Puffing out a breath, Eleanor said, “You’ll think me foolish.”
“Never, I swear,” Elizabeth said. She smiled gently. “Danni?”
Eleanor bit her lip. “I think… Damn it.” She took a gulp of wine.
“You think you might have real feelings?” asked Elizabeth.
“How do you know that?” Eleanor asked, looking up.
“My love, I think at this point, you might be the only one that doesn’t know,” said Elizabeth. “The tension between the two of you is electric. Any idiot could see it. The real question is, what do you intend to do about it?”
“This wasn’t supposed to be real,” Eleanor said. “It didn’t start real. I don’t know what happened.”
“You’re two attractive women living in close proximity,” said Elizabeth. “It would be odd if one of you didn’t have at least a stray thought about the other. How does young Danni feel about this?”
“Not a clue. I haven’t asked her and I don’t intend to.”
“Why on earth not?” Elizabeth picked up the bottle and topped up Eleanor’s glass.
“Because she’s young, relatively carefree, and because she didn’t get into this arrangement for feelings. It would be unfair of me to burden her like that.”
“I would agree, unless she happens to have feelings of her own.”
Eleanor snorted. “Even if she did, what of it? We’re completely different, we both have a life that we like, and we have a businessarrangement.”
“She’s only a few years younger than you,” Elizabeth said.
“Not the point.” Eleanor drank, the wine dark and sticky in her throat.
“So you’re going to mope around like Viola after Duke Orsino?”
“I am not,” said Eleanor, sitting up straighter. “I don’t mope. And there’s no point thinking that way. Nothing can come of this. It’s not part of the arrangement.”
“Arrangements can change.”
“No,” Eleanor said firmly. “The best I can do is attempt to leave Danni a little better off than when I found her. She got me this house, my house, the least I will do is ensure that her life has improved by the time we divorce.”
Elizabeth sighed, but Eleanor ignored her. She knew that she was right. She had to do something useful for Danni. Something that meant Danni would have the life she wanted, or at least a decent shot at it.
“Nor, you’re being a fool.”
“I don’t wish to discuss this any further,” Eleanor said. “Now, do we open another bottle, or are we going to be sensible and just finish this one?”
Elizabeth grinned. “Sensible? You? Never.”
Eleanor had to laugh. “Fine. I’ll take a candle and go down for another.”
But as she came back up from the dusty cellar with a bottle in her hands, she couldn’t help but wish that it was Danni waiting for her in the kitchen.
Chapter Seventeen
The old hay shed smelled like mildew and bad decisions. Danni had been meaning to clean it out for months now, but never seemed to have the time. Honestly, she probably didn’t have the time now, but some cathartic punishment work sounded like a good idea.
Why was she punishing herself? She hadn’t quite decided yet. It just felt somehow necessary.
She’d spent the past hour hauling out rotting bales of hay, only to discover an entire ecosystem of spiders that were far too confident for her liking. A particularly bold large one had stared down at her from atop a beam, clearly judging her life choices. And honestly? Fair.
Her life choices weren’t exactly stellar, were they? Not when she actually thought about them. She’d taken everything she had, every penny she’d got from her father’s death, from working every hour that she could, and used it all to put a down payment on a tiny farm. The kind of farm that most people were aching to sell.