Page 67 of The Duchess’ Second Chance

She put the tray down carefully and stepped back, wondering if she should say something to alert him to her presence.

Maybe I should just leave. Maybe this is my opportunity to rethink the whole thing, and he need never know that I was here.

And then he looked up, and his eyes locked with hers, and it really was too late.

CHAPTER 33

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

She flinched, and he was filled with remorse. He hadn’t meant his words to be so sharp, and he could hear now how cruel that had sounded. “What I meant was…I thought Worthington was planning to deliver my dinner.”

“Worthington must have been busy with another task,” she said quietly. “Mrs. Linden was making the rounds with a cart. But…Rose wanted to spend time with her, so I offered to make this delivery so the two of them could do that.”

How he admired her! Even now, when it was apparent that she was uncomfortable by the color in her cheeks, she stood tall and looked him in the eyes as if daring him to challenge her. He knew he never would. That would be the ultimate betrayal. As bad as it was to come home and kiss George’s wife, it would be worse to come home and make her in any way unhappy. “Thank you,” he said. “It was kind of you to deliver my meal.”

She shook her head quickly. “It was just that it needed to be done,” she said. “I’ll leave you in peace now. I’m sorry to have interrupted.”

“You didn’t interrupt.”

The words were out before he fully realized he was going to say them, and he was rather surprised at himself. Of course, she had interrupted; there could be no question of that. He had been deeply engaged in his work for hours when the knock at the door had drawn him out of it, and though he’d expected a quick break to accept his food, the sight of her had now completely broken his focus beyond repair.

So, of course, she had interrupted. And yet, he was glad to be seeing her.

She eyed the scroll in front of him. “I don’t know,” she said. “This looks awfully important.”

“Property map,” he said. Something on it occurred to him, and he picked up a pen and sketched a quick line before he could forget the thought.

“This is what you’ve been in here doing all day?” she asked him. “Drawing maps?”

“Not drawing,” he said. “This map has been here for years. It belonged to my father. This is a tool for governing this land. The tenants are disputing property rights.”

He wondered whether she might be angry at him for focusing on this rather than on the dispute between the two of them. Would their argument intensify? He was uneasy at the thought of it, and yet he wasn’t going to keep from her the basic truth that he had other concerns on his mind. She was smart enough to realize it. She must know that he was thinking about lots of other things right now.

She married a duke, and perhaps she regrets it. Perhaps she should regret it. Maybe it’s for the best that she sees firsthand that no matter what happens between the two of us, my duties never stop.

She was peering at the map. “These are the tenants’ lands?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Each box on the map represents individual holdings occupied by one of my tenants.”

“Why is that one so large?” She pointed.

“It isn’t any larger than any of the others.”

“Of course, it is.” She stared at him. “You can’t see how large that is? It’s half again as big as this one.” She tapped a square on the opposite side of the map. “If I was this tenant here, I would hate that one for having so much more than I do. I would think it was deeply unfair. You should divide the land equally.”

“I do divide it equally. You’re wrong about this.”

“Is the map not to scale?” She frowned. “Does this represent a different size parcel of land than it seems to?”

“It’s perfectly to scale.”

“Measure it, then,” she said. “If I’m wrong, you can prove it to me, and I won’t mention it again.”

He frowned and pulled out a ruler. He wasn’t sure why he felt compelled to follow this up, except that, somehow, it felt much bigger than just a conversation about land division. It felt as if the two of them were somehow talking about all the things they weren’t able to speak of directly, arguing about everything they couldn’t argue over outright. They’d found a way to release all the mounting tension through a simple conversation about property lines.

It felt very important that he be the one to prove he was in the right.

He measured across one property demarcation carefully, then the other, and showed her his findings. “They’re exactly the same,” he said.