Page 7 of The Homecoming (The De Montforte Brothers #6)
He rose and pushed back his chair, his breakfast unfinished. “I am going to take that gallop across the downs now,” he said tightly. “Gareth?”
“I’m going to sit right here and hear about the sea monster, but I’ll be out in ten minutes.”
“Suit yourself.”
Charles stalked from the room and left them all.
He moved through the Great Hall, its vaulted stone ceiling rising high above him, his shoes rapping a tattoo across the polished marble floor, the suits of armor in their wall notches staring sightlessly out at him through slitted visors.
He made for the great medieval doors with their banded iron and studded bolts.
Pushed them open and moved purposely down the steps.
In the stable he found Contender, and too impatient to call for a groom, too annoyed at the world to wait around while someone else got busy with a task he was fully able to complete himself, found the saddle and bridle and carried them back to the stall, hanging them over the partition while he curried the horse.
He was so caught up in his anger that he never heard his wife come up behind him until her soft voice cut through the sounds of the brush, briskly flicking the dust from the big chestnut’s gleaming coat.
“Charles.”
He paused, the brush in his hand, and looked at her. She sounded out of breath. Her face was flushed with the effort of walking out here, and her eyes were both sad and condemning. It fueled his peevishness all the more.
He turned away and kept brushing.
“It is not like you to be so rude,” she said quietly. “Why do you despise him so?”
“It is unrealistic to expect a man to get on with every person he meets. There’s always going to be someone you don’t like, someone who rubs you the wrong way, someone you just don’t wish to be around.”
“He never did anything to you.”
“Would that he had, as I’d find it a damned sight easier to feel charitable toward him had it been me he’d done something to, not Nerissa.
” The brush moved faster. “He may be some self-styled naval officer now, but when I was stationed in Boston, he was a pirate. A smuggler, a thief, a wanted man with a price on his head. I know more about him than anyone because I knew what his reputation was, Amy, and it wasn’t a good one.
And you want me to approve of him for my sister?
He, who abducts her, marries her, takes her far away from us, and then shows up here expecting us to treat him like one of the family? ”
“But he is one of the family, whether you like it or not.”
“I dislike it intensely.”
“I think you should give him a chance. Lucien thinks highly of him, Andrew likes him, and even Gareth is in there laughing at the silly sea-monster story.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like him,” Charles bit out, stung that Gareth, too, was falling under the rogue’s spell.
“It’s my birthday. I would like it very much if, for my sake as well as your sister’s, you can at least pretend to be civil.”
“It’ll be pretense, all right.”
Her dark eyes were pleading. “And I hope you can find it in your heart to at least try to make him feel welcome. Soon enough they’ll be going back to America and then how will you feel? You’ll have missed your chance. And maybe next time, they won’t be quite so eager to come back.”
Charles said nothing. He tossed the brush aside, picked up the saddle cloth, spread it briskly over the thoroughbred’s back, and hefted the saddle atop it.
The horse flattened his ears as he tightened the girth, sensing his displeasure, his anger.
The fact that his own wife was sticking up for the blackguard made him feel even more isolated. Outcast.
What was wrong with him?
Why couldn’t he just accept the man? Why was it so hard to even pretend ?
“You married me,” Amy said softly. “I’m certainly not well-bred, I don’t come from a noble family, I’m no higher-born than Captain O’Devir is. And yet you accept me.”
“You think I despise him because he’s Irish? Because he’s not well-born?” He made a noise of despair. “What sort of snob do you take me for, Amy?”
“I know you’re not a snob. You’re called The Beloved One, and that’s because you’ve always been a fair, decent man with a kind heart. I’m just not seeing a whole lot of fairness, Charles. Or kindness. And that’s not like you.”
He said nothing. If he did, he might regret it.
She stood there for a long moment, and he still said nothing, because shame now filled his heart as well as anger.
He turned, picked up the bridle, looped an arm over Contender’s poll and guided the bit into his mouth.
He adjusted the noseband and did up the throatlatch, and when he was finished he turned around, his temper finally under control, to answer his wife.
But in his silence, she had quietly left him.
And Charles, standing there with only his horse, his entire family inside his childhood home laughing, celebrating and happy, felt more alone than he had in as long as he could remember—and blamed Ruaidri O’Devir for that as well.