Page 4 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

She looked down at Eleanor, still asleep in her basket, one small fist curled loosely against her cheek.

“Louisa.” Lady Henwick’s voice was gentle, cautious. “What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking,” Louisa said slowly, “that a man who has not spoken to me once in his life has just offered me something no one else has bothered to offer.”

“And what is that?”

“A bargain.” Louisa folded the letter along its crease, her mind already moving several steps ahead of the conversation in the hallway, already assembling and discarding sentences with the same brisk efficiency she suspected the Duke had used to write his own. “Everyone else who has ever wanted something from me has asked prettily and hoped I would not notice I was being managed. The Duke has simply told me what he needs and asked what it will cost him. I find I respect that rather more than I expected to.”

“You cannot seriously be considering it,” Lord Henswick protested.

“I have not decided anything yet, Father, beyond the fact that I intend to answer him.” Louisa was already moving toward the small writing desk against the far wall, letter still in hand. “A duke does not write to a woman he has never met unless he is genuinely out of better options, and a man out of better options is a man worth hearing.”

“And what,” Lady Henswick asked carefully, “do you imagine you might require, in return for your help with his ward?”

Louisa did not answer immediately. She set the letter down beside the inkstand, drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and looked for a moment toward the basket where Eleanor slept.

“I do not yet know,” she said, which was not entirely a lie, only a partial truth, and dipped her pen into the ink.

Lord Henswick opened his mouth to protest further. Lady Henswick laid a hand lightly on his arm, a silent request for patience that he reluctantly honored by falling quiet.

Louisa did not look up again. She smoothed the paper flat beneath her hand, considered her opening line for the length of exactly one breath, and began to write.

The room did not see what she wrote. Only that she wrote for a long while, without pause, without once glancing up to ask her mother’s opinion, and that when she finally set down the pen and folded the letter closed, there was a look on her face that her mother had not seen in some time.

It was the look Louisa always wore when she had decided something, and had no intention whatsoever of being talked out of it.

CHAPTER 3

“You will behave yourself, Louisa.”

“I always behave myself, Mother.”

“You have never once behaved yourself in your entire life, and I am rather fond of you for it, but a duke’s study is not the place to begin practicing.”

The carriage rolled to a stop outside Ashvale House, and Louisa allowed herself exactly one steadying breath before the footman opened the door. Lady Henswick’s hand found hers briefly, a small squeeze of reassurance, before they were both handed down onto the pavement and shown through into an entrance hall so vast and so silent that Louisa’s footsteps sounded like a confession.

“Lady Henswick, if you would follow me to the drawing room.” The butler’s tone left no room for objection. “Lady Louisa, His Grace will receive you in his study.”

Lady Henswick’s eyes found Louisa’s for one last moment, saying something between are you certain and I am proud of you regardless, and then she was led away down one corridor while Louisa was led down another.

The study, when she was shown into it, told her a great deal before its owner ever appeared.

Every book on the shelves stood exactly flush with its neighbor. The desk held a single blotter, a single inkstand, and nothing else. No clutter of unanswered correspondence, no forgotten teacup gone cold. Even the fire had been laid with a precision that suggested someone had considered the correct proportion of coal to flame rather than simply piling it on and hoping.

A man who does not tolerate disorder.

Louisa turned slowly on the spot to take in the rest of the room.

Or perhaps a man who has learned that disorder, once permitted, tends to spread into places he cannot afford to let it reach.

Either reading unsettled her, though she could not have said why.

The door opened.

“Lady Louisa. Thank you for coming.”

She turned, and whatever composure she had gathered while studying his bookshelves required a brief reassembly.