, through the main doorway and on to the great staircase. As he grasped the handrail, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer of light to his left. He turned away from the stairs and crossed to the door of the anteroom. A fire still burned in the grate and a lone candle burned in the candelabrum standing on one of the tables. More light filled the doorway to the library.
He went to the library door.
She sat at the great table, her back to him. The candlelight shimmered in her hair, which was coming down. Dark blonde tendrils clung to the back of her neck.
The table was heaped with books and stacks of paper. As she dipped her pen into the inkwell, she must have become aware of him, because she turned and looked over her shoulder toward the doorway.
“You’re working very late,” he said.
“It’s most interesting, what I’m finding here,” she said. Her voice was cool.
He advanced into the room. She recommenced writing.
“It must be fascinating indeed, to keep you up so late,” he said.
“It is,” she said.
As he neared, he saw an ink smudge on her cheek and another at her temple. He was still angry with her, but the smudges were adorable, and she looked so weary and cross, like a child forced to do sums against her will.
She’d despised sums, he recalled. Yet she’d insisted on studying ledgers, column upon column of the numbers she’d hated.
“It’s too late for such work,” he said. “You’re all over ink. Come upstairs and let’s get you cleaned up and into bed.” He thought about washing her…everywhere…and his cock began to swell.
“I’m not quite done,” she said.
“Zoe,” he said.
“Marchmont,” she said crisply.
He supposed she wanted him to apologize. He was tempted. She really was adorable, all smudged with ink and cross. But she was cross with him, and she had no business to be, after very nearly driving his house steward out of the house.
Then what would become of them? England could manage well enough without a monarch. It had survived a mad king and his not-exactly-mentally-balanced son, even during wartime. Marchmont House could not manage without Harrison.
“The numbers will still be there in the morning,” he said. “You need sleep.”
And he did not want to get into his great, cold bed alone.
“I’ll be along in a little while,” she said. “As soon as I finish these calculations.”
She gave the slight, go-away wave of her hand.
Was shedismissinghim?
“As you wish,” he said, and stormed out.
The Duke of Marchmont’s bedroom faced east. When he woke, the angle of the sun told him it was late morning. No one had to tell him he was alone in the bed.
No one had to tell him he was an idiot, either.
He’d figured that out the second time last night he’d woken after a bad dream. In it Zoe rode away on a black horse and disappeared, forever.
He winced, recalling what he’d said.Bourgeois. Common.What had possessed him?
