Chapter 8 #2
“You are welcome in this library whenever you please. You need not wait until it stands empty.” He gentled his tone, aware that too direct an address startled her. “This is your home, after all. And my name is Alistair.”
Something in her expression eased. Not quite a smile, but the faintest loosening of the wariness that seemed to live permanently behind her eyes.
Years under her grandmother’s rule had left their mark in the rigid line of her shoulders and the care with which she had rationed every word in front of Beckwith.
She dipped her head and slipped out through the door, slippers whispering against the stone.
He listened until her footsteps faded completely, struck by how thoroughly the women of this household had learned to make themselves small. Even the way they left a room came practiced in silence.
Soon only the rain and the crackle of the fire remained. He returned to the desk, where Beckwith’s notes waited in a neat hand, lists of repairs and tenant grievances that would eat up months of attention and capital he could ill afford to spend.
He thought of the mill. Of the contract waiting for him in London.
Of the looms wanting his oversight and the workers who trusted his judgment.
He thought of Franklin holding the negotiations together through sheer charm and competence, and of Benedict and Gregory running the daily operations with an apparent carelessness that hid real capability underneath.
His brothers would cope. They always had.
Then he thought of Josephine.
The library seemed to grow larger without company in it, the silence crowding into the space conversation had lately filled.
The rain did nothing to fill that emptiness.
He pressed his palms flat against the desk and stared down at the ledger without truly seeing it, the columns of figures blurring together into a single truth he had been circling now for two full days.
He thought of the chamomile and mint that trailed her through every room she entered.
Of her cool gray eyes, which quieted the ceaseless churn of his own thoughts whenever she turned them on him.
Of the gentle swell of her belly beneath black bombazine, and the courage it must take to carry a dead man’s child under the roof of an old woman who would gladly turn that child into a weapon.
He thought of her standing in this very room two days past, asking for his help with an expression carrying equal measures of desperation and dignity, and how he had sent her away hurt because her honesty had cut too near a vulnerability he refused even to name to himself.
He thought of leaving for London only to return and find her ground down beneath the dowager’s heel once more, the girls retreated back into silent obedience, every fragile change he had set in motion unraveled by weeks of his absence.
That was not going to happen.
He had spent fifteen years solving problems other men called impossible. A crumbling estate and a tyrannical old woman amounted to obstacles, not final verdicts.
He crossed to the bellpull and rang. When a footman appeared, Alistair asked him to tell the younger dowager duchess that he wished to speak with her in the library. The servant bowed and departed, and Alistair went back to the window to wait.
The rain kept up its assault outside. Somewhere beyond the gardens the river would already be rising, swelling brown and urgent against its banks, no doubt dragging debris down from the hills above Irwyn. A problem for another day.
He did not wait long. Within minutes footsteps approached, lighter than Beckwith’s unhurried stride but quicker than Genevieve’s cautious near-silence, and then Josephine stood in the doorway.
Her blonde hair sat pinned beneath a simple cap, her mourning gown a study in restrained elegance, and her gray eyes clouded by uncertainty.
“You wished to see me, Your Grace?” She kept her voice under tight control, though he caught the faintest tremor running beneath it. Her hands stayed clasped before her, fingers laced, and she remained just inside the threshold.
“Come in. Close the door.”
She obeyed, easing the door shut with a quiet click, and settled into the chair Beckwith had just left.
She folded her hands in her lap, her resilience the only armor she had ever truly been allowed to carry.
Firelight caught along one side of her face, warming her pale skin and deepening the gray of her eyes, and Alistair caught himself studying her a moment longer than the occasion strictly called for.
She sat unusually straight, as though bracing for bad news, and the firelight found the faint shadows beneath her eyes that told of too many sleepless nights.
He remained standing, one arm braced against the carved stone of the mantel, and studied her with the same directness that governed every dealing of his.
Alistair had rarely claimed much of anything for himself over the years, yet here was something he could claim for himself at last, selfish perhaps, but necessary all the same. A man forever weighing the best course for everyone else had decided, at last, that his own needs deserved a turn.
Josephine, with her quiet grace, offered something rare to a man forever racing toward his next objective.
She calmed his overworked mind and awakened needs he had long ignored.
She made him notice the world outside his own ledgers.
Made him aware there was more to life than work.
A man built for decisive action, Alistair had turned this decision over for days, and had finally arrived at his answer.
“I have decided we shall wed.”
Josephine’s brow furrowed at once. “Am I permitted any say in this?”
“Do not turn contrary now. We both know you want my protection. That you have hoped for exactly this proposal. If the babe proves a son, I shall have no legal standing to help you at all unless we are wed.”
She said nothing for several seconds, caught off guard that her own proposal had actually been accepted.
“And the scandal of it? You would truly wed your own uncle’s widow?”
“Scandal holds no fear for me. This concerns legal necessity, nothing more. You and your child become mine to protect once we are wed. I shall stand as father to the child, and the old woman will hold no power at all, even if you bear the late duke’s heir.”