Chapter One #3
His gaze dropped to her palm, where the skin had gone an angry, mottled pink, and his jaw set at the sight of it.
He reached as if to take her wrist and examine the burn himself, then stopped, his fingers an inch from hers, and let the hand fall, and the courtesy of not touching her cost him something she could see and could not name.
When his eyes came back to her face he held them there a moment longer than any exchange between strangers had a right to, and Jane discovered she had forgotten, entirely, the dozen apologies she had been assembling.
“Your hands,” Mrs. Croft said, hurrying forward with a wet cloth. “please allow me to inspect your hands, Miss Rennet, we must cool the burn at once.”
“They are perfectly well, truly, the tray only caught my palm for a moment and the shawl took the worst of it.” Jane accepted the cloth and pressed it to her hand, grateful for something to do with her eyes that was not the man in the dark coat, who had stepped back to a more proper distance and was watching her across it as though the distance cost him an effort he did not wish to explain.
“I’ll pay for any damage. To the floor, the tray, or anything else I’ve managed to destroy in what I believe has been approximately eleven minutes. ”
“Twelve,” Whitlock said, from the doorway, and his voice had changed. The cheerfulness was still there, joined now by something careful and a little awed, and he was not looking at Jane.
He was looking at the man in the dark coat.
“Your Grace,” Whitlock said. “I did not realise you were in the kitchen.”
The room went very still.
Jane’s breath stopped somewhere between her lungs and her teeth, and the blood left her face so quickly she felt it go, draining downward like water through a cracked cup.
She looked at the man who had caught her muffins and pointed her toward the door and pulled a burning shawl from her body, and none of it would reconcile.
This was the cold master Whitlock had described not twenty minutes ago, the exacting recluse who forgave very little and turned callers from his door, the man children in the village were frightened into behaving by.
That very man had crossed his own kitchen with a hurried step to arrest the flames with his bare hands and had looked at her scalded palm as though it grieved him, all the while, he had not uttered a single hard word, and she could not make the two of them be the same person.
She had even told the Duke of Aldermere he had a secretary’s coat.
“Your Grace,” she whispered, and the curtsy her knees produced was a minor miracle of structural engineering, given that they had both, independently, decided to stop working.
He looked at her. His face held no anger, which was almost worse, because anger at least would have been familiar and she would have known what to do with her own face in response.
His gaze dropped once more to her burned hand, then to the ruined shawl, and then back to her, and there was something in that last look she could not name and did not want to examine, because her capacity for absorbing new information had reached its limit for the afternoon.
He said nothing.
“It is best I take my leave,” Jane said.
“I must trespass no longer upon your time. I offer my sincerest apologies, Your Grace, for the shawl and the fire and the secretary remark. I will understand entirely if you prefer not to continue with the bakery order, and my mother will understand too, though she may not speak to me for approximately a year.”
She did not wait for an answer. She collected her empty basket, curtsied again with knees that barely cooperated, and walked out of the kitchen on legs that felt borrowed from someone who had not recently set herself ablaze before a duke.
She walked into the returning rain without her cloak, which she had left hanging on the kitchen peg and could stay there for the rest of her natural life, and by the lower gate the shaking caught up with her.
Three months her mother had spent cultivating this connection, and Jane had ended it in a quarter of an hour and a cloud of burning wool.
It was worse than a lost order, because the Garricks owned the building the bakery stood in, the lease came due in spring, and they had been wondering aloud for a year whether a bakery was the best use of the place.
A word from Aldermere would have stood between her family and that wind, and she had just reduced it to ashes.
She pressed her forehead to the cold gate, allowed herself one held breath of despair, and started the wet walk to Millcombe, rehearsing a kinder version of the afternoon and knowing the true one would be out of her mouth before she reached the door, because it always was.
Behind her, in the kitchen she had fled, the Duke of Aldermere stood alone beside a smear of ash on the stone floor and a shawl that had stopped smouldering.
He bent, picked it up, and folded it with the care of a man handling something that mattered, though the wool was half gone and the edges were black and the whole thing smelled of smoke and disaster.
Then he crossed the kitchen, took a single banana muffin from the basket she had delivered, and carried both upstairs to his study without saying a word to anyone.