“Trip?” she asked, turning on her brand-new fiancé. “What trip?”
Her father looked at her as if she were slow to catch up. “Why, the reason you’re marrying so soon. So you can take over his house while he’s gone.”
Georgie didn’t say another word. She simply turned away from them and walked out the door. The last thing she heard was her mother’s faintly chastising voice. “You didn’t tell her?”
9
It took him half an hour, but he finally tracked her down, in the kitchen of all places, kneading bread dough. A full apron tied around her pretty blue-and-white striped morning dress and her hands dusty white with flour, she didn’t look up, although he knew she would have guessed he’d arrived just by the gasps and curtsies from the kitchen staff. He gave them all a nod of the head and tried his best to ignore the collective hostility directed his way. He suspected they had no idea why their mistress was upset. He also imagined they didn’t need to know. All it would take was one look at the stark betrayal in her eyes and the furious beating she was giving that dough to tell the tale.
“May I explain?” he asked her.
She closed a fist and punched the dough right in the center. He suspected she was envisioning a particular person’s body part.
“Please?”
With a sigh and a glance up at the very large man across the room in white who was cradling a meat cleaver in his arms,Georgie cleared the room quite efficiently. That didn’t mean she stopped pummeling the dough.
“Interesting hobby,” he ventured, stepping closer.
She gave the dough another solid punch. He swore he felt it in his gut.
“It has saved the life of more than one family member,” she finally said, folding the dough and folding it again before sprinkling flour over it and covering it with a towel.
“I imagine I should be grateful it was convenient as well.”
“I suspect you should.”
She had a smudge of dust on her cheek. He fought an urge to wipe it away. No, he admitted, trying to ignore his suddenly very interested cock, he wanted tolickit away. This shouldn’t be the moment he realized that he would do anything to keep from losing her, but suddenly he knew that it wasn’t at all about the girls’ safety or the mission or the fact that Georgie could bake her own bread if need be. It was about her.
In that surprise burst of honesty, he realized that he suddenly couldn’t imagine his life without her in it anymore, and it had only taken him a week to realize it. He just didn’t think she would believe that right now.
He was feeling hopeful for a positive outcome until she finally lifted her eyes, and he saw not rage, which he’d expected, but devastation. Her eyes were dry, but they seemed to hold a world of pain and disappointment. Walking over to the sink, she washed the flour off her hands and very deliberately dried them before hanging the towel back up.
He couldn’t seem to move, that pain cleaving his own chest. “I was about to tell you,” he said.
She turned back to him with eyes that were once again bland and passive. He suspected she had a lot of practice covering her reactions.
“Were you?”
He saw it so clearly then, especially after speaking to her father. Everyone in her life had done this to her. Just assumed that Georgie would handle whatever they threw at her. That Georgie would pick up the slack, cover the mistakes, supervise the mess somebody might have left behind on the way to whatever pastime they wanted to follow instead.
And she had.
Which made him even more uncertain how to go on. Because if he told her he understood, he suspected she would simply haul off and punch him like a half-risen lump of bread dough.
“Could we go somewhere to sit?” he asked. “I imagine your cook would like his counters back. And I would like to speak frankly, which I cannot do with the audience I suspect is waiting around the corner armed with cooking weaponry.”
For a long moment she just stood there staring down at the lump of dough and the towel that protected it as if waiting for it to advise her. Trim and tidy, her hair sleek as silk, her posture impeccable, her blue-and-white striped gown—even the apron—flawless, and yet somehow, she made him think of a child who had just been left on a street corner. He realized he’d lifted a hand toward her, as if to really pull her close. He let it fall.
Finally, without a word, she untied the apron and pulled it over her head. Hanging it up on a nearby hook, she called a name, which he suspected belonged to the cook, and led Grey out the kitchen door to the garden he’d first visited only a few days ago. Heading straight for the little arbor where he’d met her cousins, she sat and pointed him to the seat opposite. Not alongside.
He sat.
She settled, hands clasped primly in her lap, posture not an inch less rigid, her gaze unflinching. He respected the power of that focus. He wished he’d never had to see it directed at him.
For just a second, he considered popping off one of the irises that edged the garden. Handing it to her, as if that would make a difference.
“I wasn’t allowed to say anything,” he said instead, not moving. “It is a trip on behalf of the government.”
