Page 41 of The Captive Duke
“Of course not.” Christian rose, for she was a lady. An increasingly kissable, holdable lady. “Sleep eludes you?”
“I’m hoping not.” She advanced into the room and closed the door to keep in the fire’s heat. “I’ve brought your volume of Blake back, lest it find its way to some trunk or portmanteau of mine.”
She was doing it again, hinting at her departure, and all the conflicted emotion he’d felt contemplating his mail transferred itself to the lady in bare feet before him.
Long feet, with high arches and pink, fetching toes. Surely, composing odes to a widow’s feet indicated inchoate loss of reason?
“Shall you choose another volume? And what can you be thinking, my dear, to wander about unshod?” He hoped she washome, where such lapses were not a privilege but a right.
“I wasn’t thinking.” But she smiled, that same wan smile that he often saw her turn on Lucy. He suspected that smile signaled a lack of children in her life to love, which lack she ought to lay squarely on Greendale’s no doubt tidy grave. “A want of regular, rational processes is my besetting sin, according to my late spouse.”
“Whom you have the sense not to mourn overmuch. Come here by the fire, then, and be warm, despite your lack of forethought. I’ll choose another book for you.”
“Kind of you.” She advanced to the hearth and took a seat on the bricks. “You’ve had the fire going all day. The bricks are warm.”
“I want one room in the house where the constant chill in my bones must do battle with a decent fire. I know it’s summer, but…”
Before he could bluster his way into some ducally appropriate explanation, she stroked a hand over the bricks.
“The warmth helps,” she said. “Someone should make it a rule that spouses die only in spring, so the warmth of the summer is available in first mourning to provide the simplest comfort of all.”
And to think Greendale had tried repeatedly to call her stupid.
Christian brought her another volume of poetry. “An anthology, perfect for browsing at the end of the day.”
He sat on the hearth beside her uninvited, because he hadn’t wanted to give her a pretext for popping off to her widow’s bed. “Thank you for protecting me from Vicar and his wife. I’d forgotten he has four girls to fire off.”
“He was subtle about it, but a new roof for the nave must take precedence, I’m sure.” She hugged her robe more tightly around her, despite the fire hissing and popping softly behind them.
“Is the church in such bad shape as all that?” And shouldn’t Christian take Lucy—and the countess—to services some fine Sunday morning?
“I don’t know. When I visited here, Helene wasn’t inclined to attend services.”
“We neither of us were. I used to go occasionally, show the flag, admire a few babies. Vain of me, playing the duke.”
“And was your faith much help when you were captured?”
“No,” he said, the question taking him too much by surprise for him to make the proper polite noises. “Not in the sense you mean. The Old Testament, perhaps, where simple justice is endorsed, but certainly not that tripe about turning the other cheek and forgiving them, for they know not what they do. They knew damned good and well what they did, delighted in it.”
Though Girard had seemed sincerely regretful too, which Christian desperately wanted to attribute to malignant genius. And yet, an echo of the blond guard’s final apology—“I’m sorry for it… Girard is sorry for it,too”—rose up from memory. Did the devil apologize for his own wickedness?
“It’s frightening,” her ladyship said, hugging her knees, “to think such evil is truly walking among us, probably going to services, admiring babies, even as you once did.”
Did she regard her late spouse, fencing her away from the roses, denigrating her intelligence, as an exponent of such evil?
“I was morally asleep,” Christian said. “I wish to God I had remained in such a state of innocence.”
She turned her head, her cheek pillowed on her knees. “You don’t sleep well now, do you? I can find you down here most nights up until all hours. You ride out at first light, and you look…unrested.”
“You are in an observant mood tonight, my lady.”
Except she could always be counted upon to harpoon him with the occasional pithy observation, the periodic disconcerting question. He wasn’t sure he liked her for it, but he liked her for the courage it suggested.
And for bearing such a sweet, restful fragrance.
“One worries about you,” she said, huddling down more closely to her knees. “You are almost as quiet as your daughter, Mercia, and when one thinks the company of your military fellows might be useful to you, you’re stuck here in the country, partly at my insistence.”
“You did insist, didn’t you?”
