Page 8 of The Countess Caper

“Is it your house?” He sounded so innocent, so unruffled.

“Yes.”

“Then I suppose so.”

“By whom?” she demanded.

“Lady Summer.”

Was that curiosity in her belly? Disappointment? Envy?

Neither. It was neither. She was cold and hungry, was all. Nothing a plate of biscuits couldn’t fix. And a warm fire.

“She didn’t tell you?” he asked.

“She did not.”

“Then I apologize for the intrusion.”

He’d already done her a favor today and likely saved Marigold. She should be gracious. It had been as easy as breathing not too long ago. “Not at all. We owe you our thanks. I don’t know how to repay you.”

“I do.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“You could marry me.”

She had never been that gracious.

Chapter Four

She stared at him for a full minute when she realized he was not joking.

“You did ask,” he pointed out, as if he’d just requested a second cup of tea.

She sputtered. He was teasing her. He had to be.

What an odd jest.

Still, just a jest.

She tilted her head as the carriage pulled in front of the house. “Did that branch hit you on the head? Are you here to propose to Lady Summer?” That made sense. “Because she and I look nothing alike.”

What did not make sense was how much she hated the thought.

Loathed it.

In her bones.

Her fickle, treacherous bones.

Never mind that. She had a brain to think with, didn’t she? Who listened to their bones, anyway?

He helped her from the carriage without explaining or elaborating. When he paused to survey the house, she knew what he saw: an old manor built of gray stone which badly needed repointing if it could be dug out from the encroaching ivy. As the ivy had won the battle decades before Tessa was born, she did not hold out hope. Not to mention, repointing was likely to be obscenely expensive. Everything about the house was obscenely expensive. Even if it did not look it.

Roarke would expect glittering windows with velvet curtains, gold candlesticks, gleaming parquet floors. What he saw were crumbling chimney pots, a front door that was slightly crooked, the wood swollen in one corner. Windows rusted shut. And inside was so much worse. If the outside resembled a fine old lady fallen genteelly into hard times, the inside was her drunk sister who had set fire to the place before throwing a chamber pot at the local constable.

That was a rather detailed image, even for her. But the house just did that to her. It invited her to imagine all sorts of possibilities with the peeling wallpaper, water stains on the ceilings, birds in the ballroom. A questionable smell in the back parlor.