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“I’ll peel it for you, then. A lady has fingernails suited for the purpose.”
    She set about stripping the peel from the hapless orange as effectively as she was stripping Christian’s nerves, though in truth, she wasn’t gawking, she wasn’t simpering, she wasn’t smiling. The lady had business to transact, and she’d dispatch it as efficiently as she dispatched the peel from the orange.
    And those busy hands were graceful. Christian wanted to watch them work, wanted to watch them be feminine, competent, and pretty, because this too—the simple pleasure of a lady’s hands—had been long denied him.
    He took a sip of his nursery tea, finding it hot, sweet, soothing, and somehow unsatisfying. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to state the reason for your call, Lady Greendale?”
    “We’re not to chat over tea, even? One forgets you’ve spent the last few years among soldiers, Your Grace, but then the officers on leave are usually such gallant fellows.” She focused on the orange, which was half-naked on the plate in her lap. “This is just perfectly ripe, and the scent is divine.”
    The scent was good. Not a scent with any negative associations, not overpowering, not French.
    “You are welcome to share it with me,” he said, sipping his little-boy tea and envying her the speed with which she’d denuded the orange of its peel.
    Peeling an orange was a two-handed undertaking, something he’d had occasion to recall in the past three days. This constant bumping up against his limitations wearied him as Girard’s philosophizing never had. Yes, he was free from Girard’s torture, but everywhere, he was greeted with loss, duress, and decisions.
    “Your orange?” She held out three quarters of a peeled orange to him, no smile, no faintly bemused expression to suggest he’d been woolgathering—again.
    “You know, it really wasn’t very well done of you, Your Grace.” She popped a section of orange into her mouth and chewed busily before going on. “When one has been traveling, one ought to go home first, don’t you think? But you came straight up to Town, and your staff at Severn was concerned for you.”
    Concerned for him. Of what use had this concern been when Girard’s thugs were mutilating his hand? Though to be fair, Girard had been outraged to find his pet prisoner disfigured, and ah, what a pleasure to see Girard dealing with insubordination.
    Though indignation and outrage were also human traits, and thus should have been beyond Girard’s ken.
    “You’re not eating your orange, Your Grace. It’s very good.” She held up a section in her hand, her busy, graceful little lady’s hand. He leaned forward and nipped the orange section from her fingers with his teeth.
    She sat back, for once quiet. She was attractive when she was quiet, her features classic, though her nose missed perfection by a shade of boldness, and her eyebrows were a touch on the dramatic side. A man would notice this woman before he’d notice a merely pretty woman, and—absent torture by the French—he would recall her when the pretty ones had slipped from his memory.
    “Now then, madam. We’ve eaten, we’ve sipped our tea. The weather is delightful. What is your business?”
    “It isn’t my business, really,” she said, regarding not him, not the food, but the fire kept burning in the grate at all hours. “It’s your business, if you can call it business.”
    Something about the way she clasped her hands together in her lap gave her away. She was no more comfortable calling as darkness fell than he was receiving her. She’d barely tasted her orange, and all of her blather had been nerves.
    Lady Greendale was afraid of him.
    Perhaps she’d heard the rumors about the lost duke’s madness; perhaps she hadn’t recalled he’d be a good foot taller than she; perhaps she hadn’t expected the staff to leave them so very much alone.
    In any case, he didn’t like it. Next to hope, fear was the tormentor’s most