Page 23 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

"She used to sing to me," Audrey said. "When I visited as a girl. After the fall, when my hip was bad and I couldn't sleep. She'd sit on the edge of the bed and sing. Badly. She had a terrible voice."

"Dreadful," Kit said. "She sang to the horses. They tried to leave."

Audrey laughed. It came out wet and wrong and she pressed her knuckle to her mouth and held still. The grief hit sideways, the way it always did. Not when she expected it. Not in her study or her bedroom. Here. In a dark kitchen. Talking about singing.

Her eyes burned. She blinked hard and turned her face toward the range.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. I don't—"

He reached for her hand. Warm. Brief.

"She talked about you every week. Every letter I sent, she wrote back about her niece. The clever one. The brave one. The one who fell off a horse and got back up and whose mother wouldn't let her ride again." His voice was pensive. "I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I believe I knew her better than you did. Yet she loved you more."

The tears came. She wiped them fast with the heel of her hand and sat straighter and fixed her eyes on the cup and willed herself to stop.

Kit said nothing. He sat in his chair and gave her the silence to finish, and she was grateful for it.

She steadied. Breathed. Drank her tea. The heat of it helped.

"Why did she call you boy?" she asked. "You were eighteen when you met."

"Seventeen."

"You said eighteen."

"I lied about my age. Thought it would make her take me more seriously." He turned the cup in his hands. "She saw through it inside a week. Told me I could lie to the revenue men and the magistrate and God himself, but I could not lie to her because she had raised three nephews and could smell a boy pretending to be a man from across a county."

"And she kept calling you boy."

"Every day. At twenty, I asked her why she still called me boy. She said, because every time I hear it, I look at her with a boyish smile, and she wasn't ready to lose that yet."

Audrey set her cup down. The ache behind her ribs had nothing to do with grief now and everything to do with the man across the table who had been loved by the same woman and lost her too.

"She was the only person who was ever kind to me," Audrey said. "My mother kept me like an invalid. Hugh kept me like a shelf he'd forgotten to dust. Marian was the only one who looked at me and saw a person who might do things."

"She had that habit."

"I didn't come back enough. I should have visited more. I should have written. I should have—"

"She knew."

Audrey looked at him.

"She knew," he said again. "She didn't need you to come. She needed you to go. To leave your mother's house and your husband's house and end up here. That was what she wanted for you."

The kitchen was quiet. The embers shifted in the grate. The clock she had never managed to find ticked somewhere in the walls.

She wiped her face one last time and straightened in her chair. The tears had scraped something loose, and she felt raw and lighter and embarrassed and she wanted to talk about something else to keep him with her.

"You have never once called me Lady Kendal."

"No."

"Is it because you believe all men are equal?"

He tilted his head. "That too."

"Too. So there is another reason."