Page 10

Not that I wanted to be redeemed. Obviously.

No, it was more than that. Lady Briar obviously thought there was something deeper in what I’d done to my friends. To the money I stole. The lies I’d told.

How could I tell her that it was just…me? Getting bored, wondering whether I could do something, and seeing if I could. It had become hard to stop once I’d realized how little attention my friends were paying me.

It got out of hand, to be sure. But I wasn’t a bad man. Even if the world thought I was.

She was watching me. I didn’t need to look up to feel Lady Briar’s gaze on me. The back of my neck was prickling with the intensity of her gaze.

Here we were, in another one of her drawing rooms. It was hard to believe this whole side of the street in Mayfair belonged to her. Didn’t she see that? Didn’t she realize she could never look at a ledger again for the rest of her life, and she’d still be richer tomorrow than she was today?

I glanced up. Lady Briar was studiously looking at a book.

Oh. Well, fine. She wasn’t looking at me. Good.

I looked back at the ledger, and spotted another two mistakes. Smaller this time, so small they wouldn’t immediately register as errors. But these advisors of hers would have had a field day.

“When did you learn to use ledgers like this?” I muttered.

I could almost hear the heat pouring off her.

“I didn’t—I was never taught how to?—”

“Yes, I thought so,” I said darkly, picking up a pencil to make the lines more coherent. “I'm just going to fiddle with it, you understand?”

Movement. Lady Briar had risen from her sofa and was somehow now on mine. Next to me.

She wasn’t touching me, yet I could still feel her warmth. It exuded from her as her perfume did, subtle yet entirely impossible to ignore.

I swallowed. I wasn’t here for a lay—I was making up for a mistake. Try as I might, I still couldn’t convince myself that I didn’t care that I’d hurt her.

I’d violated her possessions, and now she was making me pay…through ledgers.

What kind of sadist was Lady Briar Weatherford?

“You’re clever,” she said quietly.

I laughed darkly, focusing hard on not glancing over at her, despite the temptation. “That’s what no one tells me.”

“And yet you still stole.”

My breath hitched in my throat. I hadn’t been exaggerating; my friends were excellent at lectures, and I’d received more than my fair share once the truth had come out. One of them over an arbitration meeting, our lawyers sitting awkwardly on either side of the table.

I never wanted to go through anything like that again.

“I told you, you don’t want to know,” I said, as impressively as I could.

Perhaps she would fall for it. Perhaps Lady Briar would believe there was some secret, important reason I couldn’t, wouldn’t tell her the truth.

Not just that I was pathetic. That I craved attention, and the only way I knew how to do that in a club of people who always did the right thing, always made the correct decision, was make the wrong one.

“There,” I said shortly, handing her back the ledger and trying not to think of the way my fingers brushed her skirt. “Sorted.”

The trouble was, now I was turned toward her, I couldn’t help it. I watched as Lady Briar’s eyes flickered across the changes I’d made to her ledger.

Her mouth fell open. “But…but this solves all of it. Even the questions I hadn’t even thought to ask yet.”

Something strange bubbled in my stomach. At first I thought it was an unpleasant feeling, but then I realized it was something much worse.

Pride.

In myself? When had I last felt that?

“It’s just a ledger,” I said awkwardly.

Putting my hands behind my head had felt like a really clever idea at first, but now I just felt like an idiot.

How were you supposed to sit near a woman like this?

One who seemed to draw from me everything I didn’t know about myself.

Who wandered about the world expecting it to be easy, because it always had—yet searched for a challenge?

I almost yelped as Lady Briar leaned into me. Her scent filled my nostrils, my mind, making it impossible to do or say anything. God, how did she?—

“Are you looking?” Lady Briar said, pointing to the ledger. “See here, I can’t quite work out?—”

“Don’t you have people for this?” I said, leaning back against all my instincts.

After all, I wasn’t a total rakehell. It wasn’t my style to press kisses onto a woman’s lips unless it was abundantly clear she would welcome them. And Briar had made it perfectly clear, when I’d pressed her up against that window in that room, that she wanted it. Wanted me.

But not enough to do something about it. And that was enough.

Lady Briar was glaring. “Haven’t you been listening to a single thing I’ve said? I told you, everyone assumes I can’t do this?—”

“Perhaps rightly, looking at your ledgers,” I grinned.

