Page 26 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

He was beginning to notice that she had that furrow whenever something intrigued her.

He found himself watching her a moment longer than the question required, the morning light catching the auburn in her hair, the unhurried certainty in the way she crossed his study without waiting for an invitation, entirely at ease in a room that made most people considerably more careful of themselves.

There was something about her stillness this morning, standing there frowning at her papers with her lower lip caught between her teeth, that struck him as almost unbearably lovely. It was not the practiced loveliness of a woman dressed for admiration, but something quieter, more honest, a woman simply being herself without the smallest thought to how she appeared while doing it.

He swallowed and looked away before she could catch him at it.

“Of course. What troubles you?”

“Mrs. Whitfield has given me the household accounts to review, as I understand is customary for a new mistress, and I have found several entries here I cannot quite make sense of.” She crossed to his desk and set the papers before him, leaning slightly towards him to point at a column of figures. “This expenditure, under ‘eastern tenancy repairs.’ Is that related to the thatching you mentioned yesterday, or is it something separate I ought to understand?”

“The same matter. My steward wrote requesting authorization, and I approved the expense before we left London. It should have been recorded under next quarter’s projected costs rather than this quarter’s actual, which I suspect is the source of your confusion.”

“That is precisely what confused me. Thank you.” She studied the figures a moment longer, then looked up at him, something satisfied settling over her features now that the puzzle had resolved itself. “I find I would rather understand the whole of it properly, Your Grace, than simply sign whatever is placed in front of me. I hope that does not strike you as an imposition.”

“It does not strike me as an imposition at all.” He meant it more than the simple words suggested, and something in his voice must have conveyed that, because she held his gaze a moment longer than the exchange strictly required before gathering her papers again. “I am glad of it, in fact. I would rather my wife understood my household thoroughly than merely occupied a chair at its head.”

“Good.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Then you will not object if I have a great many more questions before the week is out.”

“I look forward to them.”

She left as briskly as she had arrived.

Julian sat a long moment after the door had closed behind her, the letters entirely forgotten in front of him, the memory of Elizabeth and the promise he’d made himself sitting oddly alongside the lingering warmth of Louisa’s smile. Two thoughts that ought to have settled comfortably together but did not, however carefully he tried to arrange them.

He shook his head firmly, pulling the letters back toward him with more force than was required.

Everything is under control. I have made my promises, and I intend to keep every one of them precisely as written, nothing more than that.

He was not entirely certain that he believed it as fully as he wished to.

CHAPTER 13

“Which way to the stables, if you please?”

“Straight along the gravel path past the rose garden, Your Grace, and through the second archway. You’ll hear the horses before you see them.”

Louisa thanked the gardener and set off in the direction he’d pointed, her skirts gathered slightly against the morning dew still clinging to the grass. A small satchel of paper and charcoal was tucked under one arm, in case Kit wished to draw rather than sign, along with a slim primer of her own devising, written out the night before by candlelight, in case he wished for neither.

She had lain awake longer than she meant to the previous evening, debating how to begin. Every tutor before her, by Julian’s account, had arrived armed with lesson plans and expectations, had sat Kit down at a desk and waited for him to perform to some standard he had never agreed to meet. She did not intend to make that mistake. This morning, she intended to make no demands of him whatsoever, and see what came of that instead.

The stables emerged through the second archway exactly as promised, long and low, golden light slanting through the high windows onto scattered straw. The warm, comfortable smell of horse and leather and hay settled over her the moment she stepped inside.

A groom near the entrance touched his cap. “Looking for Master Kit, Your Grace? He’ll be with Rosalind. Third stall from the end, on your left.”

“Thank you.”

She found Kit there, exactly as she’d expected, perched on an overturned bucket beside a bay mare with a gentle eye and a white blaze down her nose, a curry comb moving in slow, careful strokes along the horse’s flank.

He did not look up as she approached, though the set of his shoulders told her that he had heard her footsteps in the straw and had simply decided, as he decided most things, to withhold judgment until he’d seen what she meant to do about it.

Louisa did not go to him directly. Instead, she crossed to a second bucket and settled herself onto it a respectful distance away, close enough to be present but far enough not to crowd him. She looked at the mare rather than at him.

“Rosalind,” she said, to no one in particular. “That is a very fine name for a very fine horse.”

Kit’s hand did not pause this time. The curry comb kept moving steadily, though Louisa noted with some satisfaction that his shoulders had not gone rigid the way they had on that first morning in the schoolroom. He was neither welcoming her nor shutting her out. He was simply waiting, the way he seemed to wait for everyone, to see whether she would prove worth the trouble of noticing properly.

“My grandmother had a mare rather like her, when I was your age. Chestnut, though, not bay, with a temper considerably worse than this one’s, from the look of her.” Louisa reached down and picked up a stray wisp of straw, turning it over in her fingers, giving her hands something to occupy while her voice did the work. “She bit my father’s coat sleeve clean through once, when he tried to urge her to go faster than she wished to. He never forgave her for it, though I always admired her for it. There is something to be said for a creature who simply refuses to be rushed.”