A Duke in the Night(32)

“I was checking the calving sheds, if you must know.”

Miss Hayward made a great show of looking around her. “The calving sheds.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes dropped to the knees of his breeches. “Must be a time-consuming task if you have to crawl around on your hands and knees to do so,” she commented with a calm, infuriating logic.

“I was not crawling around on my hands and knees,” he bit out. That was true. He had been walking until he got to the fence. And then he had been more…crouching.

She smiled, but it didn’t come anywhere close to her eyes. “If you are going to insist on spying on me, your sister, and the rest of my students, I am going to have to insist you leave.”

“I was not spying on you.” But it was hard to argue with grass stains.

“Of course you weren’t.” Her lips turned up in the cynical quirk he remembered so well.

He went on the offensive, abhorring the accusation. Probably because it was true. “I was out walking when I stumbled upon…whatever the hell you were doing out there in that field. Having the girls lie on their backs in the grass like a bunch of dairymaids about to be tumbled.”

He hated the words the second they were out of his mouth. Because before they’d disappeared in the long grass, they hadn’t looked like a bunch of maids about to be tumbled; they had looked like a bunch of beautiful young girls laughing in the sun.

Miss Hayward’s immaculate composure slipped, and fury crossed her face, her eyes flashing and her hands fisting at her sides. “Have a care, Your Grace. That is your sister you are speaking of. And eight other women who don’t deserve such inconsiderate, ill-mannered remarks. Those sort of comments may find you popularity in the back rooms at Boodle’s, but they will not be tolerated here.”

August ran a hand over his face. Not eight others. Nine. She hadn’t included herself in her defense of her students. What was wrong with him? His job with Miss Hayward was to be charming and personable and get her to open up to him. To get her to trust him. To bloody well like him. And right now he didn’t even like himself.

“You’re right. That was thoughtless.”

She blinked.

“It was just…It wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Not what you were expecting?” She still sounded furious, but it looked as if she was fighting for patience. “You may be Lady Anne’s brother and guardian, but that does not give you the right to pass judgment on something you don’t understand.”

“I saw my sister laughing.” That was not what he had intended to say. But this woman seemed to provoke him into fits of honesty that were as terrifying as they were liberating. Given his reason for being here in the first place, the irony was not lost on him.

Miss Hayward stilled and then blew out a long breath. She looked away from him and gazed out over the expanse of the sea. “Do you know why I bring them out here?”

August remained silent.

“To take them out of their element and put them in mine.” She ran her fingers lightly along the top of the stone fence.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

She laughed softly, still looking out over the glittering expanse of water. “You, Your Grace, should understand more than anyone, I should think. Your worth in society is measured by your title. Yet I would argue that your true merit as an individual should come not from where and to whom you were born, but from what you did with the time between then and now.”

Miss Hayward fell silent, and August simply watched the play of emotion that creased her forehead and brought a pensive aura to her being. Something strange was pulsing through him, a reckless feeling of acknowledgment that this woman saw him. Saw the very thing that drove him and haunted him at the same time.

She finally looked back at him, her eyes searching his. “In this class I have girls who call dukes and earls family. I have girls who are daughters of bankers and miners and factory owners, one of whom isn’t even English.” Her beautiful lips twisted. “You tell me how this group of women would be encouraged to interact in a society ballroom.”

He knew the answer because he had lived it. He had recovered his father’s fortune and then desperately tried to repair his family’s good name within the ranks of society. The debacle that had led him to dare Miss Hayward to dance had been part of that desperation. But it had been damn near impossible until the title of Holloway had unexpectedly fallen onto his shoulders.

“They wouldn’t.” She was right. He did know that better than anyone.

Miss Hayward inclined her head and seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “For the duration of my program, I wish my students to have the chance to be recognized for their own merit. Not an accident of birth or the ledger totals at the bottom of their family’s quarterly earnings statement. Not the type of lace used to trim their ball gown or the appearance of their hair. Not the label that society gives them because they come with a preconceived, baseless checklist of traits that has been ruled either acceptable or unacceptable.”

August stared at her. It sounded ridiculous. Preposterous, even, because that simply wasn’t how the world worked. Yet he had never, in all his years, seen Anne as carefree and as joyous as she had been sitting in a field of wildflowers.

Nor had he ever seen Miss Hayward as unguarded as she had been. As she was now.