There must be some of the old Markham charm still left in me, because Lady Briar flushed, grinning through her eyelashes.

“Fine, I'm not completely on top of it all yet,” she admitted, her grin turning wry. “But it’s just…I never attended university, did I? I am a woman, it would be considered scandalous. I never even went to school…or had a governess.”

My eyes widened. “You didn’t?”

Damn. I had just about the best education that could be found, and even then I’d spent nearly a decade shaming my name and title. Lady Briar may think I'm a genius, but it was only after making all my mistakes that I could see hers.

And she didn’t even have a governess?

“How did you start this ledger, if?—”

“Oh, I poured through my father’s ledgers after he died,” Lady Briar said with a shrug, as though it were totally normal for heiresses with no problems bigger than which country estate to purchase next to read ledgers. “It’s just—you’re looking at me.”

I swallowed. Had she seen the desire in my eyes? “Of course I'm looking at you, we’re talking.”

Lady Briar shook her head slowly, her curls shaking. “No, I meant…you know. Looking at me. You know.”

I did know. And I was absolutely not going to let her know it.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said aloud.

The trouble was, my traitorous body wasn’t in agreement. Despite all my best intentions—perhaps because of them—the arm I’d left languidly on the back of the sofa dipped, ever so slightly.

My fingertips brushed along her shoulder and sparking heat, sparking need rushed through me. Surely she felt it, surely she?—

“Cut it out, Markham,” said Lady Briar, leaning away from my hand with a scowl. “You know exactly what I meant. Can’t you just focus on what you’re actually here for, for more than a minute?”

Probably. If she hadn’t been in the wrong, it would be easy.

“I told you,” I said automatically. “I'm the duke who risks it all?—”

“I don’t know who told you that, but you should sue,” said Lady Briar with a wry smile. “They got you all wrong and they managed to convince you of it, too. You can’t use it as an excuse any longer. Not with me.”

I stared.

No one had ever said anything like that to me before. It was always harsh words or laughter, exasperated eye rolls or frustrated groans.

And that was just my friends.

Kineallen, Georgiana, and Lilah. They’d always been there for me. The fool of the club, the one who was expected to do nothing and so…did nothing.

Besides, it wasn’t an excuse. Not really. I was the duke who risked it all: never making the right decisions, always upsetting people. Even when I didn’t mean to. There was a sarcastic streak in my soul, that’s what my friend Georgiana always said.

It was true. But there was a harshness in me, I knew. A darkness. One I pushed to the sides as much as possible, but crept out when I wasn’t looking.

Lady Briar was still staring at me, though, so I had to say something. If only my tongue could behave for more than five seconds.

“I…I don’t know,” I said, trying to smile. “Honestly, it’s just a ledger.”

“You don’t value yourself, or your skills,” Lady Briar said vaguely. Her attention had drifted back to the page, and I still wasn’t sure whether I minded. “But then you don’t seem to value much. Privacy. People’s possessions.”

I snorted.

“Your friends,” she said pointedly, glancing over at me.

Now that was very close to a line that should never be crossed. “I won’t hear a word said against my friends.”

“I wasn’t going to give you one,” Lady Briar said airily, crossing out something on the page then snapping the ledger shut. “You’re the one who has disrespected them, not me.”

I opened my mouth in outrage, but my mind managed to stop my tongue before I really embarrassed myself.

Well. She had a point.

“Now, I need you to attend a dinner tomorrow.”

Lady Briar had risen, her gown gathered around her hips. She shook it out, and I tried not to look at how the hem waved in the air. Just aching to be lifted?—

Then my gaze focused and it snapped up to Lady Briar, who was smiling.

“A dinner?”

“A very important one,” she said lightly, slipping the ledger onto a table behind the sofas. “Don’t be late, and please for the love of God, wear something appropriate.”

I glanced down. “What’s wrong with?—”

“My butler will send over the details, and I’ll make sure there’s a note attached about how a cravat should be tied,” Lady Briar said with a teasing smile. “You really are a duke?”

Swallowing hard, I tried not to think about the dwindling numbers in my bank account. “I am.”

“Well dress like it,” Lady Briar said with a grin. “And don’t be late.”