Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
He shrugged. “You told me that once.”
She did not recall doing so, but her cognitive function was admittedly impaired. “I do like flowers. They are pretty. But they die. Everything dies.” She waved toward a set of three trunks beside the sofa. “Vases are in one of those.”
He nodded and began to search through them.
“I don’t want anything from you,” she said as he pulled out items protected with newspaper, but she couldn’t bring herself to hand the flowers back to him. What if she could never afford to buy flowers again?
He didn’t answer. Instead, he unwrapped a vase and crossed to her tiny kitchen to fill it. He looked out of place in all his dukeishness, standing over a kitchen sink. He’d probably never been in a kitchen, let alone one as small as hers.
“How did you know where I live?” As much as she tried for an even, sober tone, her words manifested in the slippery, high-pitched register that snuck in when she was sauced.
“I am a duke. When I ask people questions, they answer.”
She leaned against the door, the flowers hanging beside her. “Well, that seems rather underhanded. I suppose it must be nice to have that kind of power.”
Turning off the tap, he shrugged. “It has its benefits, sometimes.”
Eleanor scoffed. It had its benefits. “Most of the time, I imagine,” she said.
“It must be nice to have people always do what you want.” She screwed up her nose.
Who had ratted her out? Roland, obviously.
The duke had to have made it through the foyer.
But how did he get to her foyer? Her past employers had her address, though Sophie wouldn’t have revealed it.
Had Mabel given her away? Her friend had been vocal about a possible love match between Eleanor and the duke. But then, how had he found Mabel?
“Who did it?” she asked. “Who gave you my address? Was it Mabel, because whatever she said—”
Time was fuzzy. One moment he was in the kitchen by the sink, the next he was right in front of her.
Inches away. She could smell his clove and cedarwood cologne.
She drifted forward and inhaled deeply, the scent slipping down her throat and filling her lungs.
It was warm. It was manly. The gin had already made her skin feel separate from the rest of her body.
Now her face slid loose over her teeth and cheekbones.
Cologne had between eighty and ninety percent alcohol. That was the problem, obviously.
He leaned forward, and she sprang back, colliding with the doorframe. He looked as though he was about to kiss her. His gaze lingered on her lips. His face softened. Or maybe it was her vision that blurred and his jaw was as chiseled as it always had been.
His fingers grazed hers and her heart kicked the way it had when they’d waltzed in the before time, when they had been friendly acquaintances and not nemeses.
Now he was holding her hand, and she could not work out why. That was, at least, until he took the flowers and put them in the vase of water he carried. “Where would you like these?” he asked, completely unaffected by their nearness.
She swallowed, and tried to fake her own indifference. “On the coffee table.” Later tonight, when she fell asleep on the sofa because the bed was a mess, she could look at them as she drifted off.
“You don’t always do what I want.” It took her a second to connect his words to the appropriate part of their conversation. He put the vase down and assessed the rest of the room. “You are unique in that way. I trust you.”
She pursed her lips. “Even though we are enemies?”
With his hands in his pockets, he faced her casually, as friends might—as he had at the zoo. “We don’t have to be enemies.” There was something in his voice that she couldn’t pick.
“What are we if not enemies?” Her mouth was dry, and she ran her tongue around it. If they were to talk, she needed to be on even footing, and that footing required mouthing properly.
“We could be friends.”
“We can’t be friends.” Her scoff turned into a cough. She leaned against the door to steady herself.
“Because I ruined your career?”
Must she state the obvious? “Yes.”
He shrugged. “Well, I suppose we’re not friends then. Acquaintances? When are you moving?” he asked without giving her a chance to address the friend question.
“At the end of the week.” She should continue packing. Maybe if she did, he would recognize that he was not welcome and leave. Instead, she found herself sinking down into the sofa, her skirts flouncing. They really were pretty flowers.
“You have a lot of packing to do.”
“I know.” There was so much mess. There were so many boxes. Why could they not pack themselves? Perhaps the Captain should write a book about animated household items that did the work on their own. He enjoyed speculative fiction. He might write that for her. She would suggest it.
