The Duke Rode Two Days Through Rain to Reach His Dying Aunt—Only to Find Her Well and Her Companion Defying His Every Command, Until One Look Across a Chessboard Made Her Fall for the Man She Could Never Have

PART 2 

He watched her instead of listening. He was a man who watched. It was how he had held the dukedom together after his father died and left him nothing but debts and a name that men used like a threat. He had learned to read a room the way a soldier reads ground. And what he read in the small, unremarkable person of Miss Fay Ward was this: that she was tired, that she was poor, that her gown had been turned at least twice and mended more than that, that she loved his aunt genuinely and without any calculation he could detect, and that she had decided somewhere in the course of her hard life that she would rather be turned out into the road than pretend to be afraid of a man simply because the man expected it.

It should have angered him. It had angered him in the doorway. But the anger had gone somewhere strange in his chest and turned into something with a much finer edge.

When at last she closed the book and said, “There, the chapter is finished, Your Grace, and the book is yours,” and held it out to him across the hearth, he took it and found he did not want it at all.

“Thank you,” he said — which was not a word he used often.

“You are welcome,” she said, “though you needn’t sound so astonished at yourself. Good manners are only a habit. You will pick it up again with practice.”

And she rose and settled the shawl more warmly about his aunt’s shoulders with a tenderness entirely absent from her voice, and said, “Good night,” and went. And the drawing room was suddenly a great deal emptier than a house of that size had any right to feel.

Lady Honoria was watching him with the bright, wicked eyes of a woman who had buried two husbands and outlived every rival and had precisely nothing left to lose.

“Well,” she said. “Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Whatever unpleasant thing you rode here to say. You have a face like a bailiff. Out with it, and then you may kiss my cheek and tell me you are glad I am not yet dead — because I am not, chiefly owing to that girl.”

Oldwin set the book down on the small table between them. “You wrote to me that you were failing. I left London in the middle of the Ashworth business and rode through weather that lamed a horse because your letter frightened me. And I arrived to find you laughing by the fire, being read to by a companion who speaks to me as though I were a footman with pretensions.”

“Yes,” said Lady Honoria placidly. “I lied. I have been perfectly well for a month. But you would not come home for a wedding invitation or a harvest or a birthday. Oldwin, you have not slept a night under this roof in four years. And I am eighty-one, and I wished to see your face before I could not. So I frightened you. I should do it again tomorrow.”

She leaned forward, and for a moment the amusement went out of her, and something older and graver looked out at him — the aunt who had held him at nine years old at his mother’s graveside when his father could not be troubled to.

“You have run this family and this county and half the House of Lords with an iron hand and a cold word, and you have done it well. I will not pretend otherwise. But you have made yourself into your grandfather, and I loathed your grandfather. And I will not watch you finish the transformation while I have breath to stop it. So I have arranged for you to be a little inconvenienced. You will stay at Danahern this summer. You will not flee to London in a week. And you will be obliged, from time to time, to share a house with a young woman who is not the least bit frightened of you. It will be the best thing that has happened to you in a decade. You will hate every moment of it, and I intend to enjoy that enormously.”