Her face went still. “I should replace this at once.”
“I am not accusing you,” he said, more softly than he intended. “Only observing.” He moved closer, drawn by curiosity despite every rational instinct telling him to keep his distance. “Lady Marchmont’s collection is available to her guests. You have as much right to read as anyone.”
She drew in a breath. “I am not a guest, Your Grace. And I have no leave to use the library. My presence is… tolerated, when unnoticed.”
The words were quiet. Unsparing. Without self-pity.
They struck him more sharply than any reproach.
“You are a member of the Ashwood family,” he said carefully.
“I am adependentof the Ashwood family,” she replied, with steady composure. “There is a distinction. Forgive me. I will return the book and trouble you no further.”
“That is not necessary.”
“I think it is.”
She turned toward the shelves with careful dignity, every movement precise—as though habit had taught her to make herself unimpeachable.
He should have let her go.
Instead, he heard himself ask, “What draws you to agricultural economics?”
She stopped.
Slowly, she turned back to him. In the clear morning light, he saw her face fully for the first time: not beautiful in the conventional sense, yet compelling. Strong features, intelligent eyes, a mouth that suggested thoughts held firmly in reserve.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The books,” he said, nodding toward the shelf. “Treatises on estate management. Rural improvement. Most young ladies favour lighter reading.”
“I am not most young ladies.”
“No,” he murmured. “I had begun to suspect as much.”
She searched his face, wary, as though determining whether the words were mockery.
At last, some of the tension left her shoulders.
“I was raised on an estate,” she said quietly. “Before—things changed. I learned to manage accounts because someone had to. The land followed. One cannot study one part of a household without understanding the rest. How choices affect tenants. Crops. Families.”
“Your father taught you?”
“My father taught me to value thought,” she said. “The practical matters, I learned because necessity required them.”
“And you learned well,” he said before he could stop himself.
She looked away. “It does not matter. The estate belongs to my uncle. What I know is… surplus. A curiosity with no application.”
There was bitterness beneath the measured words, carefully contained but present. Sebastian found himself wanting to know more—about her father, about Thornfield, about the circumstances that had reduced a baronet’s daughter to borrowing books in secret and speaking of her education as though it were a source of shame.
He wanted to know about her.
The realisation startled him. He had spent years cultivating indifference, armouring himself against curiosity about the endless parade of people who moved through his life. It was easier that way. Safer. People wanted things from him—his title, his wealth, his influence—and caring about them only made it harder to see their wanting for what it was.
But this woman wanted nothing from him. She had tried to leave the moment he entered. She was not angling for his attention or manoeuvring for his favour. She was simply... there. A person with thoughts and interests entirely separate from his existence.
It was, he realised, rather refreshing.
