Dukes Prefer Blondes (The Dressmakers 4)

He was impossible.

She snatched up her pen and started yet another list, but her hand was shaking and she was so angry, she tore the paper and spoiled the pen.

She took out a penknife and tried to mend it, but she only ruined the nib. She pushed the chair back, got up, stalked to the door leading to her husband’s study, and stomped in. She’d tidied his desk after he left, and it had comforted her to touch his things. It had also comforted her to know he’d object to her touching his things, and she could tease him about it.

Her throat tightened.

She stole a pen from his desk. Not satisfactory. She was still so angry. And hurt.

She’d thought he understood.

Someone ought to encourage her, he’d told her parents. To be herself.

She opened drawers and started rearranging his neat order. She moved the ruler to the small tray where he kept pencils. She took all the writing paper out of an upper drawer and opened a bottom one to put it there.

She reached down to remove what was in the bottom drawer . . . and paused.

Because there, instead of paper or notebooks or anything else related to his work, rested a crumpled bit of tissue paper, loosely wrapped about something.

She set the writing paper down on the desk and took out the parcel from the drawer. The loose tissue paper opened further, giving her a glimpse of soft leather.

She sat in her husband’s chair and set the parcel on his desk and fully opened the flimsy wrapping.

Gloves.

A lady’s gloves.

Very dirty gloves.

They were plain but of good quality. They still smelled of lavender . . . the scent Davis always kept in among Clara’s clothes.

Her clothes. Her gloves. Her plainest pair, the ones she’d worn on the day they rescued Toby.

Only look at your gloves! Radford had said, so bafflingly furious about such a small thing.

She’d taken them off and—­then what?

When she returned to her great-­aunt’s, Davis had said, “Has your ladyship lost another pair of gloves?”

Clara had assumed she’d dropped them in the street when she’d climbed out of the carriage, pretending to an insouciance she’d been so very far from feeling. Or else they’d slipped from her lap and onto the floor of the coach . . . when she and Radford had kissed. She’d supposed the coachman or the next passenger had appropriated them.

She’d assumed incorrectly.

Radford had found them. And kept them.

Her throat hurt.

She heard returning footsteps.

She wrapped the gloves, thrust them back into the drawer, and slid it shut. She dropped the writing paper into its proper drawer and hurried back into her sitting room, taking the fresh pen with her.

She was in the chair at her desk a moment before the door flew open.

By the time Radford stormed back in, she had the pen in hand and a list of some sort—­she had no idea what it was—­in front of her on the desk. Her heart raced and her hand gripped the pen too tightly. She wanted to throw it down and put her face in her hands and sob.

She placed her grandmother’s image firmly in the front of her mind and refused to let the tears fall or her mouth so much as tremble.

He closed the door and stalked to the desk. “Dash it, Clara, have I hurt your feelings?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “I take no notice of your irrational ranting and raving.”

He set his hands on the desk, leaned toward her, and looked her in the eye. She met his gaze, chin aloft.

“I’ve hurt your feelings,” he said.

“You promised,” she said.

“Promised.”

“That day. At your trial. I needed to be myself, you said. You’d encourage me to make a spectacle of myself. You—­”

“I remember.”

To her amazement, a tinge of red spread over his cheeks and jaw.

“You spoke of my mind,” she said. “But a little while ago, you behaved as though I hadn’t one. You—­”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “I may have overreacted somewhat.”

“Somewhat? You insulted my intelligence. On no evidence.”

“Flimsy, I acknowledge.”

“Not flimsy,” she said. “None. Aught. Nihil. Unless your great brain is malfunctioning, you ought to know I did my spying as cleverly as you might have done, though you—­”

“I should not have done it quite in that way.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re a man. You can act more freely. I’m hampered by a strait-­waistcoat of rules.”

“Except the ones I’m so lost to reason as to try to make.”

She wasn’t ready to be mollified. “I took no risks,” she said. “I could not have been more discreet. I did not pursue your criminals in any way or acknowledge their existence. I simply gathered information, which I presented to your ungrateful self as soon as you’d had time to recover from traveling. And if I had it to do over again, I should do it again, because I’d rather nobody killed you at present.”

“Not at present?”

“I’m not in a humor to wear mourning for you,” she said. “I’m already in black for your cousin—­whom I dearly wish I had married instead—­and it doesn’t become me, and I’d rather not extend the length of time I must go about looking like a scarecrow, especially on your sorry account.”

He studied her dress. “Black only makes you look a little pale, though your present rage heightens your color. I should not call it unbecoming.”

“Do not try to turn me up sweet.” He was doing it, though. She was hopeless. She wished she hadn’t found the gloves. He uttered a few vaguely complimentary words and she commenced melting.

“Clara—­”

“I’m not Clara to you. To you I am my lady.”

“Your ladyship is doing it too brown. Marry Bernard, indeed.”

“I might have made something of him! I can do nothing with you! Your obnoxiousness knows no bounds.”

“You knew I was obnoxious when you married me. All the world knows it. My picture is in the dictionary next to the word.”

“You’re not even trying,” she said.

“I don’t actually have to try to be obnoxious,” he said. “It comes quite naturally.”

She wanted to throw herself in his arms. She didn’t want to quarrel anymore. She loved him, with all his faults. She loved his faults, too.

She reminded herself that the only way to get the marriage she wanted was to fight for it. They could have a partnership, like the one his parents had built. They could have the marriage she’d always supposed was a fantasy. But it wouldn’t simply happen because she wanted it.

“I refer to your learning how to be a tolerable husband,” she said.

“Tolerable! My dear girl, th

at’s asking a great deal.”

“I realize we’re in the catastrophe phase of this inheritance,” she went on ruthlessly because my dear girl made her want to fly into his arms. “But you don’t seem to realize that the earthquake has happened to both of us. Yes, I trained to be a duchess. But I was not prepared to enter a household that had never been a ducal household or had anything to do with Society or had any thought of doing either, and is completely unprepared—­and in many cases, unwilling—­to change its ways.” She added quickly, “You’re not to think I blame your parents in the least. It’s perfectly reasonable of them to want their peace. But I’ve been carrying on single-­handedly for this last fortnight—­and you come back only to find fault!”

His head went back as though she’d slapped him.

He straightened away from the desk, and she thought he’d storm out again, but instead he drew in a deep breath and let it out and said, “You have a point.”

“A point!” she said. “I have a hundred points! I could write pages on the topic, had I time. But I must think about curtains for Malvern House. And Mama cannot find half the furniture listed on the last inventory, not but what she says we shouldn’t attempt to retrieve it, judging by what remains.”

“I do realize—­”

“You don’t, not a fraction of it. The staff at Malvern House is not only too small, but incompetent as well. We’ll have to replace all but one or two. Have you any notion how time-­consuming and tedious that is?”

“Surely you don’t need to—­”

“It’s a house of some forty or fifty rooms. We don’t know the precise number because we can’t find the most recent floor plans. There are five floors in all, and even Mama’s stamina could not withstand more than the main ones.”

He turned away from her and walked to the fire. He folded his hands behind his back and stood there for a time, staring into the burning coals.

The silence stretched out. She could hear the crackle and hiss of the fire and the anxious beating of her heart, which seemed louder by far.

She gazed at him, taking in his tall physique and broad shoulders and the strength and confidence of his long, lean frame. She remembered the lanky boy from so very long ago, defending her honor against a bully who, at the time, had seemed to her the size of an elephant.