She exhaled. “What will we do first?”
“I’ll send for the runner Oswald trusts,” he said. “Quietly. I’ll ask you to write everything you remember with dates if you can bear it. I’ll speak to the steward, the butler, and the grooms. We’ll hold this house like a fort, open, not besieged.”
“And when he comes?”
“Then I’ll open the door,” Winston said. “And I’ll make it very clear that I decide who lives under my roof. Not him.”
The line of her mouth softened. “You speak like a Duke when it suits you.”
“It suits me now.”
She looked up at him for a long heartbeat. “Thank you,” she said very simply.
“For what?”
“For choosing me, even when it would be easier not to.”
He made a small, helpless noise and reached for her hand because anything else would have been a lie. Her fingers twined with his and steadied there. The room shrank to the small space where their hands met and the larger one where their eyes did.
“Oswald warned me not to proceed if I had any intention of marrying you,” he said, lighter, because the heavier version would knock them both down.
“What did you tell him?” she asked, a question and not a dare.
“That I’m a careful man,” he said. “And a stubborn one. And that I choose my own counsel.”
She smiled, a true one, small and bright. “Then we’ll be careful. And stubborn.”
“Both,” he agreed.
From the corridor came the soft, familiar tread of Louisa in her stockings, hesitating outside the door because bedtime didn’t suit and stories did. Adeline laughed under her breath.
“Go,” Winston said. “If I tell her one, she’ll be awake ’til dawn.”
“She always asks for the bits with wolves,” Adeline said.
“She does.”
Adeline squeezed his hand and slipped away. At the threshold, she paused and looked back, not for permission, not for rescue, only because that was what the heart did when it left half of itself in a room. He returned to the library and stood alone for a time after the others went to bed. The fire settled; the old house listened. Oswald’s papers lay waiting under the map. The runner’s name sat ready on his tongue.
Somewhere upstairs, Cordelia would be instructing her maid in the art of recovery as performance. Nearer, Louisa’s voice swelled and then softened as Adeline reached the part of the story where the wolves learned to keep to their own side of the wood. Winston went to the desk, drew a sheet of paper, and began to write. It wasn’t romance. It was the work of keeping a house standing. It eased him more than sleep would have.
When he finished, he signed his name, sanded the ink, and, for the first time since London, let the word he’d kept in the darkturn once in the light where he could see it. He didn’t speak it. He didn’t need to. He knew what it meant, and he knew what it demanded. He folded the paper and rang for a footman. The house answered at once.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Adeline found the morning too bright. Greystone wore its usual calm. Mist burning off the lawns, rooks arguing in the elms, the house breathing in its slow, stone way. Inside, the servants moved with their steady rhythm. Fires were laid, silver polished, breakfast things cleared. It ought to have been peaceful.
She carried Louisa’s discarded shawl back toward the schoolroom, meaning to leave it on the peg. Louisa had run ahead to show Cordelia a particularly crooked drawing. Adeline had claimed she must see to the accounts to gain a half hour alone. She didn’t reach the schoolroom.
“Lady Adeline.” Lord Duskwood’s voice came from the doorway of the little sitting room that overlooked the rose garden. “Might I have a word?”
He had a knack for making even simple requests sound light. This one was not light. His tone lacked the easy tilt she’d grownused to in London, the careless flirting, the teasing courtesy. He looked tired from the ride and the long talk with Winston the night before. He also looked wary.
“Of course,” she said. “Is something amiss?”
“That’s my question.” He stepped back to let her pass him and shut the door behind them, cutting off the sound of distant laughter. The sitting room was warm, the fire banked low. Cordelia had left a book on the side table and a half-worked embroidery hoop by the chair. The ordinariness of it made Adeline feel disloyal for bringing her secrets into the room. Lord Duskwood stayed standing. So did she.
“I’ll be frank,” he said. “I rode half of Surrey this week. I asked questions I had no business asking. I came to a conclusion I don’t much like.”
