Sweet Saturday Samples

If you blink these days the week's gone by before you know it!  And it's time for another Sweet Saturday Sample. :-)
This week I am again taken a snippet from my WIP No Job For a Woman.  I have gone back a ways to scene where deborah's life as she knows it is going to hades in a handcart, and she's none too pleased about it!!
This is the opening to chapter 13.
Thanks to everyone who comes by.  I enjoy your comments and they often give me pause for thought enough to make changes to a scene, so thank you.

‘I owe it to your brother.’ Why did Julian’s stark words add to her ever increasing sense of doom? If he’d known of her childhood feelings for him, at least he never made fun of her for it. And just because he stole her heart, it did not mean he saw her as anything more than Freddie’s pesky little sister, even now, especially now.

“I understand your reasons behind your arguments. They are powerful indeed, but you cannot ask it off me. It is disrespectful. I know many people do not recognize my place as the head of the estate, but my tenants accept me as dear Harold’s successor and they look to me for guidance. It is unquestionable that I would consider deserting them in their time of need. After all, indirectly I am responsible for their problems.”

Julian searched for a cloth and began drying the dishes she washed. “What do you mean ‘their problems’?”

“How can you ask when one of their children has been abducted?”

“Have you alerted the constable?”

Deborah slammed the plate down of the surface so hard it cracked. “I have. He said if we gave her time enough he was sure she’d come home on her own. It would turn out there’d been cross words between her and her parents, he said, and if she hadn’t come back by the end of the week to let him know.”

“I find his disinterest hard to understand.” Julian gathered up the broken plate and disposed of it in the waste bin near the kitchen door.