He took the boot from her and examined it for new dents in the leather. “Thank you, miss. It was kind of you to bring it here.”
“Has anyone considered buying the dog its own boot?”
“Ah, miss, what haven’t we tried? Several times already we’ve relocated where the footmen polish His Grace’s boots. It seems she’s a particular fondness now for these boots.” He leaned in. “No others will do now. I fear she believes the boots are hers.”
“Dear me.” Behind Mycroft was an enormous arrangement of roses—white and red and pink—each bloom or bud perfectly formed. Fern leaves had been added to the arrangement, too. You’d think it was the middle of spring here instead of winter. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, those are the most beautiful roses I have ever seen in my life.”
Mycroft stood aside, and she walked straight to the table and breathed in. “They smell wonderful.” She breathed in again. “How thoughtful to put them here where guests may be delighted by them.” Privately, she wondered how many guests a man like the duke might have to be delighted, with or without roses. Social callers, not business callers.
“His Grace insists, miss.”
“Is that so?” The duke did not seem the sort of man to care about flowers. What an unexpected discovery, that he should insist on such a thing. From duty, no doubt, not for reasons of aesthetics, surely. Then again, he possessed a sense of humor that perhaps no one but she had witnessed. Was it not possible that there was more to him than she thought? “How is anyone growing roses in winter? My garden is completely fallow. Everything cut back to the root. I haven’t a single leaf or flower.”
“A conservatory.”
She froze, for that was not Mycroft’s voice. She turned her back to the flowers, and there he stood. Not naked. Heavens, she could not erase that image from her mind. He wore tan breeches, a gold waistcoat worked with tiny red dots, and a carelessly tied neckcloth. His buff coat made his eyes colder than morning frost. He wore a perfectly good pair of boots. Entirely serviceable. Because, as she knew, he did not have both his top boots.
“A conservatory.” She had seen him nude. Nearly nude. Standing in the water. A naked duke. “Yes, what else could it be but that?” For the second time, she was flustered by her reaction to him. “I ought to have guessed.”
That flicker of something in his eyes surely meant he agreed she should have. A handsome man, yes, but so cold, so haughty, she could never entirely dismiss the uneasiness she felt around him. In London, she’d been as uninteresting to him as she was to any other gentleman who called on Louisa. She’d been impressed by his rank, of course, but all she need do in those days was give him his due respect, and that was that.
Good day, Miss Clay, he’d say in his somber way, and she would smile and say, Good day, Duke, and he’d turn to Louisa, who was too often struck dumb, and bow to her. How lovely you and your cousin are today.
Of all the gentlemen who called on Louisa, the duke had been both the most terrifying and fascinating. When it became clear his interest in Louisa was more than incidental and that there would surely be a match between them, it had been Edith’s duty to chaperone. With Louisa unable at first to be herself when the duke was present, Edith had found much of the conversational efforts had fallen to her. She had been happy to do so, happy to watch her cousin slowly relax into her natural, gracious habits around the duke.
“I wish you good morning.” She bent a knee. “I have returned your missing boot.”
His gaze flicked to his butler, holding the boot. He was an overweening presence here, too, just as he had been in London and Tunbridge Wells. And her drawing room. No one else mattered now that he stood here with his chill eyes. A little of Louisa’s trepidation crept up on her.
“I must be on my way. Good day to you, Duke.” She nodded at Mycroft. “Good day.”
The duke tipped his head backward. “You will see the conservatory.”
The authority of the words caught at her, wrapped her up in his imperative. She did not wish to. Not in the least. She opened her mouth to make an excuse, but Mycroft cleared his throat. “You will much enjoy such a tour, Miss Clay.”
She dismissed as absurd the notion that the butler meant to smooth over his employer’s gruffness, and that it was done from fondness for the man. She could not imagine an unhappier place to work than Killhope Castle. Nor a more cheerless employer—except, he was not dour all the time. He wasn’t.
“May I take your cloak, Miss Clay?” Mycroft gave her such a desperate, plaintive look that she could not bring herself to beg off.
She handed over her cloak. For Louisa’s sake, anything. “I should be delighted.”
Mycroft folded her cloak over his arm and accepted her hat as well. She shook out her walking dress and reached up to secure a few hairpins that had come loose during her walk.
“This way.” The duke strode off, and she hurried after him. She caught up, but had to lengthen her stride to keep pace with him.
The interior of the castle was nothing like her imagination. The dank walls and darkened rooms of her imagination did not exist here. The tapestries hung on the walls had not been drizzled and thus retained the glitter of gold and silver thread and did their part in keeping the cold at bay. Sconces and candelabras contained beeswax tapers, and there was mirrored glass to reflect light. As they walked, they passed a niche with a suit of armor, and it occurred to her that one of his ancestors must have worn that gleaming steel.
She knew his history, or at least the history most often repeated about him. His father had died before Oxthorpe’s birth. His mother had left him in the care of tutors and advisors and passed away the day after he reached his majority. Though he had not been an orphan, the fact was he had lived his life here, without either parent. “You grew up here, Duke?”
He gave her a cold look. “Yes.”
“At Killhope, I mean to say.”
