Best not think too hard about that particular version of a wasteland and he was a patient man. He could wait for Mrs Marianne Turner to make up her mind about the man under his viscount disguise and he had forgotten about boxing when he made up his list of ways to avoid throwing himself at her in a stew of lordly passion, had he not? He would be the fittest man in England as soon as his stupid ankle was back in full working order.
Three days after the wedding Marianne waved her parents and Viola off in Lord Stratford’s comfortable travelling coach. Fliss and Darius were busy pretending to help with the harvest and probably wandering about staring into each other’s eyes and getting in the way instead and she was escaping her packing. Her excuse was a burning need to find a book to take with her on the journey to Stratford Park a couple of counties away in Wiltshire. So she was in Great-Uncle Hubert’s study tidying a small part of it because tidying was soothing and if she happened to do some dusting while she was in here nobody could deny the room needed it.
‘Ah, so there you are.’
‘Yes, here I am, Lord Stratford.’
‘I thought you promised your brother to stop attacking his house as if your life depended on getting it clean from top to bottom.’
‘I am not cleaning. I am looking for a book.’
‘Then you would seem to have come to the right place.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And why are you wielding a duster?’
‘You would not want me importing dust into your fine carriage or your magnificent country house, now would you, my lord?’
‘Admit it, you are cleaning, Mrs Turner.’
‘I am sorting,’ she said and that was all she was prepared to admit.
‘Why?’
‘I have an orderly mind.’ It felt anything but orderly just now and why did he have to stand so close to her in order to talk? Although she did have to admit she had only managed to clear a small space in the piles of books stacked all around the room when Great-Uncle Hubert had run out of bookshelves, so he had little choice but to be close to her even if his presence somehow seemed to have sucked some of the air out of this dusty old book room and she was conscious of every breath he took.
‘Liar,’ he accused her with so much laughter in his blue eyes she smiled back at him like an idiot.
‘I am sorry,’ he said at last.
‘Why?’
‘I am not your employer yet, but I am still supposed to be a gentleman and should not close doors behind me when there is a lady in the room.’
She felt her heartbeat thunder in her ears as the musty scent of old books and the little noises of the old house shifting on its oak bones as the sun moved around the house faded and all she could see and sense was him. ‘Are you?’ she murmured. ‘Luckily I am not a lady.’
He stepped back as if she had bitten him. ‘If anyone else said the things you say about yourself, you would loathe them,’ he told her furiously.
She was glad he had to shut the door to make enough space to join her in here so nobody could hear them now. ‘Best do it myself rather than wait for someone to do it for me,’ she replied coolly.
‘And what do you think your husband would think if he could hear you say them, Mrs Turner?’
‘You have no right to bring him into it,’ she told him with enough anger to hide her worry Daniel would hate the lesser version of herself she became when he died.
‘Your brother seems to dread throwing you back into grief so much he does not feel he can argue when you call yourself names, but I can. I do not want to, Marianne, but you can hate me without hurting yourself. I was wrong to think I could lock my feelings away after my brother died and I cannot even start to imagine how much worse it must feel to lose the love of your life, but you can take it from me, pretending not to feel at all is not really living—it is existence and no more.’
How dare he criticise her when he had no idea how it felt to lose your true love? He had just admitted he did not and he was right. Temper hammered in her temples, but the horrible suspicion he was right was fighting it. ‘You have no right to say things even my nearest relatives dare not say,’ she argued.
‘Darius told me the Bath tabbies made your life a misery when you were living under your parents’ roof and he was still away fighting, so no wonder he does not want to upset you.’
‘Even if they had welcomed me with open arms I would still just have been stumbling around in the dark after my husband was killed. I hope Darius has stopped feeling guilty because he lived when Daniel died at his side, though, and at
