Page 37 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“I shall be ready.”

“I do not doubt it.”

She rose after finishing her tea, setting the napkin down with the same care she gave everything, and inclined her head. “Then I shall go and prove you correct.”

He watched her leave the room, her back straight and her steps measured. She was always ready: ready to endure embarrassment, to adapt, to accept whatever was placed before her without complaint. There was something bleak in that much competence, and he despised the part he had played in teaching it to her.

By the time the door closed behind her, he was irritated with her for looking unhappy and with himself for noticing it, and most of all because he wanted, absurdly, to be the one who took that look from her face and had no notion where to begin.

Lady Augusta had been listening from the second chair, her cup untouched and her eyes on the threshold Ellen had just passed through.

“She believes you are ashamed of her,” Augusta said.

Theodore turned toward her. “I am not.”

“I did not say you were.” Augusta set down her cup and pushed back her chair with deliberate calm. “I said she believes it, and she will go on thinking it, because you have arranged matters so the kindness looks exactly like the cruelty.”

His expression did not change. “That is not what I intended.”

“My dear Theodore, intention is a poor umbrella once a woman is already wet.” She rose, smoothing her skirts with one brisk pass of her hand. “You cannot tell the difference from inside your own silence.”

“I am taking her out of London.”

“Yes, and if you were anyone else I might call it mercy. Since you are yourself, you have contrived to make mercy resemble banishment.”

“She was hurt last night.”

“Of course she was hurt last night. She was paraded before wolves and expected to admire the chandelier.” Augusta picked up her gloves from the table. “I will come to Wrenfield in a fortnight.”

Theodore’s brows moved. “Will you?”

“Yes. She will stand in need of a companion who is bound to her by genuine regard, rather than one in your employ, and I am the only woman this family has ever produced who was any use. Do not argue.”

” “I had no intention of doing so.”

“No,” Augusta said, drawing on one glove with unnecessary force. “You never do. It would cost you a word.”

When the room was empty, Theodore remained at the table long enough for the coffee to go cold, then rose and went to his desk.

He wrote one letter himself, to a man in town whose trade was knowing things. The instructions were brief. Lieutenant Charles Vance was to be watched quietly. His movements, his company, and his debts were to be noted without noise.

Theodore sanded the letter, folded it, and sealed it with more pressure than the wax required. He was carrying his wife into the one parish in England that held both the man who had used her and the man who had waited nine years to use him. He sealed the letter without deciding which of the two the order was truly about.

***

They broke the journey at an inn on the second night, in a private parlor where the table was small enough to give them nowhere to look except the fire or each other. Ellen chose the fire. Theodore allowed the soup to pass in silence, and then the better part of the fowl after it, until she surprised him by speaking.

“There were grey horses in a field outside the last village,” she said, turning the stem of her glass between her fingers. “Welsh ponies, by the bone of them, run on with something heavier. Whoever bred them knew what he was doing.”

Theodore set down his fork. “You watched them the whole length of the paddock.”

Her fingers tightened on the glass stem, and color came into her face that the fire did not entirely explain. “Did I?”

“You did.”

“I used to ride,” she said, still looking toward the hearth. “Before. My father kept hunters, and he put me up before I was old enough to be told it was unsuitable. By the time anyone thought to tell me, I was better than the men doing the telling.”

“That must have displeased them.”