Chapter 4 #3
“Thank you,” she said, softly but with such feeling that the two words carried everything else she could not put into speech. They fell short of enough. But she had nothing greater to give a man who had just undone a year of helplessness inside a single quarter hour.
“Do not thank me yet,” he said, setting his pencil aside. “I have not done anything at all so far.”
He shut the notebook, rose, and crossed to the arched window.
Yorkshire had seen little kindness from March.
The sky sat low and leaden above the moors, and a thin rain smeared the river below into a gray thread winding through fields still too cold to green.
He stood with one hand braced against the stone casement, surveying the land that had become his.
“The steward will be gone by this afternoon. Beckwith begins reviewing the household staff tomorrow, and I shall write to my solicitor about the girls’ legal standing.
Seraphina and Arabella will need new wardrobes and proper introductions before they can enter society, and arranging that will take some doing.
” He paused, his back still to her. “I will also want a full picture of the girls’ education, or the want of it.
What they have learned. What they have not.
You will help me with this. No one knows this household or what these girls need better than you. ”
Josephine found herself rising from the wingback chair without quite deciding to.
Her feet simply carried her across the faded carpet until she stood beside him at the window, gazing out at the same bleak, rain-soaked land.
The moors ran into the distance, vast and treeless, and Fortunestone Hall crouched on its hill like a fortress that had long since forgotten its purpose.
A fierce, aching clarity swept through her, sharp enough to surprise her. So this is what it feels like to be sheltered. This is what it feels like when someone stands between me and the storm, and asks for nothing at all in return.
She had never before seen such a sense of duty in a man.
Not in Jerome, whose notion of management had been to pour himself another brandy and fault the world for his own failings.
Not in the dowager, whose grip on this household was dominion rather than stewardship.
This man, with his pencil and his notebook and his list swelling by the hour, had listened to a full accounting of her year’s imprisonment and met it not with outrage or pity, but with a plan of action.
There was nothing romantic about it whatsoever.
And yet …
Standing this close beside him, Josephine felt his nearness in a way the desk between them had not allowed.
Warmth radiated from him across the narrow gap that separated them, and she could make out the weave of his shirtsleeve where his arm braced against the casement, the muscle corded along his forearm, the smudge of ink on his forefinger he had never troubled to wipe away.
He was larger than the drawing room had led her to expect.
Not merely tall, but solidly built, muscular in a way that spoke of labor.
His scent reached her next, one of ink, wool, and a faint trace of cedar, honest and unadorned.
He had likely been at his desk since first light.
It should not have moved her in the slightest. It did.
He glanced down, and their eyes caught.
It lasted only an instant, but she felt it all the same, unwelcome and impossible to ignore.
His blue eyes carried that same flicker of awareness she had glimpsed in the drawing room the day before, the look of a man caught noticing something he wished he had not, unable yet to make himself look away.
He turned from the window to face her properly.
“Is there something more?” he asked, his expression unreadable to her. “Anything else I ought to know, or anything at all you require?”
Josephine turned fully toward him, the window now at her left, its pale March light falling across the side of her face.
“There is,” she said quietly. “But I do not yet have the words for it.”
It was true, and it was also a small deceit. She knew perfectly well what she meant to say, only the saying of it would cost more than she had left in her to spend today.
Wariness crept into his eyes. His jaw set, a muscle flexing once beneath a morning’s growth of stubble he had not troubled to shave, and his hands, loose at his sides a moment before, curled into fists before slowly loosening again.
In that instant she understood, with a certainty that needed no explanation, that Alistair Fraser-Oxley was holding himself on a very short leash.
That the careful courtesy, the deliberate distance he had kept since his arrival, had nothing to do with indifference.
It was restraint. He was not indifferent to her.
He had simply decided that whatever interest he felt must be ignored.
Admiration, she told herself. That is all this is.
But the warmth blooming in her chest told quite another story, and Josephine Oxley, who had spent an entire year mastering the art of deceiving others, found she could not, in this one instance, manage to deceive herself.