Page 35 of The Lady is Trouble
“Your father”—she paused, twisting her skirt in her fist—“somehow, somehow you’ve been able to forgive him.”
His heart stuttered, the pencil falling still in his hand. If he could relieve her of the misery of having a parent who cared more for himself and had shown this deficiency quite cheerfully, he would. “Forgive is not the word I’d choose to describe how I handled ending my relationship with him.”
“My anger has driven too many choices.” She tapped her teacup on the table. “I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want him, and how little he cared for me, to matter. To shape one more step I make.”
With a sense of hopelessness, he dove back into the sketch. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he touched her now, offered solace that would turn to something else. “A dart thrown at a dead man’s portrait, I suppose, but I hate him for what he did to you. Or what hedidn’tdo. Failed at the only significant task of his life.” He tapped the pencil against his chest without looking up. Her gaze would be too open, too tempting. And his too hungry. “My father loathed the sight of me. Or rather, he was terrified.” He shrugged, then swore as his stitches yanked. “I didn’t know at such a young age not to trust him.”
“Do you remember the Marston Ball? The first, that…my season. After my father’s passing?” He heard her cup settle on the saucer, leather squeak as she shifted.
He edged a line, used the tip of his finger to shade. He needed to keep his hands occupied with this discussion pelting him like rocks, bruising his soul. He recalled more than she imagined. “Yes.”
“A rainbow hit me when I entered that ballroom…” Her words died, and he wondered if she was chewing on her thumbnail as he’d seen her do of late. Another effort drawing his gaze to her mouth was not needed. “I wasn’t a good reader of auras then, not yet. And I understood no specifics of these people’s lives, or very little, which helps me pack them away in a valise of sorts. Everyone parroting each other, looking the same on the outside but strikingly different in my eyes. Violent slashes of red. Yellow, pure, and golden. Black.” Her foot dropped into his range of vision, the toes slim and lovely, his gaze focusing on the delicate arch he’d tried all morning to put on paper.
What would it feel like to start kissing there and not stop until I hit her mouth?
“It was disconcerting, jarring. I felt like I knew things they didn’t,” she added.
“And…” He darted a glance at her, arousal beginning to gnaw at his restraint, when she likely had no plan to send him into a fever pitch.
“I couldn’t be there.” She wrenched forward, her bottom nearly sliding off the sofa. “Ican’tbe there.”
“You don’t have to be there. You never have to be there. I’ve made sure you and Finn are beholden to no one. I can’t protect you from society’s censure, but I can protect you from being destitute.”
“But when you marry I—”
“Thatisn’tgoing to happen, Yank.” He stared at his sketch, wondering what he’d done to deserve this conversation. “We’ve discussed this. Many times over the years.”
She was silent, but he felt her gathering courage. His strokes gained in speed and intensity, preparing for the onslaught.
“Does Marianne Coswell visit you here?”
The pencil tilted in his hand, an unplanned contour going wide. “And this is your business, why?”
Her teacup clinked when he guessed she’d finished what he’d poured long ago. Feeling like a boy entering a headmaster’s chamber after wreaking havoc, he found her hands joined tensely in her lap, fingers linked. And the look on her face…
She wasn’t going to quit until he answered.
“Never here,” he said on an irritated gust.
“But—”
“Harbingdon is my life, Piper. London is my duty.”
“Well, your dutiful mistress mentioned you.” She pressed back against the sofa, her throat pulling on a deliberate swallow. “At the reading.”
“Brilliant,” he whispered and raked his hand through his hair. He threw the pencil aside.Fine. Let her bludgeon him with his errant behavior. Beat him about the head and face with it. Just bloody fine.
“She said if you married, she would not deem to be your piece on the side. I believe that was how she phrased it.” Piper rested her chin on her hand with a challenging look, sleek brow rising so faultlessly he bet she’d practiced in the mirror until she got the move just right. “And the ton calls me vulgar. She asked me to ‘see’ if you were wedded. In the future, that is.” Her lovely mouth twisted in contempt, those magnificent eyes doing a languid roll to the ceiling. “If you had the chance to look into your future, gaintrueanswers about life, would you waste it on that absurdity?”
Julian denied the urge to squirm as she gazed at him in expectation of what he had no clue, his temper starting to spit from being chastised over what was an entirely ordinary state of affairs for a man of his station. Guilt was not an appropriate emotion, even if guilt nipped at his heels. Thus, he took the familiar path like men the world over. “It means nothing.”
“Means?”
“Enough!” He threw the sketchpad aside and rose to his feet. “You wish me to speak to you as I do Humphrey and that isn’t going to happen.” He crossed to an unfinished painting of the village green he was completing for the owner of the Blowing Stone Inn. He would, of course, funnel the proceeds back into the village. The main road needed assistance, and soon.
It gave him a sadistic thrill to imagine his father’s reaction to the ninthViscount Beauchamp selling a piece of art he’d created. An unflinching blow to the face, he knew without searching hard. Julian frowned and touched the painting. He had gone too dark in his interpretation of the sarsen stone in the green. Without looking at her, he grabbed a detail brush from the rusted can holding them, uncapped a tube, and set paint to bristle. “I’d have to have a stronger attachment for anyone to be anything”—leaning in, he lightened the stone with the most minute strokes—“on the side. Also, I’m careful not to transfer my gift to another generation.”
He’d made that vow to himself years ago, and he damn well meant to keep it.