Goddess of the Hunt (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #1)(87)

Jeremy leaned against the desk, his head spinning. He felt drunk, giddy. Maybe it was the fact that his wife kept shedding articles of clothing like an opera dancer. He stared, utterly rapt, as she untied her pelisse with nimble fingers and tossed it carelessly on the mounting heap of garments. It was too much to hope that she might continue with her boots, her stockings, her gown, and her shift. But a man could dream.

Then again, perhaps it was her words that had set the room whirling.Kind , had she called him?Generous? During the course of one day, he’d gone from “addle-brained brute” to “not at all hateful”? If this trend continued, by tomorrow she’d be spouting poetry. And somehow, most strange and dizzying of all those descriptors were those so casually uttered words, “nothing like your father.” As if she could know.

“It bothers you that much, what the tenants think of me?”

“Of course it does!” She sagged against the desk next to him. “Because if they hate you, they hate me!”

He chuckled. Ah, yes. He ought to have known there was a sensible reason behind this veritable outpouring of affection.

“I’m sorry, Lucy, but their opinion of me is not likely to improve anytime soon.” He stood and crossed to the window, looking out over the uneven landscape. “You have to understand, this isn’t Waltham Manor. There, a man can toss a handful of seed at the ground and reap a bountiful harvest five months later. This is hard land. Rocky soil, unevenly watered. The wheat harvest failed this year. Last year, the barley. I’m attempting to do now what my father ought to have done years ago—improve the land, rotate the crops. Irrigate the dry areas, drain the wet. But in order to make the reforms, we’ve had to coerce the tenants to cooperate. They resist change. It means more work for them, at increased risk. So they’ve been told they must farm by the practices the steward proscribes, or I will revoke their lease.”

He turned back to Lucy. “You can well imagine, that makes me rather unpopular. In the end, they’ll reap the benefit, but for now … for now, they hate me.”

Lucy sighed, folding her arms across her chest. “They hateus.”

Her brow furrowed with frustration, and her lips pursed in a sulky pout. Jeremy thought to remedy both conditions by crossing the room and taking her mouth in a long, deep kiss. Instead, he leaned against the windowpane. Because there she’d gone again, setting the room awhirl with the tiniest word.

Us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“So this is our breakfast room.”

Jeremy looked up from his newspaper, eyebrows raised. He was obviously surprised to see her, but—Lucy fancied—pleasantly so.“Our breakfast room,” he said with a bemused expression. “Yes. I’m glad you finally decided to search it out. Perhaps later you’d care to tour the rest of the house?”

She smiled. “I think I would.” After all, it wasn’t as though she could keep to her suite forever. Yesterday’s outing hadn’t quite matched her expectations, but Lucy’s first taste of a countess’s responsibilities had not been entirely bitter. In fact, she felt rather hungry for more.

She plucked a pastry from the buffet and circled the room slowly, pausing to study a portrait hanging above the mantel. It appeared to be a vague likeness of her husband. His general figure seemed about right—broad shoulders, erect posture. Those heart-stopping blue eyes were captured rather well. But Jeremy’s hair was black as jet, not that auburn color. And his jaw—the artist had his jaw all wrong. Far too rounded.

“This is a terrible likeness of you.”

His coffee cup clinked against its saucer. “That’s because it’s not me.”

“Well, who is it then? It can’t be your father; the clothes are too modern.”

“My brother.”

She wheeled to regard her husband where he sat at the table, calmly salting an egg. As if he’d simply asked her to pass the butter. “You have a brother?”

“Had. I had a brother. He died when I was a child.”

Lucy looked up at the young man in the portrait. “How old was he?”

“When he died? I was eight, and he was eleven.” Jeremy’s hand paused, suspending a tiny spoon in midair. “Nearly twelve.”

“But this is a portrait of a young man, not a boy of eleven.”

“Yes, well. You can blame my mother’s fancy for that. She never really stopped mourning Thomas.” He replaced the spoon in the saltcellar and picked up his fork. “That was his name. Thomas.” He took a bite of egg. He chewed it slowly. Lucy ground her teeth in frustration.

Finally, he swallowed and looked up at her. She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows. “Please, continue.”

“She—my mother—commissioned a new portrait of him every year. Until she died, of course. So she could look on him as he might appear, had he lived.”

That, Lucy’s stomach decided, was a perfectly nauseating idea. Yet it didn’t seem to affect her husband’s appetite in the slightest. He reached for another piece of toast. Lucy swallowed around the lump in her throat. “And when did your mother die?”

“Four years ago.”

She calculated on her fingers. “So if you’re nine-and-twenty, like Henry … About twenty-one years your brother’s been dead, minus four … That means there areseventeen portraits of Thomas in this house?”