Moonlight filtered through the crack in the curtains, bringing Alastair’s half-written letter to his brother into stark clarity:
My behavior was abominable. I would put it down to madness, but that smacks too much of excuses. I would offer my most abject apology, but that would imply that your forgiveness is possible. Believe me, though, when I say that I wish all the happiness in the world to you and your wife. And if I could undo only one thing, it would be my
Alastair laid down the pen. He could not write a lie. If he could undo only one thing, it would not be his behavior toward Michael. The memory shamed him deeply, but the whole episode, his insistence that Michael marry to his choosing, and Michael’s enraged rebellion—all of it seemed only a piece of the larger nightmare.
If he could undo anything, it would be his marriage.
Why had he wanted Margaret? Had he really imagined ambition would bind them? He had wanted a beautiful hostess of impeccable breeding on his arm. She had wanted a salve for her wounded pride. But while they had dreamed together of the empire they might build, they had never dreamed of each other.
I never would have married you. So she had told him shortly after their first anniversary. Had you told me the whole of it, I never would have accepted you. And you knew it.
He had imagined that she would overcome her anger. She would come to see that he hadn’t deceived her, not really. He would make a far better husband than Fellowes could have done. She would realize this in time.
And in time, she had seemed to forgive him. He’d considered the matter finished.
Obviously she had not.
He walked to the window and pulled open the curtains. What had his housekeeper once told him? If the atmosphere was gloomy, one’s mood followed suit. Very true. But on this night a harvest moon, low and golden, gilded Mayfair’s rooftops, lulling him.
He remembered a similar moon. A spring night at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and himself drunk on a narrow victory in the Commons, a margin of fourteen votes. His father had still lived, then. He himself had been a mere MP, the entire future before him. He’d sprinted up the cramped stairs to the gallery high above, so high that the air was colder, the wind scouring. London sprawled beneath his feet, the ancient river and manicured squares, the dark maws of the parks, the distant slums lit by scattered fires.
He had never liked heights, but that night, he’d not been dizzy. The city had seemed like a private omen, a sacred charge upon him. He would protect and serve this place. He would spend his life striving to improve it. Here was his calling.
He wanted that back. All of it. His youth, the ferocity of his convictions. A time before all the mistakes. Somewhere out there tonight his brother lay sleeping, a stranger to him. Could that be undone? In one of their last conversations, Michael had accused him of giving up, of letting Margaret win. But he’d not spoken in anger. He’d seemed only . . . astonished.
It was true, Alastair supposed, that he had never been the weak one. From his earliest memories, his role had been to protect. You are the heir. Again and again, this message had been driven into him. Protect the family; do honor to your name. Even at a young age, he had taken his duty very seriously. Too seriously, perhaps, for a child. To see others suffer had caused him the sharpest anxiety—the sense of having failed, somehow, to prevent it.
Chicks fallen from nests. Cats trapped in trees. The village idiot in Hasborotown, where his family had wintered. The local children had liked to pelt the man with stones. At eight, Alastair had taken them on, and won a blackened eye and chipped tooth before Nurse and Coachman had intervened.
At home, this protective urge had proved all the fiercer. What had he been to Michael? Never merely a brother. How much simpler that would have been. Perhaps had they only been brothers, Michael would have found it in his heart to forgive Alastair for the madness of last spring. Brothers quarreled—and then they forgave each other. That was the natural way of it.
But Michael had never viewed him with the casual regard of a sibling. How could he? Alastair’s earliest memory was of Michael’s head tucked into the lee of his arm, Michael’s tears soaking his shirtfront. It had never been their mother to whom Michael ran for comfort—even if he spoke of her now as though she’d been a saint. She had been too busy waging combat against their father to coddle her sons.
No wonder Michael loathed him. To be failed by a brother was one thing. To be failed by one whom you counted a hero—well, that was a bitter thing indeed.
Almost as bitter as being failed by yourself.
He knew he would not be able to sleep now. The view could no longer soothe him. He left his room, walking swiftly down the stairs, past the snoring night porter, for the distractions of the library.
Inside, a single lamp was burning. Its dim light illuminated—he felt a strong premonition, a sense of inevitability—his housekeeper curled up on the sofa, a billowing white dressing gown bunched over her feet. As she pored over a book, she tickled her mouth with the ends of her long red plait.
He stood there a moment, gripped by conflicting urges. A housekeeper should not be making use of her master’s library. She should not wander barefooted in her nightclothes. She should not look so young, so untouched, so solid despite her slimness, so composed despite her undress.
