“The butler, the coachman, and anyone else complicit in restricting your movements will be evaluated and, where necessary, replaced. Beckwith can begin immediately.” He said this with the same flat authority with which he had dispatched the dowager the previous day. “A household is a mechanism not unlike a mill. When a part is not functioning, you do not plead with it. You remove it and install one that works.”
Josephine blinked. The tears she had been holding at bay hovered dangerously near the surface, and she pressed her fingertips together in her lap, using the small discomfort to anchor herself against the overwhelming sensation of being heard, truly heard.
He reached for the small notebook from his coat draped over the chair and flipped it open. Josephine caught a glimpse of the page, a dense column of entries in a firm, angular hand, underlined, annotated, and growing at a rate that would have alarmed any man less accustomed to managing chaos. He took up a pencil and added a word at the bottom. She did not need to read it to know what it said.
Servants.
“Thank you,” she said softly, but so sincerely that the two small words carried everything she could not say aloud. They were not enough. But she had nothing else to offer a man who had just dismantled a year of helplessness in the space of a quarter hour.
“Do not thank me,” he said, setting the pencil down. “I have not done anything yet.”
He closed the notebook and rose, crossing to the arched window. March had not been kind to Yorkshire. The sky hung low and leaden over the moors, and a thin rain blurred the river below into a gray ribbon winding through fields still too cold for green. He stood with one hand braced against the stone casement, looking out at the land he had inherited.
“The steward will be dismissed this afternoon. Beckwith will begin evaluating the household staff tomorrow, and I will write to my solicitor regarding the girls’ legal standing. Seraphina and Arabella will need wardrobes and introductions if they are to enter society, and that will take planning.” He paused, still facing the window. “I will also need a full accounting of the girls’ education, or lack of it. What they have been taught. What they have not. You will assist me. You know the household better than anyone, and you know what the girls need.”
Josephine rose from the wingback chair. She did not decide to move. Her body simply carried her across the faded carpet until she stood beside him at the window, looking out at thesame bleak, rain-washed landscape. The moors stretched in every direction, treeless and vast, and Fortunestone Hall sat upon its hill like a fortress that had forgotten what it was defending.
She thought, with a fierce, aching clarity that surprised her,This is what it feels like to be sheltered. This is what it feels like when someone stands between you and the storm and does not ask for anything in return.
She had never witnessed such a sense of responsibility before. Not from Jerome, whose idea of management had been to pour another glass of brandy and blame the world for his failures. Not from the dowager, whose control was not stewardship but dominion. This man, with his pencil and his notebook and his list that grew longer by the hour, had listened to her account of a year’s imprisonment and responded not with outrage or pity but with a schedule. There was nothing romantic in it.
And yet …
Standing beside him at the window, Josephine became aware of the nearness of him in a way she had not been while seated across the desk. The warmth of his body radiated through the small distance between them, and she could see the weave of his shirtsleeve where his arm braced against the casement, the cords of muscle along his forearm, the ink stain on his forefinger that he had not bothered to wipe clean. He was larger than the drawing room had prepared her for. Not merely tall but solid, muscular. The scent of him reached her, ink and wool and faintly cedar. The honest, unadorned scent of a man who had likely been working since dawn. It should not have affected her, but it did.
He glanced down at her, and their eyes met.
It lasted only a moment, but she felt it, unexpectedly, inconveniently. His blue eyes held the same flicker of awarenessshe had caught in the drawing room the day before, the look of one who had noticed something he would rather not have noticed and had not yet succeeded in looking away. He turned from the window to face her fully.
“Is there anything else?” he asked, studying her with an expression she could not read. “Anything else I should know or anything you need?”
Josephine turned to face him, the window to her left now catching the pale March light on the side of her face.
“There is,” she said quietly. “But I do not yet have the words for it.”
It was the truth and it was not. She knew what she wanted to say, but the saying of it would cost more than she had left to give today.
A guarded look entered his eyes. His jaw tightened, the muscle flexing once beneath the stubble he had not shaved that morning, and his hands, which had been loose at his sides, curled into fists and then slowly uncurled.
She understood then, with a certainty that required no instruction, that Alistair Fraser-Oxley was holding himself in check. That the careful courtesy, the arm’s-length reserve with which he had treated her since his arrival, was not indifference. It was discipline. He had seen something he wanted and was refusing himself the luxury of reaching for it.
Admiration,she told herself.That is all this is.
But the warmth spreading through her chest told a different story, and Josephine Oxley, who had spent a year perfecting the art of deception, could not quite bring herself to believe the lie.
CHAPTER 5
What sort of madhouse had he entered?
And then her scent found him. Chamomile and mint. Clean and herbal and so unexpectedly domestic that it bypassed every fortification he possessed.
He had been aware of it before, that first afternoon when those gray eyes had met his across the drawing room, but proximity made it something he could no longer dismiss. It stilled the restless engine of his mind. The perpetual calculations, the strategies, the lists that churned from waking to his brief, exhausted sleep. They did not vanish, but they reduced. She reduced them. He could not account for it and had no great desire to examine it. He only knew that standing close enough to count her eyelashes, he felt, for the first time in longer than he could name, like a man who had briefly set down a very heavy load.
He had no use for the feeling. But she was looking up at him, and his hands uncurled at his sides.
“What is your name?” he asked, his voice rougher than he intended, nothing like the clipped authority with which he conducted business. “Your Christian name.”
“Josephine,” she said, and the word was barely a breath.
