Page 18 of Miss Harvey's Horribly Lovable Fiancé
“Of course.” Bridges was happy to let him go.
“Later this afternoon?” Dalworthy pressed him.
“Shall we say in an hour? In the library?”
He was half-way up the main stairs when he halted, struck by a memory. He gripped the bannister and grinned.
The land along the River Ouse that his father owned was not entailed! It did not convey with the duchy. This meant Giles had options…and an opportunity to sever his ties to his father’s greed and to save the rectitude of his marriage to Esme.
Chapter 5
“What are you doing in the estate office?” Giles asked Esme as he and her maid gained the doorway of the large room where her father’s estate manager kept all the records.
Esme lifted her head, her golden brown curls bobbing in her surprise. She sat behind the broad walnut desk in the servants’ wing off the kitchens. Beneath her hands were spread her father’s ledgers and she had a quill in hand, a long line of figures on a paper to one side. “I promised Papa I would check the monthly receipts and invoices before you and I left tomorrow.”
He approached, smiling at her, happy to have found her and confide his troubles to her. “Good of you. I hope you will offer me the same courtesy for my own tallies.”
She smiled but it was tremulous. “If you wish.”
Usually she offered to do anything for him. Fix his cravat. Hug him. Kiss him. Her words struck him as somehow…conditional. But he was not sure on what. “I’d never burden you with it.”
Placing her pen down, she sat back. “I wouldn’t call it that. I like to do the numbers. Jane,” she said to her maid, “you may leave us.”
“But Miss—?”
“Jane, go. Tomorrow I may be alone with Lord Northington at any time of day.”
After the girl had fled, Giles extended a hand toward the spare wooden chair before the desk. “May I?”
“Of course. You spoke with Papa.”
“I did and—”
“Aren’t you tired from your early ride? The ball is tonight and you and I are to lead out the second set after my mother and father open the dancing.”
These words also set him on edge, though he couldn’t tell why. “I must talk with you.”
A flash of fear darted across her fine features. “Tell me truly. Do you want to marry me?”
That curt question sounded like such an earnest concern of hers, his heart ached. She didn’t know how he adored her? “Yes, my darling. I do want to do that.”
“Why?”
He thought that odd. And it shocked him. “You know why.”
“No.” She looked away, out the window at the dying sun. “I’m not the best catch of the Season. In fact, I’ve been out far too long. Nearly on the shelf, you know.” She made an ugly face at him, her tongue out. “A spinster.”
He gave her a rueful face in return.
She laughed and he relaxed…for a moment. “I’m glad you waited for me to discover you.”
“Are you?” she asked as if she didn’t quite believe it.
What was wrong here? Something more desperate than his bad news? “You sound as if you believe you are—”
“Unworthy of you? Yes. Yes, that could be true. Undeserving and—”
He was out of his chair, around to hers and raising her by her shoulders to stand in his arms. His lips in her hair, he worried. “You deserve more than me, my sweet.”
