The Earl of Christmas Past (Goode Girls Romance #5) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,16
of an oar, Vanessa quickly retreated. She passed Balthazar on her way, grinning and rolling up his sleeves as if eager to join the fray.
Picking up her skirts, she ran to her room, dove inside, then shut and locked the door behind her.
Her skin burning with humiliation, she went to the window and threw it open, letting the cold air steal her breath in a welcome blast.
Johnathan appeared, his color heightened and sharpened as his entire form slammed into the room like a mountain of muscle and wrath. “Those bog-faced sons of a whore! Were I myself, I’d wrench his arm from his socket and beat him to death with it, and then I’d decapitate his friend just so I could piss into the empty cavity where his spine used to be.”
“Please, calm down.” Vanessa let out a few shaken puffs into the blizzard, pressing her freezing hands to her burning cheeks as the storm pricked her with crystals of ice.
She could stand it no longer than a few seconds, so she wrestled the window closed and latched it.
John paced the length of the bed next to her, his fists white with unspent rage. “Are all gentlemen in this age such smarmy, weak-limbed dandies? Makes one wonder how many cousins had to fornicate to produce such a slithering strop of a rubbish heap and call it a man. I have a few regrets in my life, and my afterlife, but not slicing him open with that bottle is going straight to the top.”
Even as she pressed her forehead to the cool windowpane, she fought a sad little smile at his vehemence. “Yes, well, none of that was necessary, but thank you all the same.”
“He called you a slag!” John roared.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, her breath spreading in an opaque circle in front of her.
Even though his motions made no noise, she could sense that he stopped pacing. “Doesn’t. Matter?” he said with a great deal of emphasis on all the T’s.
She closed her eyes. “I’ve been called that and worse. I’m used to it.”
“How is that bloody possible?” he thundered. “You’re…well you’re—”
“I’m ruined,” she said gently, finally gathering the strength to turn around.
She had expected to see him be incredulous, but not his head cocked to the side in doglike befuddlement. “What? Ruined?”
She breathed in a deep breath through her nose, preparing to lose his respect and regard. Mourning it already. “This is why I am not with my family at Christmas. Or any holiday, really. I’m persona non grata in the eyes of society. My reputation couldn’t be lower if I actually sold myself on Whitechapel High Street.”
At that, he became impossibly still.
“It happened long ago,” she explained, already exhausted. “I fell in love with William Mosby, Viscount Woodhaven. He gave me a ring with the largest diamond I’d ever seen. We made love beneath the Paris sky…”
“And then?” he growled.
“And then he married Honoria Goode, the daughter of my father’s shipping rival, for her dowry was ten thousand pounds more obscene than mine.”
“He broke his word to you.” The statement was murmured softly, almost without inflection. “Did he break your heart?”
Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“Well…not irreparably at first. Not until he—until he published a pamphlet scoring the lovers he’d had. Prostitutes, mostly. But I was on the list, and my score wasn’t very favorable. Pathetically eager, but impossible to please, he said. He called my… my um…” She looked down, wondering why it was so difficult to say. Why she’d stopped feeling ashamed so long ago, but was suddenly afraid of the opinion of a dead man. “Well he said I am broken.”
The rickety chair at the bedside shattered against the far wall.
“Have you no brothers?” John thundered. “Your father didn’t kill him in a duel?”
She stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment for a moment. He was magnificently angry. His muscles seemed to build upon themselves as he heaved in breaths to a chest she could still mostly see through to the fire on the other side.
The effect was rather apropos, as the flames licked at his chest, seeming to ignite the scarlet coat with the same inferno that blazed in his eyes.
“Well,” she answered somewhat demurely. “Duels have been illegal for some time now.”
He gaped at her. “You’re joking.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You mean to tell me, there is no recourse to besmirched honor?” He gestured broadly as if he couldn’t comprehend the idiocy. “Any blighter can walk around and say whatever they might to