“A stalemate once more, my future beloved,” he said. “As I have already informed you—ad nauseam—I did not harm your brother. Has it ever occurred to you that he alone was at fault for his demise? Perhaps he was soused or otherwise behaving in reckless fashion when he fell.”
“Alfred was not reckless,” she insisted.
“Says the woman who was attempting to leap from a window,” he observed. “Have you never wondered, in all your fantasies about me, why I would have wanted to kill your brother? He had already been cuckolding me for months, and he was hardly the first to do so.”
“The servants said you argued with him,” she returned. “They heard raised voices. You left in a rage, they said.”
Perhaps he had; in truth, he could not recall. The time after he had realized the depths of Celeste’s betrayals remained something of a blur of drinking himself to oblivion and attempting to discover the extent of her debts.
Devastating, as it had turned out. She had sold off every jewel he had ever bought her. Even the Sinclair emeralds and rubies were gone.
“I did not like him, Lady Calliope, but I did not kill him.” And then, because she was still squirming and attempting to get away, he did the reasonable thing.
He bent and scooped her over his shoulder.
“Put me down, you brute!” she screeched, pummeling his back with her dainty fists.
He swatted her bottom. “No. We are going to have breakfast, and you are going to listen to me. And no more attempts at jumping out the blasted window.”
Callie glared at the Earl of Sinclair from across the battered kitchen table.
“Eat,” he told her, gesturing to the plate he had placed before her.
Somehow, he had procured fruit and cheese and some delicious-smelling bread. Perhaps his accomplice, the man who had replaced Lewis as her driver? Whatever their origin, fresh strawberries had never looked more tempting than they did now, mocking her on a chipped piece of crockery.
She crossed her arms even as her stomach growled. “No.”
He had even managed to make her what looked and smelled to be a passable cup of tea. Her lips were parched and her throat was dry, particularly after her near-demise earlier. As it turned out, attempting to leap from a second-floor window was not as excellent an escape option as she had supposed when she had been standing safely on the floor. Halfway out the window, she had not only gotten her dress hung up on the hinges of the casement, but she had also been assailed by a troubling burst of dizziness.
It had not been one of her finer moments.
Or one of her better ideas.
And it had ended in the Earl of Sinclair pulling her to safety and then hoisting her over his shoulder as if she were a sack of flour.
Also not one of her finer moments.
“You will eat, damn you,” he growled. “I even made you some bloody tea.”
Had he recalled her request the night before? It hardly seemed likely he would have gone out of his way to please her. After all, he made no effort to disguise his disdain for her.
“You cannot force sustenance down my throat,” she told him brazenly.
In truth, he was wearing her down. Part of her dizziness had been down to the unexpected height of the fall from the window to the ground below. Nary even a tree in which to shimmy onto a branch. But the other part of her faintness was being caused by the lack of food and drink she had stubbornly enforced since the evening before.
“Do not tempt me, oh darling future wife.” Grinning at her, he held a strawberry to his own lips and took a bite.
What was it about the sight of his sensual lips moving? Those white, even teeth flashing? There was nothing carnal about eating a strawberry, and the man before her was her sworn enemy. She ought not to be affected by the mere act of him breaking his fast. She ought not to think about those lips claiming hers.
About those kisses…
Those hated, awful kisses…
She frowned. “I am not your future wife.”
“You love your brother, do you not?” he asked mildly, before taking another bite of the strawberry.
Callie clenched her jaw. “Of course I loved Alfred. That is why I wrote those memoirs. That is why I have been seeking vindication for his death.”
His protestations that he had not been responsible for Alfred’s death meant nothing to her. The timing was too