He had invited this temerity, of course. Hell, he had hoped for it. If he could have stolen her self-sufficiency, her fierce sense of direction, by laying his hands on her, he would have done it in a moment. He had never felt more of an ass than when viewing himself through her eyes—the eyes of a woman who had been turned out upon the world at the tender age of seventeen, and had made do.
Was he really less courageous than a would-be maid?
“Good evening,” he said.
She flinched violently, then snapped the book shut and yanked her gown over her toes. “Goodness,” she said. “I didn’t think . . .”
When she rose, the light was strong enough, or the robe thin enough, or his appetites imaginative enough, to discern the contours of her body: the slimness of her waist; the curve of her hips; the fecund thickness of her thighs, which tapered neatly into square knees and rounded calves.
He did not admire her simply for her courage.
She took a step toward him—or rather, toward the door. She intended to leave. She felt the way his gaze devoured her. She knew where his interests lay.
He should let her go. But she had started this, somehow. Until she had opened the curtains and disrupted his solitude, he had been content to stay lost. Did he blame her for it? Or was this anger a product of indebtedness? He had never wanted to owe anyone anything. “What are you doing here?” he said.
She came to a stop just out of reach. Very wise. She had called herself tall, as though it was a mere matter of height, rather than abundance. So many more inches to her, so much more skin, white, smooth. He’d learned Margaret too easily, and never learned her at all. He would not make that mistake again. The next time, he would not leave the bed until he had mastered the woman in it. He would learn that trick, no matter how much study it took.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Her voice sounded strange, unusually rough.
He reached for the light. For months, he had lacked any clear sense of his own motives. But clarity was coming back to him, bit by bit. If he decided to keep the lights low now, it was simply to blur this scene, and what he intended to do here.
The dim, rising glow showed tears on her face.
He felt disoriented, as though the room had swum around him. Crying? Why? “Are you well?”
She dashed her wrist across her eyes, a furtive and embarrassed gesture. “Yes. Of course. Forgive me—I shouldn’t have come in here.” She glanced beyond him. By the way she shifted her weight, he knew that she was contemplating a dash for the door.
He should let her go. He did not like the sight of her upset. It squared with nothing he knew of her. But her distress should not concern him. He would let her go.
“Take a seat,” he said instead.
She obeyed with obvious reluctance, choosing the wing chair nearest the door. He picked up the book she’d abandoned on the sofa. The Tale of the Midnight Voyager, he read from the spine.
She grimaced. “A piece of rubbish. It—” And then she appeared to recall whose library this was, and reddened.
“Would you like another?” He browsed the shelf. Augustine seemed too weighty, though the saint’s prayer held a sudden interest for him: Grant me chastity, O God, but not yet. “Austen, perhaps?” Always a favorite with the ladies.
Her reply was hesitant. “Oh, I . . . didn’t see her books there. Yes, please.”
He pulled out two titles and offered her the choice. She took Pride and Prejudice and then sat staring at the cover, an air of bewilderment about her, as if she did not know what to do with it.
He carried the other volume to the sofa, opening it pointedly. “Do read, Mrs. Johnson,” he said.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her . . .
At last, he heard the whisper of a turned page. Leather creaked as she settled into the chair.
He eased back against his own cushions. It was a forgotten luxury to share the silence with someone. He could hear, if he listened for it, the soft rhythm of her breathing. The small noises, the whisper of cotton, as she shifted again.
“You’re really going to read Northanger Abbey?”
He glanced up, found her gawking. “That surprises you?”
She went pink. “No, of course not.” Then she shut her book and rose. The flutter of her robe provided a brief glimpse of her ankles, sufficient to burn them into his mind completely. They looked all the better without stockings: trim, pale as snow. “If I may borrow this—”
“Or you may read it here,” he said. “Unless you fear an impropriety.”
She bit her lip. Looked between chair and door. “Should I fear it?”
He smiled. A fair question, but her boldness never failed to surprise him. “Not tonight.” Not when she’d been crying.
Hesitantly she sat again. He did not miss the way she ran a quick, furtive hand over her hem, to make sure no hint of ankle remained visible. What a pity. If one must have a young housekeeper, let her be reckless with her hemlines.
“I suppose Miss Austen is not typical masculine fare,” he said. “I’ll confess I probably would have chosen a different book for manlier company. Something in Latin.”
She fought against her smile and lost. “How fortunate for you that I’m not manly.”
