Page 10 of How to Ruin a Duke
She looked curious.“Does something drastic happen if you’re not busy?”
He tried to sound glib.He desperately wanted her to count on him, or to think he was the sort of fellow worth her time.“Too much thinking.We’ve all got things we want to forget, and it’s easier to forget things if I’m busy.
“Anyway, I’ll work hard for you.And once I’ve…oh, maybe twenty pounds in my pocket, I’ll be on my way.”
Naming a figure, planning to leave—there, that was familiar.He immediately felt more at ease.
Of course, two hundred pounds would be better than twenty.Two hundred would be enough for an annuity, so Simon would never have to scramble for Howard again.But twenty was a start, more than a start.It might even be an ending to some of the ongoing burden he’d lived with for more than a decade.
“Twenty pounds is a significant amount of money,” said Miss Fairweather.
“I have a significant purpose in mind for it,” countered Simon.“And remember, your lease gets paid before I earn a penny.”
“Should I be worried about these things you want to forget?One scandal and I’m done for.Generations of work are done for.”
Simon eyedHow to Ruin a Duke.“Not if the social trespass is of your choosing.Haven’t you learned anything from that blasted book?”
She blinked.“Not that particular lesson.”
“Think about it.”Ideas were beginning to shuffle and take form in Simon’s head.Oh, this could be fun.“You’re not part of Society.You work for Society.I know, because I work for them too—or did until earlier today.You need to be proper, but you don’t have to meet the same standards as one of their unmarried daughters on the marriage mart.You’re not competing.You’re…yourself.There ought to be no one to compare to you.”
He studied her: frank blue eyes, freckled nose, tidy black hair from which lamplight plucked chestnut and mahogany.“Thereisno one.”
“All the easier to dismiss, then.”
“Or all the easier to remember.We just have to sort out how to make people think of stringed instruments all the time.”
“We?”She arched a brow.
“Do you prefer going it alone?”
She sighed.“No, I don’t.All right.Would you like some tea?I would like some tea.”She crossed to the curtain and drew it aside, saying, “Alice?”
The young maid presented herself in the doorway.More tidy of dress than of manner, she was young and coltish, with a cheerful, generously freckled face and dark red hair peeking from under her starched cap.
“Alice,” said Miss Fairweather, “bring us a pot of tea.Very strong.”She looked toward Simon.“Sugar?Lemon?Milk?What sort of trappings do you prefer?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine.”Tea wasn’t always easy to come by.He’d never bothered to develop much of a preference.
“Nonsense.No one isfinewith tea in any old way.Alice, bring them all, since our guest is shy.”
Once the maid had bobbed her head and tromped off the way she’d come, Miss Fairweather returned her attention to Simon.
“Miss Fairweather, I really don’t need tea.”
“Rowena,” she corrected, then boosted herself up onto the worktable.“And Ido, and you’re keeping me company.Come, sit beside me and let me hear all your brilliant ideas for saving my shop.I’ll try to be as good a listener as Cotton.”
More clumsily than she, he clambered atop the table, careful to avoid instruments, lamps, and the damned copy ofHow to Ruin a Duke.“You’ll allow me to work with you, then?We’re partners?”
“Yes, until my lease is renewed.”
“Partners, then.Rowena.”Her name was a tune on his lips.
She extended her right hand.Simon shook it, that unique hand that didn’t look like any other hand he’d seen and that could carry out dexterous tasks he’d never attempted.
“Partners,” Rowena echoed and grinned at him.
It spread through him, as bright and playful as a horn dancing up a musical scale.And he knew he’d do anything to help this woman, to make her need him—even if it could be for only a short while.
