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 3 

Oldwin looked at his aunt for a long moment. Then — because he was more tired than he had been willing to admit, and because she was the only living creature on earth he had ever entirely trusted — he did something he had not done in London in the whole of the season. He almost smiled.

“She turned my own book against me within a minute of my arrival.”

“She turns everything against everyone,” said Lady Honoria with vast satisfaction. “It is her one great gift, and I would not trade it for a fortune. Go to bed, Oldwin. You smell of horse and self-importance. We shall begin your education in the morning.”

He went. And as he climbed the great cold staircase of the house he had been born in, past the portraits of ancestors who had all without exception worn the lemon-and-tree expression Miss Ward had so accurately identified, the Duke of Danahern found that he was thinking not of the Ashworth business, nor of the lamed horse, nor of the letter that had lied to him. He was thinking of a low, clear voice, saying, “No, I don’t think I will.” And of a pair of hazel eyes that had looked at a duke and found him merely late for good manners.

He did not sleep well. He told himself it was the ride.

The morning came gray and washed, and Oldwin — who rose at six regardless of the hour he had gone up — came down to the breakfast room to find it already occupied. Miss Fay Ward sat at the far end with a cup of tea gone cold at her elbow and an account book open before her, a pen behind her ear and a smudge of ink on the side of her hand, frowning at a column of figures with the particular ferocity of a person who has caught a sum in a lie.

“You are at my table,” he observed from the doorway.

“I am at your aunt’s table,” she corrected without looking up. “She takes chocolate in her room until ten and dislikes to see figures at breakfast. She says they curdle the cream. So I do her accounts here. Sit down, Your Grace, and stop hovering in doorways as though you mean to charge admission. There is coffee. It is even hot, which in this house is a species of miracle, so I would drink it quickly if I were you.”

He did not move. “You keep my aunt’s accounts.”

“Someone must. Her steward is a dear man and could not add two farthings and arrive at a groat. Your family has been overpaying a coal merchant in Devizes for eleven years, by the way — a fact I discovered on my third day here and which was received when I mentioned it as though I had accused a bishop of poaching.”

At last she looked up, and there was that maddening flicker at the corner of her mouth. “Would you like to know how much? It is a genuinely impressive number. It would buy a very good horse — perhaps to replace the one you lamed showing off to the weather.”

Oldwin crossed the room. He did not sit. He stood at the head of the table in the place that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. And he looked down the length of it at this small, ink-stained person who had appropriated his morning, his house, his aunt, and a quantity of his composure he did not care to measure.

“Miss Ward,” he said very evenly, “I do not know what liberties my aunt permits you, and I do not, on reflection, much care. But you should understand that I am not my aunt. I am not managed. I am not teased. And I do not intend to spend a summer being addressed as though I were a boy caught scrumping apples. Is that clear?”

She set down her pen. She folded her hands. She looked at him with those direct hazel eyes, and for one instant he thought — with something that was almost hope, though he refused to examine it — that she was going to be sensible and frightened and quiet.

“Perfectly clear,” said Fay Ward. “You are not to be teased. You are the Duke of Danahern. You are grave and you are great, and the world trembles when you frown.”

She rose, gathering her account book to her chest. And as she passed him on her way to the door, close enough that he caught the plain, clean scent of soap and ink and no perfume at all, she paused and tilted her chin up and looked him full in the face without a particle of fear.

“But you came two days through the rain,” she said softly, “because an old woman told you she was dying. So you will forgive me, Your Grace, if I decline to believe you are quite so terrible as you have gone to such trouble to appear. Your coffee is getting cold.”

And she was gone before he had assembled a single word.

And the Duke of Danahern stood alone at the head of his father’s table in the gray morning light and discovered that he was — of all the outrageous, impossible things — smiling at an empty doorway.

He wiped it from his face at once. But it had been there. And they both, he suspected, knew it.