“Why did you come?” she asked.
That question was not one he could easily answer, especially not standing in the stable yard. And thus, he said the most obvious one.
“To return it.”
She offered an exasperated huff. “You could have sent it by messenger.”
Deflated by her reception, Adam took her words like a kick in the gut. She really wasn’t happy to see him and would rather the book had shown up in brown paper, delivered by a stranger.
“Are you not pleased to see me?” He hated to ask, feeling vulnerable in an unfamiliar way. Not that he’d expected her to run into his arms and let him sweep her off her feet, but the underlying hostility he detected was new and unwelcome.
“It’s not that,” she said, glancing around her. But she said nothing more, with unfathomable emotions swimming in the depths of her lovely eyes. Maybe the hostility was shame at her circumstances, but it looked more like fear.
What had he stumbled into?
If the gardener hadn’t called her a lady, Adam might have assumed she’d taken a lesser position than a governess as a scullery maid.
“You have a piece of potato peeling on your apron.”
Absently, she brushed it off. “You didn’t come all this way, a hundred miles, to return my book, nor tidy my clothing. What do you want?”
“It wasn’t a hundred miles, only about seventy-five. At this moment, I want to go indoors. I would like a glass of cool ale if you have it. I wish to speak frankly with you, and then I hope to have a bed to sleep in. If after all that, our business is concluded, then I shall leave tomorrow.”
“Our business?” she repeated.
Was she going to deny him entrance and the barest of explanations?He waited while she chewed her lower lip.
“Fine, then. Come inside, but I warn you, Lord Diamond, my family’s home is a shell of its former state. And there are no servants, only friends who live together because they have nowhere else to go.”
He couldn’t deny that statement shocked him.No servants?
And her last statement, did that include herself?
“What about you, Lady Alice? Do you have nowhere else?”
“Especially me,” she said quietly and led him inside.
Adam hadn’t known what to expect indoors — maybe pigs being kept in the drawing room and pigeons in the pantry. Instead, it was room after room of emptiness. It appeared as if the Jeffrey family had moved out, taken their belongings, and left a handful of people behind.
Friends, Alice had called them. Yet they were behaving as staff. He’d been immediately offered tea by a woman who must be the cook. A younger one introducing herself as Jenny said she would make up a room for him, then looked bewildered and asked Alice where his lordship should be placed. They had gone off together to find something suitable, giving him time to walk around the ground floor.
There was nothing in the drawing room except an ugly candlestick on the floor by the hearth and a single torn ottoman, making an already large space seem cavernous. The same for each room he wandered into except the dining room, which had a crude semblance of a place to eat. On the second floor, he pushed open a door expecting more of the same, and his breath caught.
It was a library with shelf upon shelf of books.
That’s where Alice found him sometime later.
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” she remarked.
He turned from the shelf he was scanning, this one full of history books. With her apron and kerchief off, she looked more like the woman he knew and with whom he had fallen in love if he was entirely honest with himself. Yet still, she did not appear like the lady of this house or any. Far too plainly dressed and with too much worry upon her face.
“This room does seem to be a miracle when every other room has been decimated of what one might consider normal furnishings. How was it spared the Viking raid?”
She laughed, looking years younger, like a teenager.
“A few days ago, I walked in here, my favorite room in the house, prepared for the worst. I swear I shrieked so loudly Mrs. Georgie — that’s our cook, before and still — she came running. I asked her exactly what you asked me. How could it still be a library?”
He moved closer to her, hoping to catch her familiar scent.
