The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Four: A Crack in the Armor

The wedding was a fortnight away when Aniya found James in the estate’s small library, well past midnight, surrounded by ledgers he clearly had no business still working through at that hour. She’d come down for a book of her own, unable to sleep in a house that wasn’t yet hers but soon would be, and she nearly retreated at the sight of him — except that he looked, for once, entirely unguarded. No composure to maintain, no audience to perform for. Just a man with ink-stained fingers and shadows under his eyes, doing sums that clearly weren’t coming out the way he needed them to.

She asked, before she could think better of it, what was wrong. He waved the question off at first, the way she’d noticed men of his class tended to when caught looking less than in command of things. She didn’t leave. She crossed the room instead, uninvited, and looked over his shoulder at the columns of figures until he finally admitted it: the roof repairs on the east wing were going to cost more than the contract accounted for, and he hadn’t yet worked out how to tell her father without it looking as though he intended to ask for more before the ink on their agreement had even dried.

She sat down across from him without being asked, pulled the ledger toward herself, and started checking his arithmetic — not out of doubt in his competence, she said, when he bristled slightly at that, but because a second set of eyes on numbers this late at night rarely hurt. He watched her work in silence for a while, something in his expression she couldn’t quite name.

When she finally looked up, he asked her — quietly, none of the usual sharpness in it — why she was helping him at all. She hadn’t needed to come down. She certainly hadn’t needed to sit here past midnight doing sums that weren’t her responsibility yet.

She considered the question honestly before answering. She told him that she’d spent her whole life being underestimated by men who assumed a woman’s mind was ornamental, and that doing nothing while a problem sat in front of her, solvable, had never once been in her nature — regardless of whose problem it technically was. It wasn’t really about him, she said. And then, after a pause she hadn’t quite planned, she admitted that perhaps it was a little about him. Just a little.

It was the closest either of them had come to saying something true and undefended since the drawing room in London. James didn’t push for more than that — some instinct told him the moment would close if he reached for it too quickly — but something eased in his chest all the same, a tension he hadn’t fully realized he’d been carrying since his father’s funeral.

He told her, in exchange, something he hadn’t said aloud to anyone. That he was afraid — not of the debt, not exactly, but of becoming his father: a man so consumed by keeping up appearances that he’d mortgaged away his children’s future rather than admit, even once, that he was drowning. James had watched that pride cost his family everything. He didn’t know, some nights, whether he was managing Wentmoor any better, or simply drowning more quietly.

Aniya didn’t offer him easy comfort, which he found he was grateful for. She only said that a man afraid of repeating his father’s mistakes was already doing something his father never had — looking at them honestly. That alone, she said, was not nothing.

They worked through the ledgers together another hour after that, the silence between them companionable in a way neither of them commented on, and when she finally rose to return to her room, she paused at the door and told him, without any of her usual edge, that he wasn’t at all what she’d expected, the day she’d walked into that drawing room and looked him over like livestock.

He asked what she’d expected. Someone easier to dislike, she admitted — and then she was gone before he could decide whether that had been an insult or something else entirely.

He decided, lying awake long after, that it had been something else entirely. He wasn’t yet sure what to do with that knowledge, only that it had lodged itself somewhere he couldn’t easily dig it back out from.

For her part, Aniya lay awake in the unfamiliar guest room turning over the same realization from the opposite direction, and arrived at a conclusion that unsettled her far more than she wanted to admit: she was beginning, against every intention she’d walked into this arrangement with, to actually like him.

That, she thought, was going to complicate things considerably.