“I was not upset,” she said quickly. “Believe me when I tell you so.”
Christopher could feel himself losing control of the situation. Of his veryhome. While he wanted nothing more than to argue his wife into submission, he was so careful to keep his composure in front of her. She thought of him in a certain way, and that perception was everything.
This would not stand, but it could stand for a few more hours, until he had time to settle down.
“I am tired from the ride.” Christopher straightened himself. “A bath is what I need. A bath and—” His eyes drifted onto the table for the first time, and they found what it was that Rose was doing in there. “What is that?”
“Excuse me?”
“That?” he said sharply, pointing at her work. “What is that?”
“Oh1” Her eyes widened, and she looked worried for the first time. Worse than that, she looked as if she knew that she had done something wrong and got caught for it. “This is nothing.”
“Rose,” he growled, not giving a damn now for his anger. “What are you doing?” He leaned over the desk, hands flat on the wood, blocking Rose from looking anywhere but at him.
She winced and bowed her head. “It isn’t as bad as it looks. I just…”
“Rose.”
“I was just in here, searching for the ledgers that concerned the payment of the staff. I wanted to confirm the amounts and make sure that they were—” She swallowed and tried for an innocent smile. “That they were being treated fairly.”
“And this?” He stabbed with his finger at what she was working onnow. “Where did you get this?”
She did not answer, still refusing to look at him.
“Rose!” he barked.
She jumped when he shouted, and while Christopher was afforded a second of guilt for the way he acted, it fled him just as quickly. And that had everything to do with Rose, his wife.
He saw her shoulders stiffen. He saw her back straighten. And he saw the way her expression hardened with a defiant energy as she snapped her head up and fixed it on him.
“It was sitting on the table, open and there for anyone to read,” she said rightly. “It is not as if I was snooping around for it.”
“That is not –”
“And I only meant to glance at it,” she powered over him, at which point she raised a smug eyebrow. “Then I noticed all the errors.”
“Errors?”
“I thought to leave them, because surely they were made on purpose? But then I remembered my father, and often he would make similar errors, and not even on purpose. I hesitateto think that someone with your reputation would make such mistakes; that is not what I am suggesting at all.” She could not have looked prouder of herself. “But just in case, I fixed them, nonetheless. Really, it was nothing.”
Christopher balked at the gall, at the arrogance, at the possibility that she found a mistake in his work. And then fixed it! There was just no way.
And that she was so darn self-important about it. The way she folded her arms and looked at him, not even bothering to hide her victory. Oh, how it annoyed him.
Despite his best efforts to be calm and reasonable, there was only so much a man could take.
“Perhaps I should have been clearer,” He spoke through gritted teeth. “When I told you that this marriage is one of convenience, you must not have understood what that meant.”
“I understand well enough,” she said. “And you were the one who said you wished to take advantage of what I can do. Well, this,” She gestured to her work. “This is what I can do. This is how I can help.”
“I did not ask for your help.”
“You did!”
“Not. With. This.”
The work in question pertained to new taxation policies that Christopher was readying to implement on his tenants in the north. He wished to raise money for a conservatory in Bath that needed funding, so he was quietly raising these taxes in a way that would not cripple his tenants.
