Page 80 of To Pleasure a Prince

“Did you not see how the women at Almack’s were flirting with you?”

“Perhaps a few,” he muttered, mollified that she’d noticed. And cared. “But only because I was a curiosity. Given the choice between their handsome suitors and a man with my hideous disfigurement—”

“It isnota hideous disfigurement,” she said fiercely. She ran her fingers along the length of it. “I think it’s rather dashing.”

She was only trying to jolly him out of his bad mood. Oddly enough, it was working. “Dashing. Right.”

Her hand caressed his cheek. “Now that we are married, will you tell me how you came by it?”

“Great God, why would you want to know that?”

“Because I am your wife. I want to knoweverythingabout you.” She straightened on his lap. “If you do not tell me, I shall poke at you with my ruff.”

A reluctant smile touched his lips. “All right. I don’t need any more scars, thank you.”

“You did not get it in a riding accident, did you?” she prodded.

With a sigh, he settled her more comfortably on his lap. “No. You were right at Almack’s—it’s a burn. From a hot poker.”

A frown marred her pretty brow. “There? On your face?”

“The person wielding it didn’t mean to strike me on the face. If it had struck my broad back as intended, it probably would only have singed my coat and stunned me, but I turned as it came down, and it hit me full across the cheek.”

“Oh, my poor darling.” Her face filled with pity. She ran her fingers over his scar as if to erase it with her tender touch. “How you must have suffered.”

Darling. She’d called him “darling.” He should have told her about his damned scar ages ago. “It hurt for a while, yes,” he said gruffly. “But it would have been much worse if not for my precocious sister. The poor mite insisted on dressing it every day with some newfangled remedy she’d read about in theLady’s Magazine. Whatever it was, it helped heal it quickly.”

“Louisa was there?”

“She didn’t see it happen, no, and I never told her the full circumstances. But she was home with me at the time, yes.”

Her eyes narrowed. “This happened at Castlemaine? What horrible person dared to do such a thing to you in your own home?”

“You don’t want to know this.” Shame engulfed him. He shuddered to think what she would make of it.

“I do want to know. I’m your wife. You can tell me anything, darling.”

Darling.There was that wonderful word again. He’d never expected to hear it from any woman’s lips, much less hers. It dissolved all his reluctance to answer. “My mother did it.”

For a moment she just gaped at him. Now she would realize how appalling the family she’d married into was, and regret her hasty act.

But the only expression on her face was outrage. “Your mother? Yourmotherdid this to you? How dare she! I swear, if she were here right now, I’d…I’d…well, I’d do something truly awful to her. Strike her own son with a poker indeed—what was wrong with the woman? Was she deranged?”

Her outrage on his behalf took him aback. “Not exactly. She did it in a fit of temper. She wasn’t thinking rationally.”

“I don’t care.Nothingjustifies a woman’s striking her son with a hot poker.”

He found himself in the unprecedented position of having to defend his mother. “She was stoking up the fire when I told her and Prinny I wanted them gone from Castlemaine, now that I was lord. That so infuriated her that when Prinny protested, and I gave him a piece of my mind, about—” He wasn’t about to go into that, not on his wedding night. “Anyway, she went mad. She came at me with the poker, Prinny called out a warning, I turned, andvoilà.I got this scar.”

“She should have been shot for marring your handsome face,” she said fervently.

Handsome face?His wife thought him handsome? Astonishing. “She got her just reward. Prinny was none too happy about it—or about being thrown off the estate publicly. That was the beginning of the end of their liaison. Why do you think she spread those vile rumors about all the wicked things I’d supposedly done to her, cutting her out of the will and beating her and all that nonsense? She never forgave me for ruining her relationship with Prinny.”

“Shewas the one who ruined it! Why didn’t you tell people that?”

He shuddered. “Tell them that my own mother despised me so much she struck me with a hot poker? I didn’t want anyone hearing that. Besides, she would simply have told them I’d been beating her and she was forced to defend herself, or some other nonsense.”

“But the prince—”