He nodded.
“I want it to be a proper month. I want you there, behaving like a reasonable human being. Like a proper husband. All I am suggesting is that perhaps we could meet for breakfast, tea and supper and converse like reasonably civilised people. That is all I ask.”
Gabriel sighed.
“Is it such an unreasonable demand?” Birdie asked.
“Why is that so important to you?”
“I never thought I’d be married.” She smiled bleakly. “So, I’d like to pretend for a month everything is normal.”
“I don’t think I can do normal, Birdie,” Gabriel whispered. “I am not at all certain what ‘normal’ is.”
“Well, neither am I. Is anyone? Maybe it is what it is, and we decide for ourselves?”
He looked at the tips of his boots.
“I don’t think what I am asking for is unreasonable,” Birdie prompted. “We’re married, after all.”
He looked up, and their eyes met. One eye, granted, was covered by that piratical patch. But if one disregarded that, his remaining healthy eye was chestnut brown, fringed by dark eyebrows. He looked troubled.
Why? What was he so worried about?
“Conversing like reasonably civilised people.” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. Then he nodded curtly. “Very well,” he said after a long silence.
“Wonderful!” Birdie clapped her hands together. “We start tonight with supper. I am so tired of sitting all by myself.”
Gabriel hesitated, but then gave a curt nod.
“You will see that conversing with me is not as arduous as you fear. Though, I must say,” Birdie added with a smile, “we’ve been doing that successfully the last half an hour. Conversing, I mean.”
Gabriel’s head went up. “You may be right.”
When he smiled, the first genuine smile she had seen, she caught her breath. It lit up his face and made him look boyish, at least ten years younger. For one moment, she saw the glimpse of the man he really was. She saw that moroseness was not an inherent part of his personality.
This man, she realised, was fundamentally decent and kind. He could be everything a girl would wish for.
If he gave her the chance, she could be that girl.
Chapter 14
Gabriel helped Higgins set up a table in the drawing room. He’d dine with Birdie there in the evening. By George, the thought of spending an entire evening alone with her made him nervous. What had got into him, agreeing to this supper? Yet her eyes had lit up, pleased, so he must’ve done the right thing.
He raked his hand through his hair.
The drawing room would do. It had panelled walls of cedarwood, dark green curtains, and heavy carpets. It was the most comfortable room in the castle. The large hall below was too cold and draughty, and the dining room was uninhabitable. The brigade of women who’d invaded the castle the other day had scrubbed the dining room to the best of their abilities, but the room merely had a rickety table, and chairs were missing altogether. He suspected that they’d been used as firewood at one point, since he once saw the leg of a chair in the fireplace. Who the deuce burned furniture, and why?
Birdie was right. He’d not bothered to get involved in the place. He’d kept himself safely locked in his tower room and neither knew nor cared about what happened around him. His conscience nagged at him.
He’d never asked for this title, this position, this responsibility.
When the lawyers had descended on him in his abode in London, he hadn’t been pleased. He’d even tried to decline the title, but that hadn’t been possible.
“You’re the last remaining issue of the late Duke of Dunross,” they’d insisted. He would become duke, whether he wanted to or not. Then Higgins found him in a tavern, roaring drunk, and dragged him home, scolding him the entire way.
Thanks to Higgins, he hadn’t touched alcohol since then. It was ironic, given that whisky was apparently what kept the old man alive.
When the town got wind that there was a new duke amongst their midst, invitations came flooding in: balls, concerts, and breakfasts. They’d hounded him. So, he’d fled to Scotland. It had worked well. He’d not received a single letter here. The only letter he’d found was the one in his military uniform. Crumpled, wet and muddy. “It would please me to see you married, son,” his father had written. He had already been dead by the time Gabriel had received the letter.
