She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 2
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"So are you, my lord."A pause. He looked at the basket. He looked at her hands, which were still faintly white with flour despite the water at the gate. She saw the moment he added those two things together, and she felt the cold clench of exposure, because no one in Ashford was supposed to add those two things together."Good morning, then," she said, and walked past him.She did not look back. She thought about it all the way home, standing in her small kitchen with her cloak dripping on the flagstones, and she concluded that an earl with better things to worry about would not spend a single additional thought on a widow with a basket. She told herself this with the particular firmness of a woman who knows she is not quite convincing herself.She was right not to be convinced.She did not see him again for ten days, which was enough time for her to stop bracing every time she heard hoofbeats in the lane. Then, he appeared at the offices of Mather and Sons, the largest of the three merchants whose accounts she kept, on a Tuesday morning when she was sitting at the high desk in the back room with the quarterly figures spread before her and ink on her second finger.She heard his voice in the front before she saw him. Mather himself was explaining something with that particular nervous brightness that men of business use with men of rank. And then the inner door opened, and the Earl of Dunross was standing in the room where she worked. He stopped when he saw her, and she stopped pretending she had not already heard him arrive."Mrs. Trent," he said. He said it with certainty, which meant he had found out her name, which meant he had been curious enough to ask.She set down her pen. "My lord. I was not aware you had business with Mr. Mather.""I did not," he said, "until recently."Mather, hovering behind him with an expression of confused delight, took himself back out to the front and closed the door, because Mather was a man who understood when he was not needed.The Earl looked at her for a long moment. In the gray morning light coming through the window, he was less polished than she had expected an earl to be. There was something worn about him, the way a good piece of wood is worn, in a way that makes it stronger rather than weaker. He had the look of a man who had not slept as much as he should have and had come to terms with it."I asked about you," he said."I suspected you had.""You kept your husband's press running for two years after his death by yourself."