Page 22 of The Duke and His Jilted Bride

She went still, her hand stopping, tangled in Pearl’s cream-coloured mane. Blinking, Evander turned the glove cuff and smoothed it flat against her wrist. He ran his thumb once along the seam to check how it was laying.

He was aware of the warmth of her wrist through the leather, and more importantly, the way her breath had shifted, an intake of breath that she held too long. She wasn’t looking at him anymore, and he quickly released her, worried she had thought the gesture meant something more than it did. Worried that he thought it meant something more too, and–

He stopped himself and stepped back, putting some distance between them. “You must be careful with what you wear when you ride here,” he said. “This isn’t like Hyde Park. We will ride hard – and you must keep up without stopping to adjust your garments on horseback. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, returning to Pearl. “Thank you…”

Nodding, he left to join Howes with Matchem and checked the girth on his own horse. He sent Howes to fetch Aurelia, and drew his horse to the gate. Outdoors again, the morning was the same clear blue it had been before. He heard Aurelia before he saw her. She was sitting atop Pearl side-saddle.

Evander knew he shouldn’t have said anything. He had already overstepped twice trying to manage her behaviour and emotions and force them into alignment with Carrstone, his expectations, what was safest.

But he said it anyway, “You needn’t ride that way when you are here,” he said, not able to meet her eye. “It is far too dangerous. Ride astride. And if you find your habit is not sufficient for this today… We will order you a new one soon.”

Sending Howes a look that told him to turn around and pretend to be busy, Evander moved to help Aurelia off the horse in the absence of a step. His hands came around her waist as she slipped out of her saddle and fell backwards into him. She was warm in his arms and smelled clean, like the women in the city. Her hair brushed against his neck, and he suppressed the jolt it sent down his back, turning his attention back to the ride at hand.

“Will you, erm,” she said as he unhanded her, and steadied her. He swore her cheeks were flushed but decided to ignore that particular realization, staring at a space over her head. “You must promise to go slow, if you are leading the ride, and I am riding like a man… I am scared of falling.”

“Off the horse?”

She nodded. He was still holding on to her arms and promptly stopped. “Yes, what else?” She attempted to smile, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Imagine it. You will be the farmer duke, and I will be the duchess of broken bones.”

“We’ll make a decent pair.”

“Do you think?”

“Yes. No matter what they label us, I think we’ll be just fine.”

Eight

The bath had been drawn by the time she returned from the ride, steaming faintly in the copper tub in her dressing room. Two maids waited for her and had arranged everything accordingly. Aurelia was beginning to understand how Evander ran Carrstone. The rules of the house went unspoken, and everything… fit nicely… in some strange middle space between formality and comfort.

She lowered herself into the water and felt the day go out of her shoulders. Her hands came around the sides of the tub as she sank beneath the bathwater and held her breath.

Later, working a lather into her hair, the younger maid Annie began asking about her day. “Was it a good ride, Your Grace? They said you rode down to Carrstone village. The people there must have been very excited to see you. They were putting flowers up when they heard His Grace was returning sooner than planned. Did you see them?”

Annie was at most seventeen, and had a pleasant and broad face. She moved to let the other maid Liz rinse Aurelia’s hair, while she folded towels by the washbasin and Aurelia considered her answer.

“We rode mainly on the outskirts. His Grace wanted to first visit the tenants closest to the manor after winter. We went to that big farm, Booton’s farm, which he said didn’t even really belong to him,” Aurelia explained, sighing as the warm water rushed down her back. “What I have seen of the countryside already has been extraordinary.”

“Is it very different from London?” Annie asked, and when she did, her Norfolk accent became more apparent.

“Oh, yes,” Aurelia replied, bringing her knees up to her chest. “Very different.”

“Well, His Grace knows every inch of it,” Annie said. “He rides out most mornings with Mr. Howes before breakfast, and sometimes Mr. Poole the estate manager. Even in January, if you can believe it. And the grounds are frozen solid at that time of the years. The rest of us can’t believe it.”

“He loves it here,” Aurelia surmised.

The two maids started chatting about business in the village, the upcoming May fair and their excitement about having a day off, and the bakehouse that sold custard tarts Aurelia had to order for breakfast. Aurelia’s thoughts were elsewhere, while Liz performed a rosewater rinse. She thought about how restorative the pale sky and muddy boots were, about how Evander had known the owner of every field they passed through, more than just a landlord cataloguing his assets, but like something naming the rooms of a childhood home. He spoke about ditches and rotations, about their main crops – which was, he had said, an unusual thing to tell a woman on their first morning in the country, but that he wanted her to know.

She had listened to all of it without even trying. He spoke about the estate with the same passion she practiced music. She had never known someone could become so attached to a piece of land like it was its own person.

And she found she liked this about him very much.

A while later, she came down with her hair still damp. Her aunt would have become apoplectic if she had done something like that at their home. But things moved differently at Carrstone, and the maids had not batted an eye.

Really, Aurelia had been looking for the library, which Mrs. Foulger had described as, “at the end of the long western passage, Your Grace. You can't miss it.” But somehow she must have missed it. Because now she was in some sort of art gallery.

The gallery ran the full length of the west wing, lit by long windows on one side. On the other side were portraits with the accumulated faces of two hundred years of Battles. She walked the length of it slowly, reading the small placards at the bottom of each frame. There was the first duke, painted in the style of the 1600s with the stiff and flat formality of the era. Next to him was his wife. The second duke came after that. He had clearly been handsome and knew it. And so on and so forth. There was a series of children across the generations, looking variously bored, suspicious, and in one case alarmed. And sometimes, she noticed with joy, there were dogs as large as Titan and Nike, leading her to wonder just how long the Battles and their Great Danes had lived side by side at Carrstone Manor.