Page 7 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

On the twelfth night of the snow, lying awake, she conducted her audit.

On the asset side, the snow still held London at bay, and Olivia Jones still answered when called, perfectly dull. He had facts, a pocketful of small, oddly-shaped facts, but facts were not knowledge.

Twelve days under the full attention of the most charming man in England, and the wall stood.

Against it, on the liability side, she set the following.

Item: she now knew his step on the stone floor from every other step in the house and did not remember learning it.

Item: the hours with the wool, the sermons, and his absurd bound thumbs were the lightest she had passed in five years. She had begun to wonder each morning what foolishness the day would bring.

Item: without meaning to, she had learned the smell of him, apple brandy and cold air and beeswax polish, which Bronwen said he rubbed into his own boots, since he had brought no valet with him from London. She could have picked him from a room of a hundred men blindfolded, and that frightened her more than anything he had yet said to her.

Item: when he returned her mother’s handkerchief without one prying word, her first feeling had not been terror but gratitude. He had spared her, and some foolish part of her had received the silence as a gift between them.

One item more, the coldest, and the one that had nothing to do with him at all. The one she had been weighing since the moment she decided not to go to the church on her wedding day; the one for which the price must, eventually, be paid.

She was a merchant’s daughter; she knew what a signed settlement meant. Her flight had not dissolved it, and whatever waited in London waited also for her father, whose name and business stood in the open where anyone might strike at them. The snow had bought her time, nothing more.

She folded the thought away. To examine it fully was to admit that her peace at Plas Eira was only a stay of execution, and that night she was not brave enough.

She slept at last and dreamed, not of London for once, but of wool. She woke cross and could not say at whom.

Chapter Five

By the middle of December, Adrian was prepared to declare the siege of Miss Jones the worst-conducted campaign since Walcheren, and he had never enjoyed anything half so much.

Every approach failed. She made placid observations on the weather and ignored his gentle teasing, pretending not to understand, though he was sure he saw the occasional spark of amusement in her eyes. Or perhaps annoyance. it was impossible to tell. The new novel he left where she must find it came back to its shelf unread.

Adrian redoubled his efforts to make himself approachable. He carried in wood for the fires and hauled crates up from the cellar without being asked, until the boot-boy stopped troubling to fetch anything himself. He made himself agreeable to every creature at Plas Eira, down to the half-wild stable cat, who had lately begun to tolerate him. The household opened to him like a Christmas orange, all save the quiet, grey-gowned woman around whom it apparently now revolved.

He knew who she was, or was nearly certain. Ophelia James, the vanished nabob’s daughter, the heiress whose flight from her own wedding had been the talk of London. What held him now was how thoroughly she had disappeared into Olivia Jones, and how rarely the woman beneath allowed herself to show.

She was a magnificent actress. Adrian, who had talked his way past guarded doors across fashionable Europe and once even charmed a smile out of his grandfather, was being held at bay by a woman armed with the weather and a cough. Her dullness was not a failing but a fortification, each flat answer fitted against the next until a man could find no purchase anywhere.

No one built such walls around nothing, and he could not quite understand what her walls were for, anyway.

The grey weight of duty had not found him in Wales. He woke curious, a sensation he had almost forgotten, and each day presented itself as something to be anticipated rather than escaped. He avoided considering what that meant. Avoidance was, after all, the one discipline he had practised faithfully.

The day of the ledgers shook him all the same.

He entered the small library on a grey afternoon in search of nothing, his usual errand, and found Miss Jones at the writing table with his aunt’s household books open before her, the fire behind her burned down to embers. She had not heard him enter.

For ten heartbeats, he watched the dull Miss Jones become someone else entirely. Her pen moved swiftly down the columns, figures dropping into place without hesitation. This was no young lady’s careful arithmetic; it was the sure, unhesitating hand of someone who had kept accounts for years.

Then she saw him.

The ledger closed a breath too quickly, the only clumsy thing he had seen her do since that dropped spoon at dinner. The woman with the pen was folded away, and Miss Jones rose in her place.

“Lady Elise wished her accounts examined, Your Grace. The steward’s sums were unreliable.”

“Were they?” He kept his tone as idle as hers.

“Yes. I have finished now.” She moved towards the door, the ledger already returned to its place on the shelf. “The snow seems likely to continue.”

“It does seem so.”

Adrian stood aside to let her pass. He did not ask why his aunt had entrusted the household accounts to a charity goddaughter, or how that goddaughter cast columns like the chief clerk of a trading house.