Page 10 of My Darling Mr. Darling

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Through the closed door, Violet thought she heard laughter. That miserable bastard! She resisted the impulse to flick back the curtains shading the window near the door and risk a peek. Of course he was still there—ofcoursehe was.

Hello, Vi?Hello, Vi?No onehadevercalled herVi.

But then, it had been some years since last she had been calledViolet, either. It was a sobering thought, and for a moment, to relieve the trembling of her knees, she pressed her back against the door and drew a few deep, steadying breaths.

“Is aught amiss?” Davis inquired from his position near the drawing room door, where he had lingered. “Should you like me to remove the—er,gentlemanfrom the steps, miss?”

“No,” she said, composing herself. “No, thank you, Davis. I can’t imagine—”

The door shuddered at her back with the force of the brass knocker pounded against it. Mr. Darling’s voice penetrated the heavy wood between them. “I’ve a letter from the Marquess of Granbury.”

Violet ground her teeth together. “I don’t care if you’ve a letter from God himself.Go away.”

Another chuckle, and his voice altered to a goading tenor. “I should hate to see your school close before it opens, but if you cannot comport yourself with civility and grace, then I suppose—”

Fury roiled within her; a seething cauldron of it bubbling over, and her fingers shook with it even as she threw the lock and cracked the door. “You supposewhat?” she asked caustically, fairly vibrating with the force of her ire.

“Miss!” Davis said, and started across the floor of the foyer toward her—but he was too late; Mr. Darling’s hand fell flat against the door and shoved, and Violet stumbled a few paces back. He had only sought to rile her enough to gain the entry she had denied him. How had she let herself be so easily manipulated?

“Don’t!” she cried, throwing up a hand to stop Davis in his tracks. Good Lord—if Davis bodily cast Mr. Darling out into the street in the middle of the day, the gossip would never die. Serena’s school would fail, and it would be on Violet’s head. For all her protestations to the contrary, Serena had endured enough scandal to last a lifetime, and Violet could not allow herself to be the cause of still more. “Don’t, Davis,” she managed at last, gentling her voice. “Please. It would not reflect well upon our school were Mr. Darling to be ejected from it. I will call you if I have need of you.”

A long moment elapsed in which she stared at Davis, Davis stared at Mr. Darling, and Mr. Darling stared at her. A long, exceedingly uncomfortably moment. But at last, Davis straightened himself, gave a haughty sniff, and with a crisp bow, excused himself. And then Violet was alone.

With her husband.

She was strong. The last eight years had proved it. But it had been a very long time since last she had felt so weak as this. She drew on every miserable year she had spent in service, in rising before dawn and retiring after midnight—on the scars and burns she had acquired, on every soft piece of her that had been sliced away by time and circumstances. She cast her shoulders back, ignored the loose curl that bobbed over her brow, and turned an icy gaze on the man whom she had married.

The last time she had seen him, it had been mere weeks ago and only in passing, but it had still been enough to curdle her blood in her veins. Every bit of her had recoiled at the very sight of him, as if she had been thrust back in time—to a cold night in October, when she had been just seventeen, her bloodless hand clasped in that of an indifferent stranger’s. To a colder morning when she had been shuffled into a carriage before dawn had even bloomed on the horizon, and shunted away from her home, straight into Hell.

To a young girl struggling to navigate a difficult time, he had seemed like a demon, like a villain from a Gothic novel bent on torturing poor, innocent souls. But to the woman who had forged her own way in an uncaring world, he was just a man.

Only a man.

She had remembered him as a towering, looming tyrant, but in fact Davis dwarfed him by several inches—though, of course, Davis dwarfedeveryone. The calculating cruelty she had expected to find in his face was absent; he only surveyed her with something approaching curiosity. His sandy brown hair was neatly trimmed and combed, his face shaven cleanly, his cravat knotted perfectly. He was dressed well, but not ostentatiously. He held his hat in one hand and a folded sheet of paper he’d scrounged from his pocket in the other. If he had been a stranger on the street, she would not have given him a second glance. Her terror of some weeks past had been only an instinctive reaction, a lingering remnant of the frightened seventeen-year-old girl she had once been. But she was not that girl any longer, and while she might have hoped this day would never come, now that it had she found that the fear she had expected to find hiding beneath her initial fury was…absent.

Justa man.Onlya man.

And Violet had learned well enough how to deal with men.

She lifted her chin, extended one finger toward the door in imperious command, and said, “Leave.”

The left corner of his lips twitched. A flicker of amusement danced in his dark eyes. “Now, is that any way to speak to a student?”

“Awhat?”

He blinked, as if her shrill outburst had taken him aback. “Are you hard of hearing?” He dangled the slip of paper before her nose. “You’ll find everything is in order.”

Everythingwas most certainlynotin order; not if John Darling was darkening her doorway. And her foyer. She snatched the letter from his hand, sliding a finger beneath the wax seal to break it.

Her eyes scanned the page, fingers curling with renewed fury with each word she read.A letter of introduction, his most noble lordship wrote,for a close friend who has found himself in need of instruction in gentlemanly deportment before the Season begins anew.

What rubbish. “Is this a joke?” she bit off, crumpling the note in her fist.

“Not at all.” Mr. Darling shoved one hand into his pocket, affecting an indolent pose that would have made the instructors at Mrs. Selkirk’s fly into a frothing rage at his terrible posture.

Violet suppressed a shudder and drove the unpleasant thought from her mind.