Page 47 of His Mad Duchess
The wind lifted the rose boughs overhead, scattering petals across the path. Miss Fortune rolled onto her side, paws batting idly at a falling blossom.
Margaret said nothing for a moment, only watched the cat, her hand still upon his. Then, with quiet certainty. “You ought to have had warmth. Everyone ought.”
Sebastian’s throat worked around words that would not come. He turned his palm under hers, holding it properly now, as though it were the simplest thing in the world to do so.
“And yet here I am,” he said at last, attempting levity and failing it entirely. “A grown man forced to borrow his Duchess’s stray to learn how to be soft.”
Margaret’s lips curved, tremulous but true. “She is not only mine, you know. For now, she is ours.”
Something loosened at his ribs, as if a single knot had come undone after too many years pulled tight.
“A dangerous notion,” he said lightly, though the words lodged warm behind his teeth. He gave her hand a careful squeeze. “Ishall make it my business to call upon Miss Fortune from time to time once we are established in separate households. It would never do for her to forget me entirely.”
Margaret had begun to draw her hand back, but he caught it once more, as if the moment might be stitched tighter by the faint pressure of his thumb against her knuckles. His eyes traced her face—quiet, steady, searching it out.
Then he cleared his throat, gaze shifting past her to the dusk gathering at the garden’s edge.
“In three days,” he said, voice careful but edged with wryness, “we shall have to return to London. Back to parlors and polished floors and my mother’s exacting gaze.”
Margaret’s brows arched, half a tease glimmering at the corner of her mouth. “And she will so adore our new companion, I suppose?”
His answering huff of laughter was dry as flint. “She will detest her on sight. Which, I confess, pleases me greatly. I may endure an afternoon’s tirade if only to watch her expression when Miss Fortune prances across her precious carpets.”
Margaret’s smile lingered, but his grew fainter. The air between them shifted, the warmth slipping to something more solemn.
He studied her properly then, the hush settling thick as the twilight. “She is… intense, my mother. Exacting in her affectionsif she offers them at all. I will do what I must to shield you from the worst of her sharpness, Margaret, but you ought to know what awaits.”
Her breath caught, only a fraction, but she did not flinch.
“I understand,” she said softly.
He gave her hand one final, careful press before letting it fall away. “Good. Then let her try, eh? Between you, me, and Miss Fortune, the old house shall never be quite the same.”
And though his grin returned, it could not quite chase the shadow from his eyes.
CHAPTER 15
Margaret had not expected to find the morning so soft. The sky was pearled over with a shy sun, the breeze mild enough to lift the edge of her bonnet as she followed Sebastian through a gate half-swallowed by blooming dog rose.
Mrs. Fowler stood in the hall with Margaret’s gloves neatly folded across her palms. “The tenants will be pleased to see you, Your Grace,” she said with a brisk dip of the head. “Best to be properly turned out.”
Margaret accepted the gloves with a faint smile. “Do they truly care for muslin cuffs and silk ribbons, Mrs. Fowler? Or more for sound roofs and full storehouses?”
The housekeeper’s lips twitched, the closest thing to a smile Margaret had yet seen from her. “Both, if I may say so, Your Grace. One feeds the body, the other the pride.”
Before Margaret could answer, Sebastian appeared, hat in hand. “If you are ready, Duchess?”
She slipped her gloves on as she crossed to him. “Where are we bound first?”
“The North Meadow,” he replied, offering his arm. “There is a tenant there with a new lambing pen and a boy who believes himself faster than my sheepdog.”
Sebastian had offered his arm, and she had taken it lightly, yet the small, bracing contact felt dangerously natural, the sort of thing she could grow used to if she were not careful.
They crossed the inner court together, gravel crunching underfoot. At the meadow gate, a freckled child burst from behind a ewe and shouted, “Good day, Your Grace!” before ducking behind his mother’s skirts.
Margaret laughed softly and bent a little toward the boy. “And good day to you, sir.”
Now, with her shoes damp from the dew and the hem of her pale gown brushing the briar edge of the lane, she matched her pace to Sebastian’s longer stride.
