It made her feel both grateful and ashamed.
Madeline smiled and returned her attention to the tray. “Now,” she said, brightening her tone, “we must take the dough out of the bowl and bake it.”
Cook stepped forward at last, taking the tray with a resigned air. “Into the oven,” she announced. “And you will stand back.”
Tessa obeyed, though she leaned forward on her toes, watching as if the oven were a stage and the biscuits were actors about to transform.
Madeline watched too, but her mind drifted, as it always did when she allowed herself stillness, and it drifted to Wilhelm in a way that felt both dangerous and inevitable.
She had not meant to think of him in the kitchen, with flour on her dress, but the thought came anyway, vivid as a touch.
She remembered his gaze upon her at breakfast, the way he had watched her as though he were measuring something he did not want to name. She remembered him in the snow, seated stiffly on the sled, his body rigid with dignity until it betrayed him, and she remembered the jolt of heat that had gone through her when she steadied him, when her hands had rested briefly at his shoulders, when she had felt how solid he was beneath the fabric, how controlled, how alive.
It unsettled her, the way her body responded to him with such immediacy, because she had trained herself for years to be careful, to keep desire locked away where it could not lead her into ruin. Yet the Duke was not like other men she had known. He did not leer or flatter or demand. His restraint was its own form of power, and it made her want to push at it, to see what existed beneath it, to know whether he would ever allow himself to take, to claim, to yield.
The thought sent heat curling low in her belly, and she forced herself to focus on Tessa and the way the child’s eyes glittered with anticipation.
“They will rise,” Madeline told her, voice steadier than her thoughts. “And they will smell wonderful.”
Tessa clasped her hands. “And then we will eat them.”
“Yes,” Madeline said, and her mouth curved. “That is the best part.”
They waited, and the minutes passed filled with Tessa’s impatience and the scent of baking dough. Madeline felt strangely calm, as though this small act had created a pocket of safety inside the city’s vastness.
Then a voice cut through the kitchen, sharp enough to freeze her in place. “What is going on here?”
Madeline turned slowly to see the Duke standing in the doorway.
CHAPTER 15
“What is going on here?” The words left Wilhelm’s mouth before he had fully crossed the threshold, hardened by the hours of frustration that had been building beneath his skin.
His boots struck the stone floor of the kitchen with decisive force. The sound echoed through the high-ceilinged room, and for a moment everything seemed to halt around him as though his presence had pulled the air out of the environment.
The cook stood rigid by the hearth, her wooden spoon suspended uselessly above a bowl of pale dough. Her eyes flicked toward him with the unmistakable panic of someone caught mid-transgression. Flour dust hung faintly in the air, catching the light from the windows like a thin winter haze. At the long central table, Tessa turned so quickly that her stool scraped against the floor. Her hands were white with flour, her cheeks flushed with excitement rather than fear.
And Madeline stood at the far end of the table, sleeves rolled neatly to her forearms, a linen cloth draped over one shoulder. Her hair was no longer confined by its usual pins but softened into loose, rebellious strands that framed her face and brushed her throat when she moved. There was flour on her wrist, on the curve of her hand. There was even a faint smudge at her elbow and the sight of it struck Wilhelm with a jolt of irritation so strong it almost masked the deeper, far more acute awareness it sparked beneath it.
Tessa was the first to speak.
“Papa!” she exclaimed, pushing herself upright with careless enthusiasm, nearly upsetting the stool behind her. She held up her hands as though presenting proof of some great accomplishment. “We’re baking.”
Wilhelm’s gaze swept over her in a single, assessing glance. The instinctive check for injury was already ingrained in him, before flicking past her to the table, the bowls, the trays, and the scattered mess that had no place in his carefully ordered household.
“I can see that,” Wilhelm replied, the words leaving him with more effort than he intended, their authority thinned by a strain he had not yet mastered. . His gaze shifted back to Madeline, as though his irritation were rooted in reason rather than in the unsettling awareness she stirred in him. “When the butler mentioned that I could find the two of you in the kitchens, I scarcely believed him. What is the purpose of this?”
Madeline did not answer at once, and the pause—brief, unhurried, utterly untroubled—irritated him more than defiance would have. She wiped her hands on the cloth draped over her shoulder with careful attention, smoothing the fabric as though nothing in the room demanded urgency, then folded it neatly before setting it aside.
Only then did she turn to face him fully, lifting her chin just enough to meet his gaze directly. Her expression was composed, infuriatingly serene, and when their eyes met there was no apology there, only a quiet resolve that made him feel, inexplicably, as though he were the one standing on uncertain ground.
“We came to the kitchen,” she said at last, her voice even, soft without any hint of submission, “to bake biscuits.”
Wilhelm stared at her, the words echoing absurdly in his mind, and for a moment he was acutely aware of the way she stood, relaxed yet attentive.
“You brought my daughter into the kitchen.” Even as he spoke, he felt the uncomfortable pull between indignation and something far more treacherous, a heat that flared low and unexpected when she did nothing more than hold his gaze.
“Yes,” she replied.
