Page 25 of To Swoon and to Spar
But the moment had passed. He’d always prided himself on being a practical man, and he had no intention of changing that now. So he added, “Which is why it is time to question the servants.”
She frowned. “I don’t know—”
Penvale reached out to take her hand, bringing an abrupt halt to her words. Her hand felt small in his, he thought; where his thumb rested on her wrist, he could feel her pulse tapping against his skin like a bird’s wing. “Jane. There must be some sort of rational explanation for what is occurring under this roof, and it stands to reason that someone within the household is responsible. Who else would have the opportunity? I intend to work out who that person is.”
Jane was very still for a moment, her gaze downcast at her hand, still engulfed in his. Her fingers curled slightly against his palm. “Fine,” she said at last. “But I don’t want you to speak to them alone—I’d like to be there, too.” She glanced up at him. “You’ll do your best proudLondon gentleman act, and they won’t tell you anything, and you’ll ruin any chance of learning something useful.”
“I wonder that you agreed to marry me at all,” he said, feeling her words like a brush of nettles against his skin, surprising in their sting, “if this is your impression of me. Last I checked, I was still capable of basic human interaction without making a complete mess of things, which is more than I can say for you, based on what I’ve observed.”
She slipped her hand from his grasp.
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he regretted them; he’d been so caught up in offering some sort of rebuttal, lessening the unexpected bite of her insult, that he’d stopped thinking too hard about what he was actually saying.
The truth was, he wasn’t accustomed to having to think much about anyone’s feelings other than his own. For so long, his only family had been Diana, his closest friends two men who had known him practically since boyhood. These were people whose presence he took for granted and about whom he’d never wasted much time worrying. He was not in the habit of keeping a mistress, either—mistresses were an unnecessary expense that a man in his position could ill afford. He supposed that once he felt assured of the estate’s finances, he could afford a mistress at last, since he’d no longer be hoarding every spare penny, but the thought of such an arrangement now that he was married to Jane seemed unexpectedly distasteful.
Jane.
Jane, whom he had just grievously insulted without really meaning to, because he’d never learned not to be careless when it came to others’ feelings. Or, at least, he’d never learned to be terriblycareful. In truth, he’d spent a fair amount of time congratulating himself on managing to acquire a home and a wife without having to change much ofanything about his life other than his residence. And he realized all at once that this was… insufficient.
He, at the moment, was proving to be an entirely insufficient husband.
He looked at her, and her face was curiously unreadable, nothing in her expression giving evidence that his words had affected her in any way. She wasn’t quite meeting his eye, though, and it was only now that he realized he’d grown used to her doing so more frequently over the past few weeks.
“Jane. I apologize. I didn’t mean that.”
She crossed her arms. “Of course you meant it.” There was something protective in her stance, and Penvale suddenly felt as though a great distance separated them, despite the fact that they stood only a foot apart.
“All right,” he said. He knew somehow that sweet words would not serve him well in this moment—not that they ever did with Jane. “I did mean it. But I didn’t mean to say it aloud, and certainly not like that, and I apologize.”
She regarded him for a moment that stretched between them, growing tighter with each second that she did not speak. “All right,” she said, echoing his words. “That was honest, at least.” She nodded her head once, sharply. “I take it you’ll let me join you for the interviews, then.” She said this flatly, as if his response were not really in question; Penvale supposed that, under the circumstances, it wasn’t.
“Fine,” he said, pressing his lips into a firm line, acknowledging defeat. “Shall we begin tomorrow morning?”
After the second hour spent interviewing members of his staff, Penvale was beginning to get the impression that they didn’t like him very much. There were only so many times a man could be gazed upon with abject wariness before he grew a touch concerned.
“Tell me,” he said to Jane after a pair of kitchen maids departed, sparing warm smiles for her and solemn stares for him, “have I murdered someone recently and forgotten about it?”
Jane, who had a cup of tea raised halfway to her mouth, paused. “If you have, I’m even more concerned for your mental faculties than I am for your eyesight.”
“Jane.”
“Penvale.”
“The staff seem terrified of me.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “You’re being hysterical.”
“Hysterical!They look at me the way—” He broke off abruptly before he could finish that sentence.
“Yes?” she asked in a dangerous tone of voice.
“They look at me the way you do half the time,” he said, throwing caution to the wind.
“And how is that?” she asked, her voice deceptively sweet—a sound that Penvale found rather chilling.
“As though you’d like to push me off the cliff path the next time we’re on a walk together,” he said quite honestly.
“We haven’tgoneon a walk together.”