“My thought precisely.”
Her smile faded. She looked down to her book.
He had an inkling of his own villainy then—a flash, as from the headlamp of a passing train, briefly illuminating his motives. Her tears did not matter, after all.
Where was the regret, the revulsion, which that thought should inspire? He could not locate it. She sat not five feet away, her flush creeping steadily down her throat, soon to stain the smooth wings of her collarbones. The robe bared tantalizing inches of her throat and chest that wool normally disguised, alabaster, so pale that he could see the delicate tracery of veins that surely must slip farther down, beneath the neckline of her robe, all the way to her breast. To her nipples. God, but he would taste them.
She cleared her throat. “What do you like about her novels?” Her question sounded stiff, full of forced courtesy. She had noticed his stare, and meant to draw his attention back to more proper pursuits.
“The world she paints.” He watched her thumb fret with a corner of her book, rubbing back and forth over the sharp point. He had no inkling what troubled her. It disturbed him. He had the outlines of her, and a sense of her inner mettle. But the details? Her childhood. Her origins. These large gaps in his knowledge suddenly felt wrong, strange, demanding of redress.
“What do you mean, the world?” she asked.
“The portraits of families. How well she paints them.”
Her thumb fell still. “They’re quite quarrelsome, on the whole.”
“Yes.” That was exactly what he liked about them. “Messy, sprawling, imperfect. But they love each other regardless.” He felt briefly surprised by himself, by this sentimental claptrap he was spouting. But she was watching him expectantly, so he shrugged and went on. “Even the loathsome sorts, like”—he nodded toward the book in her lap—“what is her name? The insufferable one, who runs off.”
“Lydia.”
“Lydia,” he agreed. His housekeeper’s half smile put him in mind of a Greek icon—a Sybil, perhaps. He could see her dispensing wisdom from some sacred cave, her long, pale face a light in the darkness, her round, deep eyes bracing a man for solemn predictions. Her hair was the color of copper, sacred metal; men would have made amulets from it in ancient times.
Bizarre, fanciful thought. Frowning at himself, he turned back to his book.
She spoke, hushed and hesitant. “I longed for such a family as a girl.”
He stared at the page. Late nights, sleepless nights, made some conversations too easy to have, and some thoughts too easy to entertain. But he did not want her friendship. He should not want her confidences.
Yet he replied. “As did I.” His family’s unhappy history was hardly a secret. “A larger family, perhaps. Or a warmer one.” Growing up in an echoing house where his parents rarely exchanged two civil words, he had recognized nothing of Austen’s domestic scenes. But even as a child, he’d felt them far superior to his own experience.
Her chair creaked. “It was siblings I wanted. I think it would have made a difference.”
“I have a brother. But a larger family . . .” He hesitated. Imagine it: he not the eldest, not the heir. Someone else to rely upon. “I would have liked that.”
“Perhaps you will create one. Have a dozen children of your own.”
“No.” The denial was hard and instinctive. Children would require marriage. Marriage would require that he trust his own judgment, which had been exposed as profoundly and irreparably corrupt. Never again. It was Michael’s job now to carry on the family line. He looked at her. “I will have no children.”
“Oh.” She turned the book around in her hands, a nervous fiddling gesture. “Well. Nor will I, I expect.”
What nonsense was this? “You’re still very young, Mrs. . . .” She was no missus, of course. “What is your Christian name?” The reference must have mentioned it, but he could not recall.
She blinked at him. “Olivia.”
It had a musical ring. A slight bite on the V. A name that encouraged one to take one’s lip in one’s teeth. Olivia. It suited her perfectly.
“Olivia,” he said. “Why should you think you won’t have a family?”
She met his eyes. “First I must have a home.”
For a brief, clear moment, he felt the stirring of his old skill, the ability to look at an opponent and divine his secret ambitions. Here was hers: a place of her own.
Or perhaps he recognized it because it had once been his ambition, as well. Oh, he’d known he would inherit houses to spare; but what he’d wanted was a place, distinct from his family’s legacy, wholly his own.
He did not think she meant a house, either. Otherwise, would not a girl such as this—clever, bold, enterprising—have found a husband for herself, in whatever bucolic little village had spawned her?
“Where are you from?” He had asked her that before. But now, in this strange hush, he knew he would have the answer.
It gladdened him to a strange degree that she did not hesitate before replying. “East Kent. My mother’s family lives on the coast, in a village called Shepwich, near Broadstairs.”
