Free Venture Untamed (The Venture Books) by R.H. Russell Page A

feel it under his feet. He placed them under the iron hooks where the servants hung their extra clothes and aprons.
    Around him were shelves of laundry and cleaning supplies and a table for folding and ironing. Inside a stone trough there was the water pump, and on a shelf above, fresh towels and soap—his favorite things to see at the end of a hard, hot day.
    He pulled off his filthy, dripping shirt and scrubbed up, though the soap stung his hands and made him wince nearly to the point of tears. Then he pumped water over his head until it was thoroughly soaked, and toweled off just enough not to drip, so that he didn’t lose all of the cool wetness. He grabbed the clean shirt he’d hung on his hook early that morning and tugged it over his head as he stepped up into the open kitchen doorway. A curtain of stifling heat billowed at him as he entered.
    “Mrs. Bright, have you got any—”
    There was no plump, aproned woman humming over the supper pots. Instead there was Jade, sweating at the fire, a long wooden spoon held up to her lips.
    “Miss.” Venture bowed, and he must have looked quite displeased to see her there, for Jade made an extra effort to seem not to care.
    “Needs more salt, I think.” She tossed some in.  
    Jade kept her eyes on the pots, while he glanced from her to the washroom doorway, his internal debate made obvious by the uncomfortable, indecisive shifting of his feet. Would it be worth foregoing something that smelled absolutely delicious for supper, and settling for bread and cheese at home, just to avoid being stuck in the kitchen alone with Jade?
    She turned to him with one hand on her hip, the other wielding the drippy spoon. “Well, Vent, aren’t you going to sit down?”
    “Um, Miss, where’s Mrs. Bright?”
    “She’ll be back in a minute, I’m sure. She’s teaching me how to make her wine sauce. I think I’ve almost got it, too,” Jade babbled with false cheerfulness, no longer looking at him.
    “Oh. That’s good.”  
    Recently Jade had taken up cooking as a sort of hobby. Under Rose’s supervision, she’d begun taking her turn planning and supervising the meals several times a week, preparing to run her own household one day. Jade, however, wasn’t content to plan and delegate. She couldn’t seem to keep herself from dabbling in the actual work of meal preparation and even clean-up. In the face of Rose’s reprimands, she’d declared openly that she intended to learn to cook. Jade had convinced her father that it would be nice to cook for her husband herself sometimes. Hadn’t her own mother liked to do the same on occasion? But Venture doubted that Jade was in the habit of thinking about what sort of wife she’d like to be. More likely she was bored and lonely and preferred old Mrs. Bright to the girls of Society.
    “You got done earlier than I expected today.”  
    “Bounty’s finishing up for me,” Venture mumbled.
    “Bounty? Chopping wood?”
    “No, no. I wouldn’t give that kid an ax. He’s just bringing it in.”
    She turned to him abruptly, her exasperation breaking through her feigned calm. “For goodness sake, sit down!”
    He sat, and he poured himself a cup of water from the pitcher on the table, and he watched her slender little figure standing nearly on tiptoe to peek over one large black pot into the other behind it. The spoon shook in her trembling fingers. Her shoulders shuddered. He’d made her cry. And that, he just could not take.
    Quietly he rose, picked up a dishtowel, and rested his battered hands on her elbows. “Miss, are you all right?”
    He nudged her gently toward him, but she would not move; she did not stop stirring.
    He looked around the kitchen cautiously. Cupboards with painted sliding doors, shelves, and a large window lined the wall flanking the washroom door. On one end of the kitchen was a door to the pantry, from which the lower level, where store rooms and the quarters of the house servants lay, could also be