“Thank you,” she said, when she had recovered herself. “The dogs will be very pleased.”
“The dogs,” he said, “are incapable of gratitude and you know it.”
His eyes moved over her face for a moment in the way they did when he was looking at her and had not yet decided whether he was going to say what he was thinking.
“Take the cat,” he said.
“She doesn’t want to go. I believe she genuinely might like you.”
“Miss Hosmer,” Harper warned, at the edge of his patience.
“She genuinely doesn’t,” Temperance continued. “Look at her.”
He looked at Soot, who was now apparently asleep. “I don’t want to argue about this.”
Temperance took Soot from his arms. Their hands were briefly very close in the exchange, and brushed against each other for the briefest moment.
It caused her heartbeat to race.
“She’s annoyed,” Temperance said, covering up her reaction, “And surely, she has strong feelings about where she wants to be. You know, cats can be very particular about this sort of thing.”
“So do I,” he said, turning back to his desk swiftly. “The accounts, I need to finish the quarterly review.”
“Of course,” she said.
She turned toward the door. She had her hand on the frame when he said, without looking up from the papers he had already opened,
“Miss Hosmer.”
She turned.
“The question,” he said. “About unusual occurrences. Were you going to ask me something specific?”
She looked at him for a moment. His attention was on the papers, or appeared to be. As there was a quality of stillness about him that suggested he was listening considerably more carefully than the posture implied.
“It was nothing,” she said.
He looked up then and the dark blue eyes met hers across the room.
“All right,” he said, and looked back at his papers.
She closed the door behind her and stood there for a moment with Soot in her arms.
She was someone who had survived twenty-two years of difficult circumstances and was not going to be undone by a pair of dark blue eyes.
CHAPTER 12
“The thing about French architecture,” Albina said, reaching for her wine unhurried ease, “is that it is completely impractical for anyone who actually has to live inside it.”
Temperance looked up from her soup. “Mother, we were talking about the drainage.”
“Were we still? I thought we had moved on.”
“You moved on, as you often do between topics,” Harper said. “I was still on the drainage.”
Albina considered this without visible concern.
“Well. You can go back to it. I simply wanted to make the point about France.”
