Worth Lord of Reckoning (44 page)

No, Christian silently amended, she had no grasp whatsoever, and based on her widow’s weeds, no husband to correct the lack.

And yet, this lady was in mourning, and around her mouth were brackets of fatigue. She was not in any sense smiling, and looked as if she might have forgotten how.

A welcome divergence from the servants’ expressions.

“Meems, a tray, and please close the door as you leave.”

Christian rose from his desk, intent on shifting to stand near the fire, but the lady twitched a jacket from her shoulders and handed it to him. Her garment was a gorgeous black silk business, embroidered with aubergine thread along its hems. The feel of the material was sumptuous in Christian’s hands, soft, sleek, luxurious, and warm from her body heat. He wanted to hold it—simply to hold it—and to bring it to his nose, for it bore the soft floral scent of not a woman, but a lady.

The reminders he suffered of his recent deprivations increased rather than decreased with time.

“Now, then,” she said, sweeping the room with her gaze.

He was curious enough at her presumption that he folded her jacket, draped it over a chair, and let a silence build for several slow ticks of the mantel clock.

“Now, then,” he said, more quietly than she, “if you’d care to have a seat, Lady Greendale?”

She had to be a May-December confection gobbled up in Lord Greendale’s dotage. The woman wasn’t thirty years old, and she had a curvy little figure that caught a man’s eye. Or it would catch a man’s eye, had he not been more preoccupied with how he’d deal with tea-tray inanities when he couldn’t stomach tea.

She took a seat on the sofa facing the fire, which was fortunate, because it allowed Christian his desired proximity to the heat. He propped an elbow on the mantel and wished, once again, that he’d tarried at Severn.

“My lady, you have me at a loss. You claim a family connection, and yet memory doesn’t reveal it to me.”

“That’s certainly to the point.” By the firelight, her hair looked like antique gold, not merely blond. Her tidy bun held coppery highlights, and her eyebrows looked even more reddish. Still, her appearance did not tickle a memory, and he preferred willowy blonds in any case.

Had preferred them.

“I thought we’d chitchat until the help is done eavesdropping, Your Grace. Perhaps exchange condolences. You have mine, by the way. Very sincerely.”

Her piquant features softened with her words, her sympathy clear in her blue eyes, though it took Christian a moment to puzzle out for what.

Ah. The loss of his wife and son. That.

She pattered on, like shallow water rippling over smooth stones, sparing him the need to make any reply. Christian eventually figured out that this torrent of speech was a sign of nerves.

Had Girard blathered like this, philosophizing, sermonizing, and threatening as a function of nerves? Christian rejected the very notion rather than attribute to his tormenter even a single human quality.

“Helene was my cousin,” the lady said, recapturing Christian’s attention, because nobody had referred to the late duchess by name in his presence. “The family was planning to offer you me, but then Greendale started sniffing around me, and Helene was by far the prettier, so she went for a duchess while I am merely a countess. Shouldn’t the tea be here by now?”

Now he did remember, the way the first few lines of a poem will reveal the entire stanza. He’d met this Lady Greendale. She had a prosaic, solidly English name he could not recall—perhaps she’d just told him what it was, perhaps he’d seen it somewhere—but she’d been an attendant at his wedding, his and Helene’s. Greendale’s gaze had followed his young wife with a kind of porcine possessiveness, and the wife had scurried about like a whipped dog.

Christian had pitied her at the time. He didn’t pity her now.

But then, he didn’t feel much of anything when his day was going well.

“Here’s the thing—” She was mercifully interrupted by the arrival of the tea tray. Except it wasn’t simply a tray, as Christian had ordered. The trolley bore a silver tea service, a plate of cakes, a plate of finger sandwiches, and a bowl of oranges, because his smiling, hopeful, attentive staff was determined to put flesh on him.

His digestion was determined to make it a slow process.

“Shall I pour?” She had her gloves off and was rearranging the tray before Christian could respond. “One wonders what ladies do in countries not obsessed with their tea. Do they make such a ritual out of coffee? You take yours plain, I believe. Helene told me that.”

What odd conversations women must have, comparing how their husbands took tea. “I no longer drink tea. I drink…nursery tea.”

A man whose every bodily function had been observed for months should not be embarrassed to admit such a thing, and Christian wasn’t. He was, rather, humiliated and enraged out of all proportion to the moment.

“Hence the hot water,” she said, peering at the silver pot that held same. “Do you intend to loom over me up there, or will you come down here beside me for some tea?”

He did not want to move a single inch.

She chattered, and her hands fluttered over the tea service like mating songbirds, making visual noise to go with her blathering. She cut up his peace, such as it was, and he already knew she would put demands on him he didn’t care to meet.

And yet, she hadn’t smiled, hadn’t pretended grown dukes drank nursery tea every night. Whatever else was true about the lady, she had an honesty about her Christian approved of.

He sat on the sofa, several feet away from her.

She made no remark on his choice of seat.

“I suppose you’ve heard about that dreadful business involving Greendale. Had Mr. Stoneleigh not thought to produce the bottle of belladonna drops for the magistrate—the full, unopened bottle, still in its seal—you might have been spared my presence permanently. I can’t help but think old Greendale did it apurpose, gave me the drops just to put poison in my hands. Easterbrook probably sent them from the Continent all unsuspecting. Greendale wanted me buried with him, like some old pharaoh’s wife. Your tea.”

