He watched in fascination.
Their heads were close together, her blonde head, and the boy’s dark one.
“No. Try again.” There was a hint of vexation in her tone.
The boy petulantly threw the chalk down, breaking it in half.
“Hector!” she exclaimed.
“I did what you said, and it still doesn’t make any sense. Explain it so I can understand!”
Julius stood up. The time for him as an uninvolved observer was over.
“Let me help.”
Both looked up.
“No thank you,” the boy said immediately. “I can do it myself.”
“Oh, could you? That would be wonderful.” She stood up and stretched her back, which must have been aching.
“Doesn’t he have a tutor?” Julius stepped to the table and looked at the numbers scrawled on the slate.
Lena grimaced. “No. We can’t afford it. In the past, Simon used to teach the younger boys. Hector and Achilles go to the local school here, and I daresay Herr Maier does his best, but there are thirty children in the class, the youngest being five and the oldest fifteen. I suppose it is a bit noisy.”
“It’s unbearable,” Hector muttered, picking up the chalk and drawing on the kitchen table. “Lessons are either too easy or too difficult, and Herr Maier explains even worse than you do.”
“Oh hush, I’m sure he’s not that bad,” Lena retorted.
“It’s a waste of time. We’re better off fishin—” He interrupted himself with a cough.
“Hector Arenheim. Never tell me you’re skipping lessons to go fishing.” Lena placed her hands on her hips.
“Almost every day.” Les poked his head around the door, then quickly disappeared as Hecki threw a piece of chalk at him.
“Tattletale!” He shot up to run after him, but Julius clamped his hand on his shoulder and pressed him down into his chair.
“You stay here, and I’ll be your tutor.”
Lena nodded with approval. “Excellent. Behaveyourself, Hecki,” she said before disappearing into the kitchen.
Lena sawthe two dark heads together, the big and the little one. The deep, sonorous voice of the Duke vibrated as he explained the rules of arithmetic to the boy. The higher tones of Hector replied. She watched with mixed emotions.
A pang of tenderness flooded through her and vanished as quickly as it had come, followed by a quick jab of fear.
He wouldn’t take Hector away from her, would he? He wouldn’t tear her family apart. If August was right, he had the power and the right to do so. There would be nothing she could do about it.
But if he’d wanted to do that, wouldn’t he have done it already, instead of agreeing to their experiment? Here he was, dressed in commoner’s clothes, helping her son—his son!—with arithmetic.
She didn’t know him well, but it struck her that he wasn’t that kind of man. Her first impression of him was that he was arrogant and proud. He had a cold shield around him that was difficult to penetrate. He never smiled. He seemed to have a strong sense of duty and fairness. She hoped she was right, and that this sense of duty and fairness would prevent him from doing something as cruel as separating a mother from her children. To her, things were clear: if he wanted her or her son, he would have to take them all on. It was either all of them, or none of them.
He’d asked her to trust him. She found that difficult. There was so much about the man she didn’t understand. The gaps in her memory frightened her, but so did the memories themselves. Random scraps, bits and pieces, uncoordinated fragments and flashes that made neither head nor tail.
It wasn’t anything concrete, just a feeling, like when she smelled his cologne. She blushed at the thought of when, earlier this morning, he’d caught her sniffing at him like a dog when she thought he had his back turned to her.
She was almost obsessed by the scent.
It triggered a wave of emotions that were unfamiliar to her.