“I did.”
She imagined a young boy with dark hair and pale green eyes wandering the corridors and passageways, alone, with no one but tutors and servants to keep him company and entertain him. No wonder he was so solitary a man, if he’d grown up here with no friends or boys his age.
He stopped at a set of double doors carved with a swan on one side and a griffin on the other. He opened the door with the griffin and held it for her. “You ought to have sent a servant.”
She kept her smile. She must. One did not insult a duke. She had no wish to insult anyone, least of all a neighbor, and even less one who owned most of the land for miles. “In future I shall know better.”
He set off down a short, wide corridor hung with paintings she would have loved to study. “I hope so.”
That was too much. Edith glared at his retreating back. “I have done you a service as well, Your Grace.”
He stopped walking and faced her. “What service is that?”
“I have twice found and returned your footwear.”
“I have acknowledged that.”
“I ought to have left your boot where I found it.”
“As I said.” He spoke with infuriating calmness.
“And you say I ought to be married.” She shook her head. “You, sir, are sadly and badly in need of a woman’s gentle influence.”
“I do not deny that.”
She gave him a sideways look. “You understand your shortcomings in this respect and take no measures to remedy them?”
“There we must disagree.”
She could not help smiling. “Then you do intend to go to Holmrook for Christmas.”
“I have made no such decision. Is that the reason for your sharp tone, Miss Clay?”
“No, Duke, it is not.” There was no more maddening man on this earth.
“May I inquire what I have done to offend you?”
“You are a duke, yes. I acknowledge that I am nothing and no one compared to you.”
His dark eyebrows drew together. “I hope I have not given you cause to believe such a thing.”
<
br /> “It’s true. There’s no point pretending it isn’t. You were kind to offer your assistance in the matter of my crisis of transportation.”
“Thank you.” But his words dripped ice.
“Neither of those things mean I welcome you sharing your low opinion of my decisions.”
“I feel,” he said, “that you do not refer to my criticism of your lack of decision about a carriage.”
“Don’t be willful.”
“Never.”
Hands on her hips, she said, “I felt it was more expedient and convenient to you, sir, to return your boot myself rather than walk all the way home and ask one of my servants to bring it here.”
“My apologies, Miss Clay, for giving offense. I did not intend that.”
Her stomach dropped to her toes. His eyes, such a cold and pale green, were really quite remarkable. When he looked at her, it was like being taken apart from the inside out.
“But it is very much the case that you could have left it there.”
“No, Duke,” she said softly. She could not—would not—tolerate his treating her in this dismissive fashion, as if she were as cold as the blood that ran in his veins. As if she cared for nothing but rational decision. “I could not have.”
He let out a long breath. “I suppose not.”
What was she to make of that flicker of resignation in his reaction? “I would not have left anyone’s boot in the field. Not even yours.”
“One of the servants would have gone in search of it.”
“I found it first.”
“So you did.” He turned away. At the end of the corridor, he opened one of a pair of doors that were twins to the ones at the other end, with the same beautiful carving of his coat of arms. Again, he held the door for her.
Even before she passed him, she smelled roses, and then she forgot the petty irritations of her exchange with the duke.
“Oh. Oh.” She stood inside, entranced.
The door he’d held for her opened onto a lengthwise oval of paradise, a more recent addition to the castle, for nothing like this would have been attached to a structure meant to instill dismay and despair in attacking armies.
A passion vine wound around a marble arch to her left. Opposite that was an orange tree. Roses grew along the entire long side of the oval. White gave way to pink gave way to red. A climbing rose with white blossoms streamed along a column and over a limestone arch.
To her right, a servant knelt in one of the beds, and not far from him a black-and-white collie lay on her side. He saw them, put away his shears and the rest of his implements and edged toward the bare outline of a door meant to blend into the wall. The collie followed, hopping on three legs.
Edith walked farther in. Delighted. Astonished. “How do you get them to bloom this time of year?”
“Paling.”
This proved to be the servant’s name, for the man turned and bowed to the duke. Like Mycroft, he did not seem fearful or terrified of his employer. “Your Grace.”
“See to it that Miss Clay has roses to take home with her.”
“Sir.”
“Hardly necessary, Duke.” That earned her another icy look. “But—that would be lovely. Thank you.”
Paling had already retrieved a bucket from some hidden cavity, and now he pulled his shears from a pocket and headed for the roses.
“Have you a favorite color, Miss Clay?”
“They’re all so lovely, I could not possibly choose.”
“That is not an answer.”
No man could have more thorns than he. Either he was silent as a block of ice or on the verge, she was certain, of telling her how deeply he disliked her and wished she would stay away. “Pink.”
“Plenty of the Duchesse de Montebello, Paling.”
That he knew the names of the roses disconcerted her. The duke of her slowly crumbling imagination was not a man who knew such things. Not a man whose servants would smile. Yet. And yet. He had offered to help her buy a gig. And a horse. She had seen him naked, near naked, all pale skin and muscled body. Adonis rising from the water. He had made her laugh. More than once.
These were not feelings she ought to have where he was concerned. She did not wish to think of him as a man. She couldn’t.
