“You are not urchins now,” his wife remarked. “Yet still acquainted.”
So she had done away with the polite stance of not acknowledging her husband’s liaisons. Only here her efforts were wasted; Aoife would never bed a man, and since she had found her Susan, not even other women, but that, too, was not for Harriet to know, at least not from his mouth.
“I gave you my word that I wouldn’t take a lover,” he said instead.
Harriet promptly made a bored face, as if she couldn’t care less. Fickle creature. “Miss Byrne shares your interests,” he said. “She’s often up at the Royal Academy or with the Decadents, sitting for paintings. She enjoys the opera.”
“How thrilling,” Hattie murmured. Her shoulders were drooping and shadows had appeared beneath her eyes from nowhere, and his fingers flexed on instinct, to take her somewhere where she could rest. But he’d be damned before he lost his composure and fell on her again. The memory of their kiss promptly seared through him. He tried to block the phantom feel of her warm, wet mouth and eager tongue.
“Would you like a bath?” he said, and when her gaze flickered to him uncertainly, “I have to deal with some business affairs—I’ll do it here.”
She hesitated. “You would work here—in the dining area?”
“Has anything been done by protocol lately?”
A tired smile tugged at her mouth. “No,” she said. “I do love a bath.” He rose when she did, but she shook her head. “Please, stay. I should like to go alone.”
He was aware his gaze was following her swaying skirts like a hungry dog going after a bone, and he didn’t like it. It felt as though she had a part of him on a leash. I don’t know how to do this right. The tops of his ears felt warm when he recalled his heated words earlier. He couldn’t remember the last time he had admitted cluelessness to another person. First, there had never been a need for it—as Aoife had pointed out, there was no one around for him; second, he was hardly ever clueless. And his men of business didn’t cry, no matter what he said; all they wanted from him at the end of the day was profit. What did Harriet want from him?
He ordered another ale to his booth and assessed his financial due diligence reports. It demanded near inhumane discipline. The moment he put the pen aside, she invaded his mind again. How at ease she had looked among the children. Her keen interest in … everything. Her tears. Her soft, soft kisses. He neatly stacked his documents as restlessness took hold of him. She was sweet. Genuinely sweet and unassuming. Spoiled and ignorant, too, but her cheerful disposition was rooted in something deeper; there’d be some whimsy in her even had she been raised in a beggar’s hovel. It was reckless to be this way, in a world such as this; she could be hurt in all sorts of ways. He felt a knot in his stomach as a cold sensation seeped beneath his skin. He hadn’t felt moved to keep a particular woman safe from … everything … in over ten years. Now the long-buried instinct rattled its cage at the bottom of his soul. Unless he kept it buried, it might swell with the force of a tidal wave and take the ground from under his feet.
Harriet was left to soak undisturbed in the metal tub next to the fire for a long while, but she was barely conscious of the soothing heat of the heather-scented water. Her mind was too deeply preoccupied with Lucian’s revelations.
When he finally returned to their room, her hair was nearly dry again and she was huddled in the armchair, hugging her knees against her chest beneath a double layer of tartan blankets. He washed behind the curtain in the side room, cursing softly as he maneuvered in the small space, and finally he emerged wearing a soft black cashmere robe that outlined his strong shoulders to great effect. She studied him as he sorted his papers on the table, trying to superimpose all she now knew over the man she had thought he was.
“Is that what you do?” she said. “Acquiring ailing mines to improve the communities?”
He glanced up. “When I can, yes.”
“I thought the mining commission takes care of such matters.”
“It should. It does. But laws are only ever as good as the will to enforce them.”
“What about the miners’ unions?”
A sardonic glimmer lit his eyes. “Tell me—who still owns the mines in Britain, the slate mines, the coal mines? Or who steers the consortia that own them? The unions?”
“No,” she said reluctantly. “Dukes and earls and wealthy men of business.”
“That’s right.”