Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
“Because I ceased to be Peter and became the duke. Cooks who would scold me for snatching a biscuit now offered me the entire plate. My father’s friends, who had shown little interest in me as a boy, now became almost sycophantic.
People traveled from all over with daughters in tow to express their sympathies for my parents’ demise.
Inevitably, they had to spend a night or two to recover from the arduous journey and I had to host them while my siblings got to avoid guests and play by the stream. ”
He tipped his head and gulped his drink, grimacing as he did. “That gin is something…”
A swirly, uncomfortable feeling snaked through her. “It might not be the quality you’re used to, but it’ll put hairs on your chest.”
Peter looked at her chest, and she flushed. “It didn’t… I mean… There are no hairs on my chest, thank you very much. It’s an idiom.”
Peter cleared his throat. “I have heard the phrase.” He dragged his eyes back up to meet hers. “Is there a system to this madness?” he asked, scanning the room. “Or are we to put everything in whichever trunk is closest?”
She sighed and slumped until her feet touched the table and she was staring at the ceiling.
Dash it. Her skirt had bunched and her ankles were showing.
Oh well. The duke was focused on the mess.
It was not like he’d be interested in her stockings.
He was here to help her move, apparently.
“I need to sort through stuff and decide what to take to my boardinghouse room and what to sell. I cannot keep it all.”
He winced again. “I’m sorry.” He truly was. She could see it in the way his shoulders sagged as she gave him the news.
“It’s not your fault. It’s just progress, right?
” She stabbed at the word. Stupid progress.
Damnable progress. Unlucky-for-her progress.
She still couldn’t quite believe it had happened, and just the thought of it made her stomach flop.
For a moment, she’d forgotten the pickle she was in.
Talking to Peter was easy. It was comfortable, which was a surprise, because who would have thought he would be a welcome distraction from her life?
He turned to the piles of books on the floor, and sighed. “You must sell your books too?”
“My books too.” She hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d told Lady Wharton her library had been a lifetime of curation.
The books she had not finished because they were boring—and there was no time for boring books—hadn’t been kept.
Which meant her shelves, which were so full that she’d had to stack books in front of books, held only stories she enjoyed.
Of course, her library was not as great as Agatha’s, because her lifetime was not as extensive. “Don’t call Agatha old, by the way.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You dared call the Dowager Countess of Wharton old?”
She wrinkled her nose and the skin on her cheeks protested. “I didn’t call her that on purpose, though she took it so.”
He laughed. But then he turned away, his gaze snagged on her books, and his expression changed. He pinched the bridge of his nose. It was a lovely nose. Perfectly proportioned. “How many must you sell?”
She blew a raspberry at the universe, then remembered she had company and sat up, trying for a respectable demeanor but almost slipping off the seat. “Three quarters. And half of my wardrobe.” The words barely made it past the lump in her throat.
Peter sat on his haunches, picked up a book from the pile closest to him, and studied it. “A Gentleman Against the Elements. This one has to go, surely. It was a terrible book.”
“How can you say that?” She tripped to where he was and plopped down on the floor next to him, snatching it from his hands. “It was a poignant story of a man and his dog and the bonds they forged during a wild and treacherous journey.”
Peter scoffed. “It was fifty thousand words of a man talking rather pompously about a trek he was unprepared for, from which he needed rescuing, and which cost the government thousands of pounds and fractured its ties with Alexander the Third.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. Russia was not inclined to allow British troops within their borders, just as England was not inclined to send them, but the public hysteria surrounding the fool’s misadventure forced our hand.
He was found in a tent, with a fire, munching on sandwiches, by the way.
Hardly the starved, frostbitten wreck he pretended to be in his book. ”
“Huh. Interesting. I did not know that.” She filed the information.
Peter place a hand to his chest, with an exaggerated expression of shock. “Can it be? Is there a curiosity that Miss Eleanor Wright does not already have in her head?”
Dash it. She despised falling short. “Very funny. Fine. That book can be donated.” She went to toss it, then paused. “Should we write a disclaimer in the margins, though? That way, the next reader knows the truth about how he was found.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We’re better off scrawling the words ‘A work of utter fiction’ on the title page.”