To put some distance between them, she walked toward the marble stairs that led to an interior terrace. Here, there were two upholstered benches, several chairs, and a table. To her left, a wide and tall glass door with a pointed top was closed against the winter air, but here, he’d cleared the trees to unblock the view of the Vale of West. At the far left edge of the window glass, she could see one of the castle walls. That marble terrace meant that in summer and spring one might sit outside and admire the prospect.
Was it possible he sat here in awe of the view? Surely not. Surely. How could he not, in the face of such beauty? The view swept her away, took her breath and her words. Heedless of her audience, uncaring, she stood in the center of this terraced view and spread her arms wide. Head back as she breathed in, she turned in a circle.
She ended up facing the duke. He remained on the landing above the stairs. She lowered her arms, and he flushed. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought him embarrassed. What could possibly make a duke uncertain of himself? She smiled at him and forgave him every cross look and word they’d ever exchanged. “Mycroft was right. I have enjoyed this. Thank you for showing me this. I am glad, so glad, you insisted.”
He nodded. A curt movement of his head, and she was, for no reason at all, convinced that the man before her was not in dislike of her but simply a man who did not have words come easily to him because he’d grown up alone.
She thought of him as a boy. Lonely here, with no father and no mother to hold him, only the servants for company, and Killhope as an unceasing reminder of the centuries of duty and responsibility that were his. Her heart twisted up.
Chapter Nine
‡
If he spoke, there was no possible outcome but another disastrous exchange of words at cross-purposes. The chances of him finding both the right words and the right inflection were, in his experience with her thus far, vanishingly small. He would either growl at her, or tell her what was in his heart. She wasn’t some young girl who would accept a proposal of marriage from him merely because a duke bent a knee to her. God in heaven, he would not want her to be such a woman.
He floundered in the waters of his admiration for Edith. Men like him married for the suitability of the match. They married young, to secure the line of inheritance. They married nobility, or else for reasons of money, property, and politics. He’d done none of that. None. The thought of doing so now turned him dead inside.
There was merit in a marriage made for reasons of duty. Until Edith, he’d intended to make just such a marriage. Had his life not taken such an odd turn, he might this moment be married to a woman—likely Miss Louisa Clay—who would have accepted him for reasons of his rank rather than her heart. He would have had no quarrel with that result. They would have made the pattern from which others might make similar marriages of suitability.
Then, Jesus, weeks after his hopes for Edith lay in tatters, after days and days of rumors and gossip about the men who had offered for her once her circumstances were so changed, she’d inquired about Hope Springs. This he’d learned solely because of his insistence on reviewing with Goodman the details of his estate.
For ill or good, he’d picked up the letter from her solicitor to his and said, “This offer.”
Now he feared what the future might bring. That leaden weight in place of his heart was dread that she’d moved here because she believed he would marry her cousin and hoped to be close to Miss Clay without making a nuisance of herself. Dread that she would meet some other man and see in him all the joy of life that he lacked.
“I will see you home.” The words came out all wrong, with gruff emphasis on the word will. One look at her, and he lost all chance at serenity. Because he had never in
his life cared whether anyone liked him. He’d never thought about it. Until her.
She intended to tell him no. Because that was her way. Because she was worried he might throw over her cousin on some whim or other. She was not wrong in that, since, in fact, he did mean to. Just the other day, when he’d felt the delay in a response to Clay’s invitation was yet another message, he’d replied to the man’s letter, which included a breezy, amusing paragraph from Louisa. In his single-paragraph reply, he wished Clay and his daughter all the happiness of the coming holidays and ended with the dry fact that he intended to remain at Killhope until February or March and then remove to Wales until June.
He presumed Clay would understand his letter for what the rejection it was. He took a breath. “It is cold.”
She touched a near blossom. “You admit that, do you?”
“There have been six robberies between here and Hope Springs.”
“Not in daylight.”
“Two.”
She glanced at him. “Not recently.”
“Tuesday last. Friday.”
“I never heard that.”
“The road goes through the woods not once but twice.” He held back a fierce smile when he saw the moment she acknowledged he was correct. “Nor will I send you home with flowers to manage on your own.”
“In that case, thank you, Duke.” She curtsied, and it was well done, in that way that never yet failed to make his heart clench.
It was her grace that had first caught his eye. That and the fact that three weeks into the Season, everyone he knew, lady or gentleman, had eventually remarked in passing that they very much liked Miss Edith Clay, and wasn’t Miss Louisa Clay a pretty young thing? Men wrote poems in praise of Miss Clay’s beauty, but they all wanted Edith to sit beside them at dinner.
On their return journey through the house, he stopped a servant and asked to have his carriage brought around. In this he was fully competent. He could instruct his staff without losing himself. He gave instructions. They were carried out.
They resumed their walk with him infernally aware of her keeping pace. Her gaze moved from place to place, to open doors, to statues occupying niches, to the chandeliers and sconces. Doubtless, she had imagined he lived in a dungeon, a moldering heap where the blood of ancient enemies yet stained the floors. He’d heard the talk. The local stories, most too fanciful by far, about how his home had come to be called Killhope.
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