So, he’d married Miss Burns. Somewhat late, but he’d married her. He’d always told himself it was because it had been his father’s last request of him.
Gabriel had never really considered himself to be the marrying kind. He had intended to remain a bachelor and to spend his life serving in the army, dying honourably on the battlefield.
Fate had decided something else for him.
Fate had wanted him to be a duke.
He now had a duchess as well, with whom he was supposed to converse tonight. If he were honest with himself, it terrified him.
After he helped Higgins move the table to the drawing room, he returned to his tower.
He immediately noticed something was wrong.
Narrowing his eyes suspiciously to two slits, he surveyed the room. Something looked different here. It also smelled odd. Then it hit him. The moldy, dusty smell was gone. It smelled clean. Of lemon, beeswax and… was that lavender? His gaze fell on a bowl with pot-pourri on a side table next to his bed. His grey woollen blanket was gone, and in its stead, there was a thick mattress covered with a white, crisp linen sheet, a neatly folded blanket, and a fluffy down pillow. Where had this small oaken box come from? Where was his pile of clothes?
The fireplace, cleaned of ash, gleamed, and the grate was polished. A thick, quilted blanket covered his bed. Someone neatly stacked his books on a little table, which hadn’t been there before. Was that frilly thing a lampshade?
Someone had dusted, cleaned, and sorted the room in the one hour he’d left. He knew who it was, even if she was the one who’d merely given the order.
Lavender! In a soldier’s room!
Where was his pistol? His eyes flew to the windowsill. Someone had washed his brushes and neatly lined them up there; the tin cans next to them were sorted according to colour.
His pistol was gone.
This, Gabriel decided, was beyond the pale.
It was simply and utterly intolerable.
Birdie had beenbusy the entire afternoon working in the library. With the help of the women, they’d taken every single book off the shelves and given it a good, thorough clean. To the shock of the maids, Birdie herself had tied an apron around her dress and had taken a rag in hand.
“These books are precious,” she’d told them. “Stack them all on the floor over here. I will dust them myself.” This is what she had been doing for the third day in a row. Her plan was to sort and catalogue them eventually, but for now, she wanted to put the library to order so it could serve as a schoolroom.
Birdie wiped the books down with the rag and stacked them into organised piles. There was quite a collection of Shakespeare and many books on history and geography. She pulled out a universal almanack from 1713, which, though outdated, might prove useful; Burns’Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which she pushed back into the shelf; a book on etiquette and ah—the greatest treasure of the library: a primer for little children, to teach them their ABCs.
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is worth more than Shakespeare,” declared Birdie from where she stood on top of the ladder, clutching the book happily in her hands. In the furthest corner of the shelf, she spied an original edition ofRobinson Crusoe. “This one, too.” She could read it to the children. They would love it. She tucked the geography book and the almanack under one arm, and, poking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, reached for theCrusoe. Just as her fingertips brushed the leather book spine, the door flew open.
“Birdie!” Gabriel roared.
The door crashed against the ladder, which wobbled dangerously. Birdie reached out to clutch it, but because she had the books tucked under her arm, they toppled down, and that simply couldn’t happen. They were too precious. Trying to catch them, her fingers groped the empty air; the ladder wobbled, wobbled some more, and she went down with a crash—right on top of Gabriel, who never saw her coming.
She felled him neatly with a swoop and caught the primer.
Her body crashed on top of his, crushing the air out of both their bodies. “Oof!”
He’d smacked his head on the floor with a crack and lay there, his eye closed.
Birdie gasped for breath. Why didn’t he move? “Oh, dear.” She prodded Gabriel in the arm with the book. “I hope I haven’t killed you,” she gasped. She leaned forward to look at his face. His black hair tumbled over his aquiline forehead. She studied his lips. His lower lip was fuller than his upper lip. His eye was closed, and the eyepatch had slipped a bit.
Dare she look at what was beneath it?
Her finger crept upward slowly and hovered next to the patch. Just as she was about to touch it, his other eye popped open.
Startled, she withdrew, but his hand whipped up and gripped hers in an iron grasp.
She noticed his hard masculine body against hers, that smell of leather and smoke. It bewildered her senses.
“I was just about to—check—whether you were still alive,” she babbled. She still lay on top of him, the primer in one hand, now pressed against his chest.
