Behind the Courtesan(7)

Sophia rose to his bait in a heartbeat. She wondered if he stopped to consider the fact that she had nothing to smile about. She stepped forward but stopped short from poking him in the chest with her pointed finger. “And is that the only issue you take with my character, Blake? It has nothing to do with the fact that you hate everything about me and what I do?”

“I do not hate you. I merely feel sorry for you.”

“Well, I don’t need your pity. I am perfectly happy.” And apparently not above lying just to prove him wrong.

“I don’t pity you for sleeping with men for trinkets. I grieve for the girl you once were. The woman you could have been.”

He went to walk away, but Sophia decided in that moment that Blake needed to know a few truths about the woman she would have become if she hadn’t fled Blakiston all those years ago.

She ran around him, the swirl of her skirts about her ankles letting the cold seep beneath. “Would you like to know what my father had planned for me? What price he put on my body to start the bidding?”

“What are you talking about?” His eyes rolled heavenward as though her excuses meant nothing to him.

Sophia opened her mouth, but then she snapped it shut again. Why should she defend her actions or her decisions to a man who would never understand them anyway? He wouldn’t believe her. Her own brother wouldn’t have believed her father’s intention to sell her to the Duke of Blakiston in exchange for the neighboring farm. “Prime land for a prime filly,” he’d said, laughing. Well, she hadn’t laughed. She’d been terrified.

She bit her lip, welcomed the sting as she stepped out of his way. “It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t understand.”

All was quiet for what felt like decades, and then he spoke. “I wouldn’t understand because I am a swine or a simpleton?”

Sophia looked up into gray eyes narrowed in frustration. She could hear the hurt in his voice, but he could never comprehend her decision. She would have been foolish to tell him anything. “No, Blake,” she replied with a sad shake of her head. “Because you are a man.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Men will never grasp the female mind and its intricacies.”

“Nor do we want to.”

Sophia forced a chuckle. It was a very good thing the males of their species were not perceptive in the least. It was also convenient that they were easily distracted. “What is first on your agenda, Blake? Chickens? Cows? Pigs?”

“I am not the one with the agenda, Duchess.”

With a glare thrown over her shoulder, Sophia turned toward a low building at the rear end of the yard. “I am not going to talk about this anymore. Either we find a way to work together or I am going back to bed.”

Mumbling beneath his breath, he passed her and made a track for the double doors at the far end of the barn. She almost called for him to slow down so she wouldn’t have to trot to keep up but figured that wasn’t worth yet another disagreement. She had to show Blake she could do anything he did. Keep up with his daily chores. Match him task for task. Otherwise he won.

She could not let him win.

As he threw the first door wide and then the second, heat washed over her along with the scents of hay and manure. It was an earthy, rich smell that didn’t make her nose wrinkle as she’d envisioned. The moment was almost nostalgic. After all, she’d spent half her life mucking stalls, feeding horses, milking cows and collecting eggs.

Her first few steps into the barn made her think of her father and her brother in their happier years. Back to a time when her gangly limbs and freckled cheeks had been nothing more than a child’s cuteness. The years before her breasts had formed, before her body had curved and filled out in all the wrong places.

“What are you thinking about?” Blake asked. He stood with his hands on a horse’s bridle half lifted from its spike on the wall.

“Home,” she admitted with a sigh.

“London?” His question broke the spell and Sophia grimaced. London was her home now. Thankfully there were no cows to milk at dawn and the only eggs she had to deal with were the kind one held up with a fork to put in one’s mouth.

Ignoring his question—and the Pandora’s box it would open if she were to dwell on her answer—the curiosity in his eyes, she wiped her hands on her skirt and asked, “Where do we begin?”

* * *

Blake should have put her out of her misery. With every yawn she tried to suppress, he wanted to release her from their bargain and tuck her back into bed. He wanted to apologize and rescind all the hurtful words he’d said. But there was also a part of him that wanted to punish her.

Nothing he’d said to her so far was a lie. She needed to hear the truth, for surely she lived in a fantasy land. How else could she think she’d made the best decisions for her life?

He leaned against the side of the barn and watched as she hefted the heavy pitchfork fully laden with straw into the open horse’s stall. He had to admire her gumption. Not once had she complained when clearing the muck. Not once had she surrendered or begged for mercy. Not that she would. The stubborn set of her shoulders, the tight grip she had on the timber handle, the spark of her eyes when their gazes happened to meet and clash, told him Sophie would endure.

Even though straw and dirt clung to her full skirts and God knew what sullied the hems, she still struck a magnificent view. Her black hair gleamed as it slid across the smoothness of her back, the fabric of her blouse pulling this way and that with her exertions. He was surprised to notice it was damp between her shoulder blades as her makeshift plait swung over her shoulders.

He wondered when the last time was she’d worked up a sweat, but then dismissed the thought. He didn’t want to know what made her perspire. He didn’t want to know about her life in London.

But she was still Sophie. The world hadn’t ended when she’d lifted her skirts for the first nobleman to look her way. Her life hadn’t ended when she’d made the worst decision a woman could make. And that was one of the hardest parts of it. The world should have ended, it should have mourned the loss of an innocent girl the same way he had.

“Am I doing it wrong?”

Blake snapped his gaze from her back and looked into her eyes as she peered over her shoulder at him. “No.” He shook his head.

“Then why are you staring at me like that?”

Blake shrugged his coat off and hung it on a hook. He wanted to hurl another insult her way and ask the question burning the tip of his tongue. He wanted to ask about her. The real her. The woman she’d become, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. So he told her the truth. “I was watching you work.”

“Why?”

He shrugged again. “Why not.”

Her curious glance turned suspicious and her lips parted as if to retaliate, but then she snapped her mouth shut and turned back to the stall.

Taking a deep breath against the urge to snatch the pitchfork from her and do the job himself like a gentleman would, he took a few steps away and instead took up a shovel.

“What are you doing now?” she asked when he returned to her side.

“I was going to help you. The lunch and evening meal will not prepare itself.”

“Do we not get to break our fast?”

It was a simple question. She hadn’t whined it. She hadn’t huffed childishly. It made him feel like the bear he’d been since she’d arrived with her airs and orders. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I don’t take breakfast until the barn is tended, but it doesn’t usually take this long.”

She sighed and hefted the fork again. “Then it should be my turn to apologize. I am slowing you down.”

For a second his heart lodged in his throat. He liked her better when she gave him reason to be rude in return. “Let’s just get it done. The day is nowhere near to being over yet.”

With his back behind the shovel, the stall was mucked, cleaned and refreshed in thirty minutes. It could have taken her all day to do the simple task.

He had to remember that under her courtesan exterior and fierce glares, she was still a delicate woman not up to the tasks of a farmer. Despite her protests to the contrary.

“Can I have a moment to clean up?” Her voice cracked the hard shell of his thoughts. “It wouldn’t do to enter a kitchen with this filth hanging from me.”

“I don’t want you entering my kitchen like that either.” He chuckled. She now had straw in her hair and dirt smudged across one pale cheek.

Blake stepped toward her, his hand rising of its own volition. Sophie stepped back.

He paused with his fingers in the air. For a second she had been frightened of him. He’d seen the flash of fear skate across her eyes. “I wasn’t going to do anything,” he said defensively, as though he’d already laid hands on her person.

Her reply was a nervous laugh, her blue gaze darted from his face to the door of the barn behind him.