Page 22 of Nothing Compares to the Duke
“Quite so.” Mrs. Chalmers’s face puckered in a frown. She was a clever woman. Rhys suspected she could see through his ham-fisted interrogation and sensed there was something more afoot. “Mr. Brooks and I were allowed to purchase as we saw fit.”
“What was left to Radley?” Rhys was due to meet with the estate’s steward in the afternoon and longed to know if his previous impressions of the man were shared by others.
“Only when an expense was out of the ordinary would we consult Mr. Radley, and he spoke to His Grace on our behalf when necessary.” Her dark eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. “Is anything amiss?”
Rhys liked her suspicious mind. It made him certain the staff were not aware of whatever shenanigans had gone on with the dukedom’s finances.
“Mr. Radley is relatively new to the role of steward, is he not?”
“Your father hired him nearly two years ago.”
Two years during which Rhys hadn’t spoken to his father and exchanged only a handful of letters with his sister. If the dukedom was struggling, he’d never been informed.
He scooped up the paperweights off the edge of his father’s desk. Polished rounds of jade he suspected his father liked more for their beauty than their usefulness. He began juggling the three disks. Concentrating on the task allowed him to focus his thoughts.
“Do you like him, Chalmers?”
“Not for me to say, Your Grace.”
“I command you to say.”
Her graying brows winged up high and she pressed her lips together.
More gently, he tried, “You’re a discerning woman.” She was so clever, he had half a mind to ask her to have a look at the estate ledgers herself. But he didn’t want the staff alarmed if it was something as simple as an accounting error. “I trust your judgment, so may I have it?”
“He’s a bit odd. Went away rather a lot. Disappeared for weeks at a time.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Can’t rightly say. We all wondered why he was allotted so many holidays or whether he was off on business for your father. I do recall mention of property the duke thought to purchase. There was talk of who among the staff might go to the new house.”
“New house?” Rhys gestured around the spacious study. “Edgecombe has twenty-three bedrooms, three drawing rooms, and the largest ballroom in the county. Why would my father need another house?”
“The seaside. There were whispers that he wished to buy a house for holidays. Mr. Radley did make several trips to the seaside and spoke of the temperate weather.”
“Do you trust him?” He expected her to hedge about answering again, to demure and say it wasn’t her place to cast such a judgment. Instead, she held his gaze a long silent moment.
“Now that you ask, Your Grace, I do have my suspicions about the steward.”
Rhys fumbled a stone but caught it before it fell. Leaning toward his housekeeper, he whispered eagerly, “Tell me more.”
Nothing made sense.
The previous day, Bella had organized her book into three distinct parts and today the words seemed to run together on the page. Sorting and arranging, which usually gave her such pleasure, only stoked the irritation that had been stewing since opening her eyes.
She could blame fatigue or the distraction of having strangers in her home, but mostly she blamed Rhys for bursting back into her life uninvited.
How dare he disturb all the poise and contentment she’d been working toward for years? And without even a bit of warning. Even now, hours after they’d parted, she felt like a kaleidoscope being twisted, its pieces tumbling one over the other.
Five years should have been sufficient. More than long enough to put her foolishness aside. Seeing him again shouldn’t have disturbed her peace of mind one iota. She’d fought for that peace, practiced it day after day until it was a habit every bit as firmly ingrained as her desire to speak to him every day had once been.
She’d pushed thoughts of him aside so often that she told herself she’d forgotten how he looked and sounded and smelled, his unique spice and leather scent.
But it wasn’t true.
She remembered him completely, but memory was nothing to seeing the man in flesh and blood. Rhys had always exuded a vibrant energy she could feel from across a crowded room, but last night the billiard room had been empty. His nearness had surrounded her like a soothing warmth she hadn’t known she needed. Somehow, unfairly, time had lent him more appeal. Even as disheveled and exhausted as he’d looked, he was handsome. Devastatingly so. Especially when he smiled. That lip-tilted smirk of his was perhaps what she’d missed most of all.
For so long she’d told herself what she felt for him was childish nonsense. The infatuation of a girl with no real sense of what love or romance meant. She’d vowed to be unfeeling if they ever crossed paths again.