“Tell me where to start.” The duke’s voice dragged her attention back to the present, where animated trunks were not going to help her.
From this angle, with him looming over her, he was inconveniently handsome.
Though if she had to be honest, he was handsome from all angles and that had been a secondary part of her frustration all along.
He made her butterflies panic and collide into one another.
“Helping you pack is the least I can do,” he continued.
It was the least he could do. He was the reason she’d had to beg and borrow for moving trunks. He could help fill them. “Over there.” She pointed to the pile by the window. He promptly knelt and got to work. But why?
As much as he deserved to be packing her things, it left her uneasy.
Like she was a bad host. She was a good host. She was a great host. “Would you like a drink?” she asked, hosting.
Mabel and Lillian were both at work and she felt numb, drinking alone in her flat, packing up her life.
At least the duke made her feel something, even if it was annoyance.
“What do you have?” he asked.
“Gin. I ran out of bourbon.”
His lips quirked. “Gin it is then.”
She waved a hand toward the doorway that led to the kitchen. “You’re going to have to dig out your own glass from a trunk in there. I left only one unpacked.” Dash it, that was not good hosting. Oh well. “Baskerville doesn’t drink, and I wasn’t expecting company.”
He cocked his head. “Baskerville?”
Eleanor gestured to where Baskerville was sitting on top of a bookshelf, his tail twitching.
“Well, hello there.” The duke reached up and gave Baskerville a scratch behind the ear. In a second, the Judas was purring and pressing his face into the duke’s hands. “Animals like me,” he said, pushing against the cat’s cheeks.
Baskerville’s eyes closed, and the purring deepened.
“I never got to have one of my own, though my siblings did,” he said in response to Eleanor’s narrowed eyes. He gave her cat one last scratch and then pulled away.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Because I was the duke.” He bobbed down to rummage through the trunk she’d indicated.
“Why did being a duke stop you from owning a cat?” It was incongruent with what she understood of a duke’s life. They could do and have what they liked.
The duke unearthed another glass and took the bottle of gin from the table next to the sofa that Eleanor had collapsed onto.
“According to my father’s man of business, I didn’t have time for a cat.
My attention had to be on my estates. I was allowed to have a horse because I could use it to visit my tenants. ”
She snorted. “Your father’s man of business sounds like a pillock.” Everyone deserved a cat. Even a duke. Poor Peter, the younger version anyhow.
Peter chuckled. “He was a pillock. Thank you for giving me the vocabulary with which to describe him.”
She probably shouldn’t swear around a duke. But then, why not? Wasn’t she the one who didn’t care about titles? “Did you get the blasted horse?”
“I did,” he said, suppressing a smile. “But one can’t curl up with a horse in their lap.”
A burst of eagerness sat her upright. “Did you know that miniature horses from Argentina are only thirty-eight inches tall? You might be able to curl up with one of those. They aren’t much bigger than a Great Dane.”
Peter raised a dukeish eyebrow and then looked to the dresser, where Baskerville was lying with his belly exposed. “I could just get a cat,” he replied.
She nodded. “You are a grown man who can have what he wants. You simply cannot have my cat, despite how much he’s taken to you.” A fact that made her frown. Baskerville wasn’t a mean cat, by any standard, but he also did not cuddle strangers so readily.
Peter smiled. “I like your cat. I would be very happy with your cat, but he belongs with you.” He poured a healthy serving of gin into his glass.
From this angle, she could not help but admire the cut of his jaw. It was strong. Determined. Serious. But a slight five o’clock shadow roughened his shininess, making him seem less picture-perfect and more human-perfect.
“How old were you when you became the duke?” Now that they were not enemies but acquaintances, she was curious about him. Before she’d known who he was, she’d rather liked him. Not that she could like him again. No, sir.
He winced, as though the conversation was not one he wanted to have.
Still, he answered. “Thirteen. I was up an apple tree when my father’s man of business came to give me the news.
I knew what had happened the moment he bowed and called me Your Grace.
That was the last tree I climbed. Everything changed, and not for the better. ”
“Because you couldn’t have a cat?”