“A beautiful part of England.” He could envision her walking the seashore, the salt breeze lifting strands of her hair, her skin opalescent in the cool gray light. “Is that where you dream of your home?”
Her lashes dropped, veiling her eyes. She ran a finger down the page of her book. “I don’t know that I dream of a specific place.”
He’d been right. “What, then?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I want somewhere to . . . belong. To feel safe,” she said softly.
He considered her. It made sense that a girl forced to do for herself would long for stability, rootedness. Why had she not taken the quickest route to it? “Many women leave service for marriage.”
She looked up, meeting his eyes. “And many men remarry. What of it?”
He sucked in a breath. “Well. That was bold of you.” Why was he surprised?
Color came into her face. “It’s half past three. I am sitting in dishabille with my employer. Etiquette does not address such situations.”
“Touché. Let me be equally blunt. You were weeping before. Why?”
Her jaw assumed a granite cast. “Surely a servant must be allowed some degree of privacy.”
He snorted. “I have never noticed you nursing a high regard for that concept. Indeed, given that I found you in my private library, our definitions of it seem to differ.”
Her brows flew up. “Given that you rarely leave your rooms, I could not have foreseen that I might interrupt you here!”
He rose, powered by a welter of emotions—chief among them amazement. “I think marriage might be the best thing for you. God knows you aren’t cut out for service. Had you been born a man, I would have recommended you to the bar.”
She gave him a look rife with disbelief, one that required no verbal translation: now he would judge her? “Your Grace—”
“Did one of the staff molest you? Is something awry below?”
She came to her feet. “I am well able to manage the staff. Nor would I weep over such passing trifles as disobedience from a servant!”
“Then what—”
“I will tell you if you answer me one question,” she said flatly.
It was no longer clear to him who was in control of this conversation. How absurd. He was not bound by her terms; in return for her answer, she could demand the moon, and it would make no difference to him. “Very well, then, answer me: why were you crying?”
“Because I am not the person I hoped to be. And I dislike myself for it.”
That told him nothing. “What do you mean? Who had you hoped to be?”
“Someone better. Someone who abided by her ideals.”
Christ. Blackly amused, he turned away from her toward the bookshelves. “Then we both were drawn here by the same mood. But I assure you, Mrs. Johnson, you will overcome your disappointment.”
“As you have?”
He ignored that. “Good night to you.”
“You haven’t yet answered my question.”
“Welshing,” he said coldly, “is the duke’s special privilege.”
“Very well, don’t answer. But I will ask it anyway: why do you read Austen if you lack all hope for yourself? Why torment yourself with happy endings if you don’t believe one is possible?”
He stared at the books. This had gone too far. Why did she think she had the right to speak to him in this manner?
Why did he constantly invite it?
“You have every advantage.” Her voice was fervent. “There is no reason you can’t go back into the world, have everything you feel you’ve been denied. I tell you—if I had your advantages, I would remake myself!”
The taunt in her voice speared him like a hook into his chest. Yes, she probably goddamned well would remake herself. She had no notions of respect, of boundaries, of her own place. She had no idea of limitations. He looked over his shoulder to sneer, to deliver her the acidic set-down she so badly needed.
But the sight of her robbed him of words. She stood with the novel hugged to her chest, a tall, long-waisted girl with coloring like the autumn, hair as red as turning leaves, and there was no taunt in her face. Her expression, rather, was pale, resolute, hopeful. Daring him to be as brave as she was. She was constantly daring him, as though it were not the most galling, impudent, presumptuous business—
“Can you imagine,” he said, and did not recognize his own voice, the animal viciousness in it. “Is it possible you have lived long enough, hard enough, to guess—that I would devour you in a bite, I would use you, discard you, if it meant I could experience, for a single moment, that idiotic naïveté in your face? A fool’s bliss: that is what it is, Olivia. And life will break you of it. And I would break you of it, right here, if I could have it back for myself, for only a moment, God help me. Your stupid faith in something better.”
Her lips parted. He had shocked her. Good. She believed in happy endings. She thought fairy tales had some connection to reality. He wanted to do more than shock her.
He realized he’d stepped toward her when she leapt back. He made himself halt. Fisted his hands at his sides. This leaping, flaming need that wracked him so suddenly was not lust: it was far darker, a more ravaging consumption. His nails bit into his palms.
But hope was a drug, was it not? And yes, he was a fiend in withdrawal. No drug would ever feel more exotic to him, or cause him to shake harder for the want of it, than hope. What a false and desperate appetite. Else why would the poor squander their coin on lotteries, and rally to the rumors of tears appearing on the cheeks of wooden idols? How did they profit from such delusions?
