When a Duchess Says I Do - Grace Burrowes Page 0,7
reason to accept aid.
“I would have done the same for anybody,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
Duncan had been careful not to touch his guest, other than to drape the quilted shawl about her shoulders. He hadn’t offered his arm as they’d paraded through his ruin of a garden, hadn’t bowed over the lady’s hand, hadn’t helped her to remove her cloak.
Now, he patted her wrist, which was alarmingly boney. “My life, while insignificant in the greater scheme, is not nothing. I could at this very moment be lying in that clearing, a knife in my ribs, blood pooling beneath me. My fate might have been a painful expiration from loss of blood, or the more protracted agony of succumbing to the elements. My assailants would never have been held accountable, and then I’d have had no choice but to truly haunt that forest.”
Her hands cradling the teacup were too thin, the veins a blue tracery beneath pale skin. Her smile, though, was a study in warmth. Her whole face became illuminated, her gaze softened, her mouth curved to reveal straight white teeth. Her smile conveyed shared delight and a tantalizing hint of mischief.
“You have a dramatic imagination, Mr. Wentworth.”
Stephen Wentworth, Duncan’s sole pupil for many years, claimed Duncan had no imagination whatsoever.
Stephen was apparently wrong for once. “I will use that imagination to conjure lurid tales of the horrors facing a woman alone in this benighted shire. Foul weather and vexatious felons are the least among them. Am I to stop at the posting inn on the London road next month to learn that a strange lady was found frozen in some cow byre, the very woman who today saved my life?”
Duncan was not afflicted with a tender heart—not anymore—but he had a thriving horror of waste. That he should rattle around in a house with fourteen bedrooms while this woman sought warmth among the livestock was an affront to common sense.
And be damned to propriety. He was a preacher’s nephew—that couldn’t be helped—but also a Wentworth.
She set aside her tea, which had to be tepid by now. “Sheep byres are warmer. The ceilings are lower, the beasts less skittish, and they leave tufts of wool…”
She fell silent. In the north those tufts of wool were called hentilagets. Poor children gathered them up from the hedges and brambles, to be spun into yarn and knitted into stockings. Duncan could well recall the coarse, greasy feel of the wool, the tenacity of the thorns, and the delight he’d taken in the coin earned.
Though Uncle had decreed that the money had to go into the poor box, and Duncan had lost his enthusiasm for gathering wool from ovine sources.
“Let me help you,” he said. “Better still, why don’t you help me?”
Ah, that piqued her attention. She regarded him with the wary uncertainty of a woman whose opinion of men had acquired some tarnish, or possibly a thorough coating of rust.
“In what capacity could you need aid?”
“I am a scholar of modest intellect, and in recent years, I’ve traveled much on the Continent. I’d like to transcribe my notes for eventual publication.” Though, thanks to dear Cousin Quinn—may he choke on his strawberry leaf coronet—Duncan had no time to work on his transcriptions.
“You need an amanuensis? A secretary?”
“Badly. My penmanship is abominable. If you have a lady’s hand, then you are the perfect resource to aid me.” An imaginative fabrication, once again proving that Cousin Stephen was an idiot.
She set a tea cake draped with lemon icing on her plate. “What would my wages be?”
Duncan named a modest figure, not low enough to be insulting, not high enough to raise her guard any higher than she’d already raised it.
“Plus room and board, of course,” he said. “We will share our mealtimes, that we might discuss the work without intruding on the rest of the day.”
She took a bite of her lemon cake, closing her eyes as if the nectar of the gods graced her palate. Duncan helped himself to a raspberry cake when he realized he was watching to see if she’d smile at him again.
“I will take supper with you,” she said. “Breakfast will be a tray in my room, lunch will likely be a tray in your library. You do have a library?”
“Largely devoid of books, but yes.” Books were fungible, like small tables, lamps, carpets, and silver. “Do you speak French?”
“I do. I haven’t used it in some time.”
How careful she was. “Other languages?”
“Enough Italian to stumble through a libretto, thanks