“Then there’s the money.” Daphne leaned against the opposite shelf, arms crossing again. “You count pennies, Nell.He’s never had to count anything in his life. That kind of difference — it doesn’t just disappear because two people fancy each other.”
“I am not some fool who thinks —” Nell started.
“And he is younger than you.” Daphne cut her off, not unkindly, her dark eyes steady on Nell’s. “Nearly six years younger. The ton will count every single one of those years, and they will not be generous about it.”
Nell pressed her back harder against the shelf. The thoughts she’d been avoiding all night crashed over her — each one landing heavier than the last. Widow. Common. Poor. Older. Mother of two. She’d known all of it, every impossible obstacle, since the moment his hand had lingered on hers a breath too long. She simply hadn’t let herself line them up in a row like this, where she couldn’t look away.
“I am not saying anything you haven’t already thought.” Daphne’s expression softened, and she reached out and took Nell’s hands between her own. “I just want you to be careful. He can walk away from this and lose nothing. You can’t.”
Careful. The word echoed in the small space, bouncing off the flour sacks and sugar barrels.
“He called you nothing once.” Daphne spoke softly, her thumb rubbing across Nell’s knuckles with a rhythmic, grounding pressure. “At the festival. In front of Mrs. Pemberton and Sir Richard and anyone else who was listening. Because someone asked about you and he panicked.”
Nell drew a shuddering breath, her throat aching as she stared at a stray dusting of flour on the floorboards. “I remember.”
“I am not saying he meant it.” Daphne shrugged, her hands tightening their hold on Nell’s fingers. “But he said it. Without thinking. Without considering how it would make you feel. He panicked, and he was cruel.”
Reckless, Nell thought. She looked away, her gaze snagging on the heavy iron scales. He’d panicked and lashed out because he didn’t know how else to handle the heft of his station. What else might he say without thinking? What else might he do on impulse when the pressure of the ton became too much?
“Just be careful.” Daphne squeezed her hands once more. “You have children to think about. You don’t want to end up as his… mistress.”
She went silent, letting the drag of the word hang between them. She didn’t have to say more.
Nell’s mind was already spinning, cataloging every objection and every obstacle that made this union a madness. This could destroy the life she’d built so carefully from the ruins of her marriage. She was thirty-four years old, six years his senior, a widow with two children and flour permanently embedded under her fingernails. The ton would never accept her. They would call her a fortune hunter, a scheming widow who had trapped a young lord with common charms and a baker’s body. They would whisper behind their fans and laugh behind their hands. Eventually, inevitably, Dominic would hear them, and he would start to wonder if they were right.
“I will.” Nell managed the words through a throat gone tight, returning the squeeze of Daphne’s hands. “I will be careful.”
Daphne pulled her into a hug, a quick and fierce embrace of sharp elbows and protective love. Then she moved toward the door, slipping out of the storeroom to open the shop and leaving Nell alone with the ghost of his hands on her skin.
This had to stop. Whatever madness had seized them both, it had to end before it destroyed them.
The morning slipped past her familiar routines.
Lily came downstairs in her nightgown, as she chattered about the library at Bramwell Park. “He had a first edition ofUdolpho, Mama. And Lord Westmore promised I could come back to see it again.”
“Can we, Mama?” Lily tugged at Nell’s stained apron, her eyes appearing enormous behind her smudged lenses. “Can we go back? He said I could hold it again if I was careful, and I was very careful, was I not?”
Nell busied herself with the bread, keeping her face turned away as she kneaded the dough with unnecessary force. “We shall see, sweetheart.”
Oliver was quieter than usual when he appeared, but there was a lightness to him that Nell hadn’t seen in months. There was a softness around his eyes and a looseness in his shoulders that had long been absent. He ate his breakfast without his usual sullen silence, looking up with a spark of eagerness when Lily mentioned the lake.
“There are pike in that lake.” Oliver spoke casually, pushing eggs around his plate the way the information were a mere trifle. “Big ones. Lord Westmore showed me where they hide.”
Nell’s hands stilled on the dough, her heart tightening at the boyish hope in his tone.
Martha appeared in the kitchen doorway, her dark eyes moving over Nell’s face with quiet assessment. She said nothing, she rarely did, but her silence spoke volumes. Nell knew the woman had understood everything at Bramwell Park and had drawn her own conclusions about the missing viscount, the flushed baker, and the crooked yellow dress.
The shop opened at eight, and customers came and went in the usual morning rush. Mrs. Potts requested her weekly order of seed cakes. Old Mr. Thornton fumbled for coins to pay for his daily loaf, but the vicar’s wife sent her maid for scones to serve at a ladies’ meeting. Nell smiled and served and made change,her hands moving through the familiar motions while her mind churned.
Mid-morning brought Mrs. Potts, her neighbor from the haberdashery next door, bustling through the door.
“The usual, dear.” Mrs. Potts set her coins on the counter, her eyes bright with the gleam of someone holding a secret. “And did you ever catch that nice doctor?”
Nell paused in the act of wrapping the loaf, her brow furrowing as she looked up. “The Doctor came?”
“Yes, Dr. Hartley.” Mrs. Potts leaned across the counter, delighted to be the bearer of news. “He came by yesterday afternoon while you were out. Stood at your door for ages, poor man, knocking and waiting and knocking again. I told him you had gone to Bramwell Park for tea with Lady Philippa.”
Nell’s heart stuttered, and she gripped the edge of the wooden counter until her knuckles turned white.
