The Way to a Gentleman's Heart - Theresa Romain Page 0,18

year, a testimony to the success of the academy. Now she would need to feed dozens of the elite, wanting only the best. Two courses, the first with a remove for soup, and a dessert. Each course must be arranged in a particular way, with center and side dishes in a harmony for appearance and taste...

She sketched an arrangement lightly with a pencil, considered, and added a few notes to her plan.

Then Jack started humming.

“Stop humming,” Marianne said without looking up. “Just chop.”

“It’s too quiet.”

Now she did look up, a protest on her lips. Too quiet? With the servants talking in their dining hall? With Evans rattling the coal scuttle? With Sally sliding metal pans over the table and pots rattling on their shelves when someone walked by?

She remembered this about him, how he liked always to be at the center of attention. Not to draw it to himself, but to soak in it.

“Fine,” she said. “Talk if you must. But no humming.”

“’Scuse me, mum, but I’ll get the cheese and butter for the sauce,” Sally said. “We’ll be needing it soon.”

The sauce. Today’s meal. Right. Marianne tossed down the pencil and rubbed at her temples, drawing herself back to today’s plans. “Cheese and butter,” she said. “Thank you. Milk too, and fresh eggs, and the flour.” Sometimes a sauce needed thickening, and adding flour was one of the simplest ways to correct the texture.

Sally bustled off, and Jack spoke up. “I’d rather listen than talk, if you’re in the mood.”

Marianne’s eyes popped open. “Words every woman longs to hear, unless she’s got a meal to prepare.”

“You don’t have anything to do until Sally gets back.” Those merry gray eyes, those wicked gray eyes.

“All right, Mr. Grahame.” She stressed the surname, then rested her weight on the corner of the table at his side. “For perhaps four minutes, I am at my leisure.”

He popped to his feet, pressed a quick kiss to her lips, then sat again and resumed peeling the papery skin off an onion. All before she had even finished gasping her surprise.

“Why did you never come back to Lincolnshire?” he asked.

She picked up an onion skin, folding and crumpling it between her fingertips. “Too proud,” she admitted. “Unless I could return in triumph, I planned never to go back at all.”

He nodded at the scattered makings on the worktable—the plan for the Donor Dinner, the pan of sliced potatoes. “Look at what you bring together every day. Isn’t that a triumph?”

She smiled. “That’s not a...” Then she paused. “It is, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of triumph I was thinking of, but yes. It’s a triumph.”

Jack sliced a bad spot out of an onion. “You were thinking of the sort of triumph one reads about in novels, weren’t you? With a husband who adores you and gems all over?”

“Right,” she agreed. Though hadn’t she always liked strawberries more than gems? “Right,” she reassured herself. Because if she’d had enough all this time, and she could have gone home to her remaining family whenever she missed them...

She blinked, her eyes teary. “Onions are getting to me.” As she moved away from Jack, she added, “My life is in London.”

Jack shrugged. “Sure it is, part of it.”

“All of it,” she said firmly, though she felt as wobbly as an underdone blancmange.

“You know, when your father died and your mother sold the Redfern lands to my father, all that money went to set up an income for your mother and dowries for her daughters.”

“I know.” Marianne’s two younger sisters were three and six years her junior. They had both married as they wished, thanks to the freedom of money. Money, money, money.

She was still holding the onion skin. She crumpled it and threw it to the floor.

“All three daughters,” Jack said. “Not only your sisters.”

“I know,” she said again, though she’d hardly thought of it since receiving the news five years before. “But I can’t make use of a dowry.”

He nodded as if this made perfect sense, to turn away from thousands of pounds—though he’d never done it himself. “Your mother has it now. She lives in the dower house on my property with my mother. They were always friends, you recall.”

This was the strangest bit of the conversation of all—him speaking of her mother and his in eternal tête-à-tête. How much had passed between the old friends since Marianne had left Lincolnshire? Was her mother’s hair still graying brown, or had it gone white? Did she still refrain