She giggled. “Well, let’s do that, then. I hate it when my facts are incorrect.”
Peter reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a pencil, neatly sharpened with clean, decisive knife marks.
As he opened the book and wrote beneath the title on the first page, she couldn’t help but notice the slight purse of his lips, as though what he was writing held great national significance, or the way his hair—which he had obviously tried to tame with pomade—had worked itself back into boyish curls incongruent with his status as one of the country’s most powerful men.
“Next.” He put the book aside and picked up another. “Encyclopedia, A to F. Do you have the others?” Her cheeks flushed and she studied the ceiling while he studied the rest of the books in the pile. “Three? You have three full sets of encyclopedias?”
“I like to know things.” Reluctantly, she faced him. His incredulity was as expected.
“I have gathered that, but is there not a significant amount of crossover between the editions?”
“Yes,” she said defensively. “But each new one brings new information.”
He shook his head. “So why don’t you donate these three sets to a school and wait for a future edition?”
She wasn’t opposed to the former, but the latter was impossible. “Because encyclopedias are expensive and there is no guarantee I’ll have the funds to purchase another.”
His expression shuttered, as though closing itself to a sudden shift in weather. After a moment of silence, he forced a smile and tossed the encyclopedia onto the “donate” pile. “You are welcome to borrow from my library whenever you wish. I will always have the latest edition ready for you.”
She couldn’t borrow from his library. He was the Duke of Strafford for God’s sake. She shouldn’t be visiting him and he certainly should not be sitting in her modest flat drinking mediocre gin and sorting through her books while she sat there, half drunk. Full drunk, in fact.
“I can’t borrow your books.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not friends. We’ve already determined that.” They were only acquaintances and only then by a very odd definition of the word.
“We could be. I could be your friend,” he said softly.
“How? How can we possibly be friends?”
He shifted, crossing his legs like a boy in a schoolroom and not like a duke. His chest was open to her. She felt the urge to mirror him and so she shuffled until she faced him directly.
“It’s easy,” he said. “I say to you, ‘Eleanor, would you like to go to the zoo with me tomorrow?’ and you say ‘Yes,’ and then we’re friends.”
She huffed. “It’s not that simple.” Because it couldn’t be. Their relationship was too complicated. Too much had happened in the months since they’d first met. At that time, she’d thought that yes, perhaps she would like to spend more time with him. But that was in the before time.
Besides, she and the Captain had reestablished their relationship. They were once again talking about the books they read and sharing random observations as they moved through the city.
It would be weird being friends with them both, wouldn’t it?
But then… Peter and the Captain were both just friends. As it stood, that was all she wanted from either of them. Peter might be devilishly handsome and her body tickled uncomfortably in his presence, but they’d been enemies just an hour ago.
She’d once thought the Captain might be more than a friend, but he had left her without warning and broken her heart.
Still, she’d forgiven him. Maybe he would become something romantic, in which case, she should not be friends with Peter, who made her shiver and who it appeared she had also forgiven.
When she didn’t answer, he nudged her knee. “How is you and me being friends not simple?”
The gin had loosened her tongue, and before her brain could stop her, she blurted out, “Because I’m sort of, somewhat, seeing someone.” She winced. That was not a fact he needed to know.
Instead of laughing or scowling or expressing any of the emotions she’d thought he would, he calmly picked up the glass next to him and twirled it in his hands.
“Truly?” He was nonchalant, watching the liquid swish.
“Who is this man who has earned your affection?” he asked before polishing off the drink.
A hot flush crept up her neck. “I do not know his name.”
Peter coughed, gin splashing her skirts and bodice. “You do not know his name?”
“No.”
“What does he do for a living?” he asked incredulously.
“I am not sure.”
“Who is his family?”
“I do not know.” She dropped her head into her hands.
Peter tsked, like her old schoolteacher might have. “Eleanor, does this man actually exist? You don’t need to invent a person to get rid of me. Say the word and I’ll leave.”
She scowled at him and scrunched her skirts in her hands. It was a perfectly reasonable question, and that was annoying. “Yes, he exists. We have been writing letters for months now.”