like him so much?”
Oh, hell, he felt exposed. And this time, Charles did wrestle with his cravat. “Miss Gately doesn’t want to hear—”
“Oh, she does!” Emma exclaimed. She swiveled her attention back to the little boy. “I do.”
“Once, I had a nasty tutor . . .” Seamus went on, happy to supply that which Charles attempted to withhold. “A mean, stern fellow. He rapped my knuckles”—he lifted his hand, displaying the sight of that old, now invisible wound for Emma—“and often.”
She gasped. “The bounder.”
“Worry not; Scarsdale sacked him.” The little boy flashed a crooked-toothed smile. “But only after he’d punched him in the stomach.”
Charles winced. “I didn’t really hit him”—he managed a sheepish grin—“that hard?”
Clapping lightly, Emma laughed. “I shall always applaud the defense of another in need.”
And with that dimpled, radiant smile trained upon him, Charles had an understanding of just how Seamus had felt, being elevated so by this woman before him.
Emma looped her arms about her knees and rested her chin atop them; she rubbed it back and forth over her skirts distractedly. “Now tell me, Lord Scarsdale, what is your opinion on Mr. Locke and his writings?”
Once again, Charles’s mind went racing back to all the times at Eton and Oxford when he’d been marched to the front of the classroom and put on display, to fumble through some point that he hadn’t fully understood. The damp palms, the churning in his stomach that had been eased only when he’d donned a grin and made up some jest or another to distract the class, and spare himself anything but the fury of the preceptors.
The gentle encouragement in Emma’s eyes, however . . . proved different from the coldness of frustrated instructors who’d not known what to do with a marquess’s son and failed student. That warmth radiating from her gaze pushed aside all the keen reminders of his failings and allowed him to continue. “I pointed out to Seamus that Locke spoke of learning by play and recreation, and as such, every child should be thusly so encouraged.”
Emma stopped that distracted movement of her chin, and resting it there on her knees, she stared at him. “That is lovely,” she said softly. And in this moment with her, he didn’t feel like a failure of a student. He didn’t think about all the details he didn’t know. “I never thought of it in quite that way.” Her nose wrinkled at the end in what he’d come to learn was an endearing indication of her in contemplative thought. And he wanted all those details about this woman. He wanted to know everything about her, and all the subtleties that made Emma Gately, Emma Gately.
Even as you are undeserving of one as clever and strong and witty as she is, a voice taunted. And it was . . . the first time in which he’d made himself own that reality, that she was entirely too good for him.
“My own governesses all sought to turn me into what society viewed as an appropriately serious student,” she went on through the tumult of his thoughts. “Until I came across one who opened my eyes to the philosophers and deeper thought, and I just naturally came to expect that to consider scholarly topics, one need behave in a way that is considered scholarly.” She straightened. And this time as she spoke, she did so almost more to herself . . . as if her eyes had been opened to a point she’d never considered, and as that thought took root, her excitement grew. “But why must it? Why should children be expected to be—”
“Miniature adults?” Charles supplied for her.
Emma nodded frantically. “Precisely!” She sat back. “Why, I think you are the one who has had the right of it all these years, Cha—” She slid a glance in a grinning Seamus’s direction. “Lord Scarsdale,” Emma substituted.
“I told you,” Seamus said with a pride that Charles was undeserving of.
And damned if he didn’t feel himself blushing like the schoolboy he’d once been. “Yes, well, as I said, my knowledge is less extensive than either yours or Miss Gately’s. And that selection of Locke is only because I never knew of Le Rond”—Charles held Emma’s eyes—“until Miss Gately.”
“Do not diminish your own thoughts and opinions, Charles.” Emma spoke with a quiet yet gentle insistence, and his mouth went dry as it hit him square between the eyes: she saw.
She saw and knew that he’d attempted to shift away praise and return their focus