Page 9 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke
“The late ones can go in the blue jug, Nancy.”
Theodore turned his head.
The voice came through the half-open door, clear and unhurried. It was pitched lower than he had expected, the voice of a woman who gave orders all day and had long since stopped needing to raise it to be obeyed. There was no temper in it and no idleness.
“The others are past saving,” she continued. “Throw them away, if you please, and do not pull that face at me over it. A dropped rose is not improved by being mourned.”
A maid answered, too softly for the words to carry.
“Yes, I know it was pretty yesterday,” the woman replied, and there was a faint warmth in the rebuke. “Many things are pretty yesterday. The trick is not to let them scent the whole floor today. The water in the morning-room vase has turned. Carry it out before Mrs. Bell pretends not to notice and then notices very loudly.”
Theodore listened with more attention than he had intended to give.
Competence, his mind offered, and it was the highest word he had. He valued it above every other quality and met it least often. This was competence without fuss, command that never had to raise its voice. He found himself listening to her the way he listened to very few things, with the whole of his attention brought unwillingly to heel.
A door opened at the far end of the passage.
She crossed it.
She carried an empty vase against her hip with one hand, as if it were a thing she had carried a thousand times. She moved toward the back of the house without waste and without hurry. She did not see him. The light came from a window behind her, giving him the line of her more than the detail, a slight figure in a grey day dress with a darn at the shoulder catching where the new thread sat proud of the old cloth. Her light brown hair was pinned with a certain charming negligence, tumbling softly at the nape of her neck, the unmistakable mark of a lady who had dressed her own tresses before a single servant was stirring. Beneath those straying curls, her clear, hazel eyes held a quiet brilliance.
She turned the corner and was gone.
Theodore had observed her for four seconds, and it should not have been enough for anything at all. She had not spoken to him or looked at him. She had crossed a passage with an empty vase and the unhurried authority of a woman who had held a household together so long that no one inside still noticed it was being held.
It was irrational to make anything of it, and calling it irrational did nothing to weaken it. He was not a green boy to be caught by a pretty profile, and beauty had never been an argument that moved him. A soft voice and a worn grey gown had no business exerting force on a man who had spent his life refusing force from anyone.
And yet he wanted, for one strange moment, to see her face fully. To hear whether her voice changed when it addressed rank. To know whether the gentleness in it would survive surprise.
The footman returned, still holding the card. “Your Grace, I have informed Mrs. Bell. My lord is indeed from home and is not expected soon.”
Theodore said, “Is Miss Middleton within?”
The words were nearly out.
The footman’s eyes lifted.
Theodore stopped.
There it was: carelessness, appetite got up as inquiry. He had nearly asked to be admitted to the presence of a young woman who knew nothing of the arrangement being made around her, a young woman whose brother had forbidden nothing because Theodore had given him the order himself, a young woman who would know him only by reputation.
And what a reputation it was.
Severe. Cold. Worse than severe, as Henry had been too prudent to say aloud. A duke who had just considered the purchase of her future and had the arrogance to stand in her hall pretending that his curiosity was moral caution.
Anger moved through him, sharp and clean, and it was directed wholly at himself.
“No,” he said.
The footman hesitated. “Your Grace?”
“I shall not wait.”
“Shall I say Your Grace called?”
“You shall say nothing until Lord Middleton returns.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
