“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

 PART 8

It was Odelina herself, in the end, who broke the stalemate. Though not with the confrontation he had expected.

He found her two evenings later — not in the parlor with her half-finished letters, but in the estate office again, at Hollis’s desk. The quarter’s accounts spread before her with the same absorbed, competent attention she had given them the very first week he had come to admire her for it.

“I thought you had given up correcting my steward’s arithmetic,” he said from the doorway, “now that the household’s future is somewhat less certain.”

“I have not given up anything, Your Grace.” She did not look up. “I have simply decided that if I am to leave Fossborough soon, I would rather leave it a well-ordered house than a chaotic one. It seems the least I can do, having been mistress of it — however briefly, and however coldly the mistress-ship began.”

She set down her pen at last and looked at him directly. And there was something raw beneath the careful evenness of her expression that undid him more than any accusation could have.

“You need not linger in the doorway watching me work, Ketrick. I am not going to weep on the ledgers. I have found that grief kept busy is grief kept manageable. And I intend to remain entirely manageable until the fourth of the month, whatever it costs me to do it.”

“I do not want you to leave,” he said.

The words came out plainer and rougher than he had intended, with none of the careful eloquence he had spent two sleepless nights trying and failing to assemble. But they landed, he saw at once, with more force than any polished speech could have managed.

She went very still, her pen forgotten in her hand.

“You have a curious way of showing it,” she said. But her voice had lost its evenness entirely now, gone thin and uncertain. “You have said almost nothing to me in a fortnight beyond ‘good morning’ and ‘pass the salt,’ Your Grace. A woman cannot be expected to read a man’s heart from his silence — however much you seem to believe silence is eloquence enough.”

“I know.” He crossed the room, stopping a respectful distance from the desk. Close enough to see the sudden brightness in her eyes that she was fighting with visible effort not to let fall. “I have been a coward about it. And I do not have a good excuse beyond the plain fact that I do not know how to say the things I feel without sounding like a stranger to myself. My father taught me that feeling was weakness, and I believed him for thirty years. And I am only now discovering how thoroughly wrong he was, and how much it has already cost me to have believed it so long.”

He paused, his voice rough.

“I do not have the whole of it worked out yet, Odelina. I do not know precisely what I mean to say to Paraga, or how I mean to say it. But I know I do not want you writing to cousins about positions as a companion. And I know I have not been able to think of a single thing beyond you since the morning you raced me along the river and beat me fairly. And I know that whatever I decide in the coming days, I want to decide it with you beside me — rather than already gone.”

It was not by any measure the declaration he had spent two nights composing in his head. It was rougher, less certain, missing half the fine phrases he had discarded as inadequate, one after another, in the dark.

But Odelina rose from the desk and crossed to him. And for the first time since the night of Ashwell’s cruel remark, she reached out and took his hand of her own accord — without waiting to be asked.

“That will do,” she said unsteadily. “For a beginning. I do not require fine phrases from you, Ketrick. I have never required them. I require only that you mean what you say, and say it before it is too late to matter.”

She looked up at him, and there was hope in her face now. Fragile and unguarded. The first he had seen since the letter to her cousin had told him plainly how little of it she had left.

“We still have nearly a fortnight. I find I am no longer quite so certain as I was a week ago how it must end.”

“Nor am I,” Ketrick said. “But I mean to spend every day of it finding out properly — rather than leaving either of us to guess.”

It was not a resolution. It was not even quite a reconciliation. But it was, he understood, watching her hand remain in his rather than withdraw, the first true thing he had managed to say to her since the night this whole reckoning had begun. And it was, he thought, walking her back toward the house with the evening settling gold and quiet over the park, considerably more than either of them had possessed a single hour before.

The rains came within days. Hard and unrelenting, the kind that turned Fossborough Park to a green swamp and the river Odelina had raced along into something swollen and brown and dangerous. By the third day, Hollis arrived at breakfast with mud to his knees and a face gone grim.

“The mill dam at Thornwick, Your Grace. It wants attention it has not had in a decade, and this rain has found every weakness in it. If it goes, the low cottages will flood before the village has warning enough to move their stock, let alone their furniture.”

Ketrick was on his feet before the man finished speaking. It did not occur to him until he was halfway to the stables, shrugging into his greatcoat, that Odelina had risen just as quickly and was calling for her own riding habit rather than waiting to be told whether her presence was wanted.

“You are not coming,” he said when she appeared in the hall, already pulling on her gloves.

“I am considerably better than any of your men at organizing a household under duress, Your Grace. Having done precisely that the week my father died, with half the parish descending on Alcott Grange to see what could be salvaged.” She held his gaze, steady and unflinching. “You may forbid me if you wish, and I will obey you because I am your wife and I know what obedience is owed. But I would remind you that Thornwick’s women and children will need somewhere dry to go, and someone calm to tell them where it is. And I do not think you mean to spend the morning doing that yourself while you are shoring up a dam.”

She paused.

“Let me be useful, Ketrick. It is the one thing I have ever asked you to let me be.”

He looked at her for one long moment. Mud already spattered on the hem she had not troubled to lift. Her jaw set in that stubborn line he had once found merely irritating, and now found, with an ache that had nothing to do with the weather, almost unbearably dear.

And found he could not, in fact, forbid her anything at all.

“Take the north track,” he said instead. “It floods slower. And take Mrs. Burch with you. She knows every family in that village better than I do, and you will want her arm as much as her knowledge before this day is through.”

She was already moving toward the door, but she paused just for a moment. Something flashed across her face that was not quite a smile, and was, he thought, considerably warmer than one.

“Thank you,” she said simply. And was gone into the rain.