“Oh!” The hard scrape of a blade against the ice snapped him out of the trance he’d fallen into, just in time to see her stumble over the hem of her skirts. Her arms pinwheeled, and then she was falling, her backside slamming into the ice with a hard thud.
“Rose!” Somehow, it was her given name that burst from his lips, despite his never having thought of her as anything other than Miss St. Claire. He darted forward, the ice slipping beneath his feet as he stumbled over to her and caught her hands in his. “Are you all right?”
She said nothing, but her slender body trembled against him as he eased her up onto her feet, keeping her upright with his hands wrapped around her waist. “Are you hurt?”
Her shoulders were shaking, her breath coming in great, gasping pants. Good God, had she broken an arm? A leg? “Miss St. Claire! Are you injured?”
She tipped her face up to his, still gasping, her pretty, pink lips split wide in a grin. “No, Your Grace. I’m fine.”
She was laughing.Laughing.
All at once, the ugliness inside him, the hatred and fury and bitterness, dissipated, drifting away on the wind.
What must it be like, to have such reserves of joy inside you? To have a smile always hovering on your lips, a laugh always waiting to burst forth, as she did? She was motherless, fatherless, penniless—a young lady of no consequence, tainted with the stain of illegitimacy, and utterly alone in the world, yet here she was, smiling and laughing and spinning on the ice as if she held everything she could ever want right in the palm of her hand.
Was it any wonder the sun sought her out?
He gazed down at her, his heart pounding, mesmerized by those laughing pink lips. If he touched her, dragged his fingertips across her cheek, or grazed her bottom lip with his thumb, could he touch the happiness that lived inside her? Absorb it, through the layers of their skin?
Slowly, he reached for her and caught a lock of her hair in his hand. It was soft, sun warmed, the silky strands glinting like threads of gold between his fingers.
“Y-your Grace?” She was no longer laughing, but she didn’t pull away, only stared up at him, eyes wide, her shallow breaths trembling on her lips.
“I don’t understand,” he murmured, only half-aware of what he was saying. “How can you be so . . . how can you have so much joy inside you?”
A soft sigh left her lips, and for a moment, one wild, heart-stopping moment, she turned her face toward his hand, her soft cheek nestling against his palm. “Joy is a choice, Your Grace.”
Was it? Or was it a gift given to some, and denied to others?
He released her hair and took a step back. “We’ve stayed too long, Miss St. Claire. It’s time to return to Grantham Lodge.”
CHAPTER15
The ride from Hammond Court back to Grantham Lodge was silent. When the carriage stopped in the drive, the duke politely handed Rose down, but he avoided her gaze and vanished into his study as soon as they were through the front door.
Monk raised an eyebrow at her, but she could only give him a helpless shrug.
Something had happened at the pond, something she hadn’t expected. That he’d touched her at all was shocking enough, but the gentleness of his fingers in her hair, and his expression when he’d gazed down at her had been . . .
She hardly knew what. She didn’t have the words to explain it, but it had made her belly quiver.
She climbed the stairs slowly, made her way to her bedchamber, and perched on the edge of her bed, her fingers tight around the bundle of papers she’d folded and secreted in her pocket when they’d passed through Hammond Court’s stillroom on their way back to the carriage.
She couldn’t say whether or not the duke’s grandmother’s gingernut recipe was among the fragile pages, but she’d taken a moment to gather some of her own stores of preserved ginger and lemon peel from the kitchen, just in case. They were far superior to anything that could be had at the shops.
If she was going to make the duke ginger biscuits, then she was going to do it the way it was meant to be done. As for whether or not she was going to make them at all, well . . . she hadn’t decided yet, which was rather ridiculous, on the face of it. She’d made dozens of biscuits in her lifetime. Why should she be hesitating over making these?
They were just biscuits, for heaven’s sake.
Except, of course, that theyweren’t. She had only to recall the expression on the duke’s face when he’d spoken of them to know that. There would be no going back again once she’d plucked on this thread, and the duke might not thank her for dragging his painful past into the light.
But she’d never been good at minding her own concerns. Perhaps that was why Ambrose had assigned her this task—because he’d known once she got the barest glimpse behind the duke’s grim façade, she’d poke and pry at it until she’d wrenched it loose.
Of course, she may not have the recipe at all. She withdrew the thin bundle of papers from her pocket and leafed through them one by one, unsure if the quivery feeling in the depths of her belly was a hope she’d find what she sought, or a hope that she wouldn’t.
She took up the first paper, smoothed it carefully against her knee, and leaned over, squinting at the faded ink. Marrow pudding. Marrow pudding? Dear God, that sounded dreadful.
She rifled through the pages one by one, the brittle paper crackling in her fingers, struggling to decipher the spidery handwriting. Venison pasty. Fish sauce with lobster. Oxford pudding. Yorkshire pudding. Boiled plum pudding.
