She thought of the previous steward. His ingratiatingly bent spine, his habit of addressing her as ‘My Lady Seraphina’ in a tone that managed to be both deferential and subtly disgusting, and the way he had stood outside Margaret’s sitting room each morning for his instructions as though the rightful authority of the household resided not in its duke but in its dowager. Even when her father had still been with them.
Beckwith had been at Fortunestone Hall for days, and she had already seen enough. Coal orders doubled without consulting the dowager, a tenant farmer’s wife redirected from the servants’ entrance to his own desk and actually listened to. He was a man who trusted his own arithmetic and answered to no one’s authority but Alistair’s. Which was, she reflected, the opposite of everything the old steward had been.
He was not, in any sense she had yet discovered, servile.
She was not sure what to do with that, either.
You are cataloging him,said the stern portion of her mind,like a naturalist noting the habits of an unusual specimen. This is not appropriate behavior in a man’s arms.
She was aware of that. She was also cold, exhausted, four-and-twenty years old, and apparently reduced to cataloging a man’s eye color because his coat smelled of leather and warmth and nothing she had encountered in all her years. Which was not, she decided, sufficient grounds for self-reproach. She had read extensively about men, in the philosophical and political essays hidden behind more acceptable volumes in their family library, and had formed strong opinions based on observation, literature, and her father’s own failures. She was not naïve. She was simply, it turned out, entirely unprepared for an actual encounter with a real man of marriageable age.
This is not useful information,she told herself firmly.
The lights of the hall appeared ahead through the rain, warm yellow rectangles, the drawing room windows and the entrance lanterns burning against the gray. Seraphina felt the familiar compound of relief and something she could only describe as reluctance, which she recognized as entirely unreasonable and intended to ignore.
He slowed the bay to a walk as they approached the gravel sweep before the entrance. She expected him to dismount immediately. He did not. He drew the animal to a halt just outside the reach of the lantern light, and for one suspended moment, neither of them moved.
“You’re safe now,” he said, low and quiet, with something rougher than mere professional concern running beneath the words like a current under ice.
She turned her face toward his, an instinct rather than a decision, and their cheeks brushed. Cold against cold, wet skin against wet skin, and yet the contact sent heat flooding beneathher surface with an immediacy that had nothing whatsoever to do with temperature. His stillness in that moment was absolute, the stillness of a man suppressing something very studiously, and the restraint was legible to her with a clarity that made her breath catch.
Then she felt the lightest press of his lips against her temple. Not quite a kiss. Close enough to one that the margin felt almost cruel.
He gently released her from his lap, then dismounted in one smooth motion and reached up for her. His hands spanned her waist and lifted her down from the saddle, setting her on the gravel with a steadiness that suggested he had noted the tremor in her legs and was compensating without comment.
She looked up at him.
He gazed at her, those dark eyes almost level and entirely too readable in the moment before he made them otherwise, with an expression that was not quite neutral and was not, she thought, entirely resolved. No warmth; no coldness. Recognition. He had noted something inconvenient and had not yet decided what to do about it as the rain ran down his face.
She knew that look. She must be wearing it herself.
Clara appeared as the front door opened, eyes wide and blankets already in her arms, with the resigned expression of a woman waiting for exactly this outcome. Servants moved. There was warmth and light and the smell of fires from inside.
Beckwith turned to the groom who had run out for the horse, speaking in a low, steady undertone, his back to her. Already engaged with the next task.
Seraphina allowed Clara to draw her toward the door.
But at the threshold, she paused … just for a moment, sheltered by the entrance arch, with his overcoat still around her shoulders and rain still hammering the gravel … and looked back at him.
* * *