But if he tasted her, he might have a moment’s fix. He might.
“A good thing Jones is seeking out a replacement.” His voice came out as a growl. He did not believe in fairy tales. He was not going to ravish this naïf. To hell with her. “You will not find a happy ending in this house, I promise you.”
“Nor will you,” she breathed.
“You are baiting the wrong man, little girl.”
“Will you never go out again?”
He lunged at her. She remained stock-still, staring up at him, wide-eyed, unflinching. It infuriated him. “Do you fancy yourself a do-gooder?” The words tore from him in venomous chunks. “Have you conceived, somehow, that you might help me?”
“No,” she whispered. “Or—I don’t know; I only mean to say that you—”
“You are my servant. You do understand that, Mrs. Johnson? It is possible I will not give you a reference. You are insolent and unmindful of your station; in good conscience, I could not recommend you.”
Her expression darkened. He wondered why he had wanted so much to put a shadow in it. The look did not suit her better than hope.
“That is unfair,” she said flatly. “And you are not an unfair man.”
“Am I not?” His laughter burned his throat. “Are you really such a fool?”
“No. I am not.” Her shoulders squared. God damn her, she was rallying; that bloody light was entering her face again. “Even at your darkest, you did nobody evil. And at your best, the good you did the poor, the—the authority with which you guided your party, and the nation no less, through troubled times—and the noble example of your statecraft—you could have all that again, and I don’t understand—”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. Slammed his mouth onto hers. He drank her gasp of surprise and bit her soft lower lip, though some shred of sanity kept him from drawing blood. He wanted her to squeak, and she did.
She tried to break free. His grip on her arms tightened; he was hurting her, yes. Here is reality. No sugarcoating it, no romanticizing it: there is no one to protect you. He licked into her mouth and tasted her tongue. She had recently drunk tea, sugared, and she smelled like roses, always roses—
Her fingers threaded through his hair. Her lips, her mouth, moved beneath his. She was . . . kissing him back.
Had she caught fire, he could not have been more bewildered. He did not deserve this kiss. His grip went slack.
She stepped into him. The tight, hot grasp of her hands fell from his hair to his nape, to the breadth of his shoulders. She kissed clumsily, with the same blunt, aggravating enthusiasm, the same desperate fumbling hope, that he had wanted to punish with this lesson: this lesson in disappointment.
But this did not feel like disappointment. She was warm and impossibly, miraculously tall. The angles and swells of her body matched perfectly to his, her breasts crushing into his chest, her waist—his baffled hand fell there—sweetly curved. She smelled like the garden in summer; she kissed his neck and her hair came into his nose, flowers and greenery, fresh and young.
He took her by the waist and slammed her into the bookshelves. “Fine,” he snarled into her mouth. “Take it, then.” He was so good? “Then take it.”
“Yes,” she whispered back.
Yes? He understood nothing of her. He was furious with her, at how she would let herself be used, and by what kind of man. He shoved his hand into her hair, his fingers ripping through her plait, and yanked her head back to expose the tender length of her throat. She let him do it. She was an idiot to let him do it; to let him rake his teeth down this vulnerable stretch of skin.
She shuddered against him. She moaned.
He reached down, grabbed the thin lawn of her robe, hauled it up. Her calf was hot, impossibly soft; he massaged the muscle there, sliding his palm up to the tender space behind her knee, damp, secret; and then to the curve of her inner thigh, pliant, giving, a sweet surrender. She squirmed against him. Resistance? “Too late,” he growled.
Ah, God, she yielded; her thigh sagged in compliance, then hitched higher, brushing over his hip. He grabbed her ankle, set her bare foot on his thigh, and cupped her quim in his palm, pressing firmly.
She cried out. “Yes,” he said through his teeth. He could feel the plumpness of her lips through her drawers, the dampness of her. The sensation made it feel difficult to breathe; he groped for the slit in the undergarment and then hissed out a breath when he found the heart of her, slippery, her lips so easily parted.
She turned her face into his throat, and he gripped her head to hold her there as he laid his finger atop the throbbing bud at the top of her vulva. He pressed, rotated, and she stiffened, throwing her head back hard against the spines of books.
He met her eyes, his thumb still pressing, teasing that place at the apex of her quim. Her hair was coming down, a wild fiery halo around her pale, pale face. Her lips parted, trembling; he leaned forward and licked them. “Am I still a good man?”
