Page 30 of An Offer By the Beastly Duke

She said nothing.

She was still asking herself the same question.

Chapter Ten

“The Duke,” Penelope demanded the following day. “I must see him.”

The butler, a silver-haired man of considerable composure, blinked. His gaze drifted past Penelope’s shoulder to the empty drive, as though confirming she had arrived alone, without an invitation, and apparently without any intention of pretending she needed one.

“My lady,” he began, in the measured neutral tones of a man assessing the weight of her authority. “His Grace is not currently receiving guests.”

“I did not ask whether he was receiving.” Penelope held his gaze. “I asked where he is.”

The butler’s eyes flickered, his internal calculations shifting. He cleared his throat. “He is in the back gardens, my lady.”

“Thank you.”

She stepped past him before he could formulate a protest.

She had rehearsed her confrontation on the walk over. Last night she had lain awake with his words moving through her mind like water under ice, persistent and cold.

The boy has potential. It isn’t being trained.

She had polished her response until it was a blade. She would be composed. She would be direct. She would deliver her ultimatum and depart with her dignity intact.

That would be the end of it.

The corridor was cool and dim, smelling of old wax and woodsmoke. The house felt settled rather than decorated, filled with heavy, unhurried furnishings that spoke of quality rather than a desire to impress. She moved through it without slowing, her heels clicking a sharp rhythm on the stone floors.

It occurred to her this was the first time she had approached Brigrock Hall the proper way.

She pushed open the garden door, and the air changed.

The gardens made her pause.

She had expected the same rigid order as the house, but here, the formal architecture had been surrendered to the wild.

Old stone paths were half-hidden by encroaching moss. Foxgloves had seeded themselves in tall, nodding drifts along the south wall. A climbing rose had abandoned its trellis entirely, spreading in a wide, unruly curtain of white and thorns above the gate. The grass grew thick and unharvested, and in the far corner, a pear tree leaned at an angle that suggested it had been yielding to gravity for a century.

It was beautiful. The specific, unself-conscious beauty of something that had been left alone long enough to become itself.

A gravel path ran through the center, ending at a low stone wall. Beyond it lay a small lake. The water was still and dark, edged with rushes. Late morning light moved across the surface in slow, shifting sheets of silver.

Penelope lifted her hem against the long, damp grass and walked toward the water. The air was heavy with the scent of turned earth and cool moisture. For a heartbeat, she forgot her rehearsed speech entirely.

The surface of the lake broke.

The Duke came up from the water without warning. His hands gripped the mossy bank, and he surged upward, water cascading off his frame as he rose.

Penelope stopped dead.

Every word she had prepared left her head simultaneously. They simply departed, as though they had never existed.

She had known he was tall. She had registered the breadth of his shoulders. But there had always been the intervening reality of clothes—the wool, the linen, the starch—all the layers that made a man legible and manageable in polite company.

There were none of those things now.

He was built the way she imagined the men of old paintings were built. The kind of sketches she had seen in her father’s books and privately considered exaggerated. Nothing about this was exaggerated.