No one asked what he wanted. No one imagined he might want anything at all beyond what his position already required.
You are indulging in self-pity, he told himself grimly.You possess wealth, influence, every advantage of birth. These are the complaints of a spoiled child.
But knowing it did not dissolve it. It merely added guilt to the weight he already carried.
He set aside the book and rose. The library was handsomely arranged—classics beside novels, philosophy beside natural history—an orderly display of cultivation. On a small table near the window, however, a different arrangement caught his eye: a neat stack of practical volumes, quite separate from the rest, as though someone meant to return to them.
Estate management. Agricultural improvement. Rural economy.
Hardly the sort of reading one associated with a house party devoted to diversion, yet these books bore signs of recent use—the faint softening of the bindings, a ribbon marking a page, a scrap of paper tucked with care between two chapters.
Curiosity pricked, he opened the uppermost volume. It fell at once to a section on drainage he himself remembered—and there, in the margin, lay a few light pencil marks. Not extensive, but thoughtful: a brief query, a reference to another work, a quiet correction of an error.
The hand was small and precise. Feminine.
He closed the book and examined the rest of the little stack. Each had been treated in the same manner—selected, marked, set aside for further thought. Not the idle dabbling of a bored guest, but the disciplined attention of someone accustomed to thinking in practical terms.
Who, at a house party, studied tenant management and crop rotation?
A face rose unbidden in his mind: the woman in grey. The cousin. A baronet’s daughter who had lost everything to an entail and an impractical father.
A woman who, in other circumstances, might have managed an estate herself.
He was being fanciful. The marks could belong to anyone—the steward, a previous guest, Lady Marchmont herself. There was no reason to connect anonymous pencil strokes to a woman he had glimpsed for mere seconds.
And yet.
He returned the volume to its place on the table and stood for a long moment, staring at the spines without seeing them.
He was thinking about her again. Miss Cecilia Ashwood. Despite his mother’s warning. Despite reason. Despite the absolute impossibility of any meaningful connection between them.
Stop,he told himself.She is nothing to you. She must be nothing to you. Think of what matters.
But whatdidmatter, exactly? Finding a suitable wife among the interchangeable young ladies his mother had selected? Securing the succession through a marriage of convenience to someone who would never know him, never challenge him, never make him feel anything beyond comfortable indifference?
That was his duty; that was what mattered.
He reclaimed his chair, retrieved his book, and forced his eyes to the page.
He did not think of her again.
Except that he did—through the evening, into the small hours.
And when at last he slept, he dreamed of grey silk and dark hair and eyes that seemed to see far more than they revealed.
Chapter Five
“The blue ribbon, Cecilia. Not the white. I specifically said the blue.”
Cecilia counted silently to three before replying. “The blue ribbon is in your hand, Georgiana.”
Her cousin looked down, blinked at the length of silk clasped between her fingers, and flushed—slightly. “Oh. So it is.” She did not apologise. She never apologised. “Well. Proceed, then.”
They had been at Fairholme Park several days now.
Cecilia proceeded, weaving the ribbon through Georgiana’s golden curls with the practised efficiency of long experience. Morning light streamed through the windows of the guest chamber, gilding dust motes, costly fabrics—and one young lady’s increasingly elaborate coiffure.
“Lady Marchmont has arranged a walking tour of the gardens,” Georgiana said, studying her reflection with critical care. “All the young ladies will participate. And the gentlemen, of course.”