Her mouth formed a single syllable. She tried twice to speak it. “Yes,” she whispered.
“No.” Did she not learn? He felt for her opening, eased a single finger inside her, biting back an animal sound as she closed around him, as a sob ripped from her, breathy, nearly a moan. She was tight; she tightened further as he probed more deeply. She put the back of her hand to her mouth. “Do you feel me?” he asked.
Wide-eyed she stared at him over her palm.
“Say it.” He meant to speak sharply, but his voice was slowing, growing languorous. God, the feel of her . . . “Do you know what I want with this part of you?” He made himself use the filthiest word. “Your cunt. Do you know what I wish to do with your cunt?”
She swallowed. “I . . .”
“I want to fuck you,” he said. “With my cock—and all my fingers, and my tongue. Go deep inside you, every inch of you, Olivia. I want to use you up. I will make you scream, and beg me to stop, and then I will bend you over and fuck you again. This is where hope leads you: do you understand? It leads you to ruin, and I will enjoy it. I will ruin you for pleasure, and I will make you come for me, and hate yourself in the end for doing so.”
She took a ragged breath. “I—you are not—you want to be so much worse than you are!”
“Worse?” He fluttered his thumb over her clitoris, and she gasped. “Watch me,” he said. He dropped to his knees, and gripped her hips as she began to slump; he pinned her in place against the bookcase as he lifted her hem, parted her folds to expose her, and laid his tongue to her. He licked her in full.
The taste of her . . .
She cried out. Dimly, he heard it. But suddenly, he was only here, in the darkness, caught in his own trap, drunk all at once on the taste of her. She tasted like . . . the ocean, everything female; fecundity, life, creation; salt and copper, he thought his cock would burst. The dam broke and his hunger roared up through him, taking possession. He forgot his aim, forgot everything but this need, only this: to taste her more deeply, to paint his tongue and his lips with the scent of her.
He sucked her clitoris until her hips bucked, but it was not enough. He was an animal, yes, too long denied; he pushed his tongue into her then, as deep as it would reach; he had promised he would do it, but now it was only for himself. Take it, he thought.
She twisted beneath him. “Oh—oh—oh!”
She came against his lips, throbs that he could feel, her whimpering breaths igniting parts of him, base and all-consuming desires that he had not felt before. He had not known.
It was that, in the end, that made him draw back. That which kept him from opening his fly, and finishing what he had started. For suddenly, as he held her in place, as he watched her recover her senses, he realized he did not know what he had begun, here.
This was like nothing in his experience.
She was nothing like Margaret.
Margaret had never made him feel like a ravening beast.
Margaret had never made a noise.
His thoughts doused his ardor like ice water. He slowly stepped away from her, prepared to catch her if she fell. But she straightened off the bookcase. She met his eyes. She held them, when any other woman would have looked away.
It was he who turned away from her then. He who did not know where to look.
The thought gave him an odd panic. He made himself pivot back toward her. She was leaning against the bookcase, watching him, her lips parted, her face flushed, her braid unraveling over her shoulder. He had a vivid flash of what she would look like with that braid unbound, strands of fire falling across her bare white breasts, gazing up at him from his bed with this same startled revelation in her eyes.
When she reached up to touch her lips, her hand visibly trembled.
Jesus Christ.
He wanted to yell at her. The words were like solid chunks in his throat, making it impossible to swallow. Have you no care? No sense?
He would have liked to punch the bookcase—he deserved the pain. But she stood against it, and that would frighten her.
How was she not frightened already? From their first meeting, when he had thrown the bottle—how had he not managed to frighten her yet?
“You are not fit for service,” he said.
She blinked as though puzzled. As though he might have said anything else: as though he could have thought of anything to say in that moment that would make sense.
Only this made sense, a cheating and low kind of sense: he was the Duke of Marwick, and she, a domestic. Whatever that made him—a swine, a cad, his father’s son—so be it. He retreated into the role, away from the intolerable confusion.
“Leave service,” he snarled. “Find a husband. Make a hash of your own home instead of meddling in others’.”
Now, at long last, she looked away. A bright flush crawled up her cheeks. Her reply was barely audible. “That would be a happy ending, indeed.”
He recoiled. And then made himself laugh, though the sound burned his throat. “And now I know you’re a fool. Good night to you, Mrs. Johnson.”
It was his library. But she remained behind as he shut the door on the sight of her, alone and straight-spined by the bookcase.