Page 94 of The Duke Who Loved Me (The Duke's Estates 1)

Cecelia cut a bit of cake and offered it to him. His taking of it felt like a kiss on her fingertips.

He licked a trace of icing from his lower lip and said, “Good.”

She was not the sort of woman who would ever swoon, Cecelia told herself. But her surroundings seemed to be swaying more than could be accounted for by the bouncing of the carriage. Was this what people meant when they said their senses were reeling?

“Tea?” James asked. His eyes were laughing.

“I–I don’t care for it without milk.”

“Oh, there is milk. Gunter’s would not let us down.” He showed her a small jar.

“They have thought of everything.”

“Imade them a list,” he replied. “Detailed. Comprehensive. One might even say meticulous.” He raised dark eyebrows.

Cecelia laughed. Lists had been a point of contention between them for years. Cecelia found them critical. James claimed that truly important matters stuck in one’s brain, and anything else deserved to be forgotten. She had called him scatterbrained. He had called her obsessive. “I commend you,” she said, adding a dollop of milk to the cup of tea he had poured for her. She sipped. It was only barely warm, but she would not complain.

He prepared his own cup and drank. “Ugh. It’s gone cold.”

“The thought is what counts.”

“Not with dreadful tea.” He tossed the contents of his cup out the open carriage window and reached for hers.

She pulled it back. “I shall drink it.”

“Nonsense.” He pulled the cup from her and dumped it outside. “You may have more lemonade if you are thirsty.”

“May?”

“You cannot really wish for cold tea, Cecelia.”

She didn’t. But she didn’t care for his dictatorial tone either. She started to tell him so, then stopped. She didn’t want to be always arguing with her…husband. James was her husband! She began placing the uneaten food in the basket. Surely, with time, they would find a way to settle points without contention.

***

They arrived in midafternoon, sweeping through an open gate guarded by rampant stone lions in a long gray wall.

A gravel drive stretched ahead to a large manor house in the distance, but they took a turn into a narrower lane well before reaching it, passed into a thick grove of trees and through another smaller wall into a lovely garden. The scent of flowers followed them around a curve.

“There it is,” said James.

Cecelia leaned out the carriage window and gazed at a round stone tower perhaps thirty feet across. It was three stories high with crenellations at the top.

James got out and handed her down from the carriage. A manservant came out of the tower and took their valises inside. When he returned with an inquiring look, James indicated the basket inside the vehicle. He took that as well. “They are expecting you at the main stables,” James told the coachman. The driver touched his hat brim and drove away.

“What is this place?” asked Cecelia.

“It was a ruin from some centuries ago,” James replied. “My friend’s grandfather had it restored for…his own purposes.”

“Nefarious, I assume?”

“He was apparently rather a loose screw.”

“Is that slang for a libertine?” Cecelia asked.

“Ah, yes. I shouldn’t have…”

She waved his scruples aside. “Oh, I may know these things now that I am a married woman. So your friend keeps it up?”

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