She’d made him a cup of hot water, sugar, and cream—nursery tea, served to small children to spare them tea’s stimulant effects.

“I’ll fix you a plate too, shall I?” A sandwich, then two, as well as two cakes were piled onto a plate by her busy, noisy hands.

“An orange will do.”

She looked at the full plate as if surprised to find all that food there, shrugged, and set it aside. “I’ll peel it for you, then. A lady has fingernails suited for the purpose.”

She set about stripping the peel from the hapless orange as effectively as she was stripping Christian’s nerves, though in truth, she wasn’t gawking, she wasn’t simpering, she wasn’t smiling. The lady had business to transact, and she’d dispatch it as efficiently as she dispatched the peel from the orange.

Those busy hands were graceful. Christian wanted to watch them work, wanted to watch them be feminine, competent, and pretty, because this too—the simple pleasure of a lady’s hands—had been denied him.

He took a sip of his nursery tea, finding it hot, sweet, soothing, and somehow unsatisfying. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to state the reason for your call, Lady Greendale?”

“We’re not to chat over tea, even? One forgets you’ve spent the last few years among soldiers, Your Grace, but then the officers on leave are usually such gallant fellows.” She focused on the orange, which was half-naked on the plate in her lap. “This is just perfectly ripe, and the scent is divine.”

The scent was…good. Not a scent with any negative associations, not overpowering, not French.

“You are welcome to share it with me,” he said, sipping his little-boy tea and envying her the speed with which she’d denuded the orange of its peel.

Peeling an orange was a two-handed undertaking, something he’d had occasion to recall in the past three days. This constant bumping up against his limitations wearied him, as Girard’s philosophizing never had. Yes, he was free from Girard’s torture, but everywhere, he was greeted with loss, duress, and decisions.

“Your orange?” She held out three quarters of a peeled orange to him, no smile, no faintly bemused expression to suggest he’d been woolgathering—again.

“You know, it really wasn’t very well done of you, Your Grace.” She popped a section of orange into her mouth and chewed busily before going on. “When one has been traveling, one ought to go home first, don’t you think? But you came straight up to Town, and your staff at Severn was concerned for you.”

Concerned for him. Of what use had this concern been when Girard’s thugs were mutilating his hand? Though to be fair, Girard had been outraged to find his pet prisoner disfigured, and ah, what a pleasure to see Girard dealing with insubordination.

Though indignation and outrage were also human traits, and thus should have been beyond Girard’s ken.

“You’re not eating your orange, Your Grace. It’s very good.” She held up a section in her hand, her busy, graceful little lady’s hand. He leaned forward and nipped the orange section from her fingers with his teeth.

She sat back, for once quiet. She was attractive when she was quiet, her features classic, though her nose missed perfection by a shade of boldness, and her eyebrows were a touch on the dramatic side. A man would notice this woman before he’d notice a merely pretty woman, and—absent torture by the French—he would recall her when the pretty ones had slipped from his memory.

“Now then, madam. We’ve eaten, we’ve sipped our tea. The weather is delightful. What is your business?”

“It isn’t my business, really,” she said, regarding not him, not the food, but the fire kept burning in the grate at all hours. “It’s your business, if you can call it business.”

Something about the way she clasped her hands together in her lap gave her away. She was no more comfortable calling as darkness fell than he was receiving her. She’d barely tasted her orange, and all of her blather had been nerves.

Lady Greendale was afraid of him.

Order your copy now:
The Captive

Book Two in the Captive Hearts trilogy:
The Traitor

Book Three in the Captive Heart trilogy:
The Laird

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Grace also recommends: 

The Rogue Spy
 (November 2014) by Joanna Bourne—a beautiful addition to the Spymaster Series. 

Fool Me Twice
 by Meredith Duran.

Between the Devil and Ian Eversea
 by Julie Anne Long.

And coming from Grace this summer: 

The Captive
 

The Traitor
 

The Laird
 

Followed by the fourth Scottish Victorian in the MacGregor series:

What A Lady Needs for Christmas
 (October 2014) 

Or you might enjoy:

The Windham Series, beginning with 
The Heir
, a 
Publishers Weekly
 Best Book of 2010.

The most recent book in the Lonely Lords series is
Trenton
.

The Lonely Lords series begins with 
Darius
, an iBooks Best Book of 2013. 

The MacGregor Scottish Victorian Series, begins with 
The Bridegroom Wore Plaid
, a 
Publishers Weekly
 Best Book of 2012.

About the Author:

New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author Grace Burrowes hit the bestseller lists with her debut,
The Heir
, followed by
The Soldier
, L
ady Maggie’s Secret Scandal
, and
Lady Eve’s Indiscretion
.
The Heir
was a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of 2010,
Lady Sophie’s Christmas Wish
won Best Historical Romance of the Year in 2011 from RT Reviewers’ Choice Awards,
Lady Louisa’s Christmas Knight
was a
Library Journal
Best Book of 2012, and
The Bridegroom Wore Plaid
, the first in her trilogy of Scotland-set Victorian romances, was a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of 2012. Her second Scottish Victorian romance,
Once Upon a Tartan
, was also an RT Reviewers’ Choice winner, and Darius, the first in her groundbreaking Regency series The Lonely Lords, was named one of iBook’s Best Romances of 2013.

Grace is a practicing family law attorney and lives in rural Maryland. She loves to hear from her readers and can be reached through her website at graceburrowes.com.