Lady Lilias and the Devil in Plaid - Julie Johnstone Page 0,26
the nonsense about the invitation to the ball? No, she’d come to see him. Had she waited seven long years to confront him? A bark of desperate laughter escaped him. He somehow was not surprised. He’d hurt her. She’d thought them real friends, and he’d betrayed her. His glorious girl.
Perhaps she’d felt a small bit of the emotion that he’d felt, still did, for her, and she had simply wanted the closure he’d never given her? Perhaps she’d wanted to set things straight between them for Owen’s sake, as she likely knew she’d wed Owen. Most likely, she wanted him to understand that if he still felt anything for her, it could not be. He didn’t know. His mind wasn’t working properly.
He felt haunted, and he was—by her. She was the ghost that would not die in his mind or heart. He poured another drink and prayed for no dreams of her tonight.
“No.”
Nash’s mother sat across from him in his study the next day and arched her dark eyebrows at him. “Nay?” She repeated the answer he’d just given her with definite incredulity. “I never ask anything of ye.”
That was not quite true. She frequently asked for more pin money for new gowns and baubles, but he gladly gave it. She did not, however, ask for his company. Ever.
“Ye live yer life as ye wish. Ye cling to heathen ways.” She flicked her hand at the kilt he wore.
He resisted the urge to laugh. There was nothing heathen about wearing the kilt of his mother’s clan. She just didn’t like it because her stuffy friends would not like it. They thought themselves better than the Scots, so his mother liked to conveniently forget that she was a Scot. Just as she’d conveniently forgotten his existence until it had become inconvenient.
“I need ye to go to the ball,” she said.
“No.” He could not go to Carrington’s ball. Lilias would be there. He didn’t trust himself around her. Yesterday, when he’d realized she had walked to his house alone, he’d dashed out the door to see her safely to where she wanted to go. That was not his duty. She was not his duty. At the very least, he could have had his footman accompany her or his coachman take her, but that would have required forethought, and Lilias stole that ability from him simply by being near. He needed to keep a good distance between them until she was wed, and he could finally put her on the shelf where she belonged, the high one where precious things went so some fool didn’t come along and break them.
His mother scowled, opened and closed her mouth several times, and then said, “I have not wanted to ask this of ye, but—”
She paused, and damn it if he did not find himself leaning forward as an eager boy of seventeen would have instead of the man of five and twenty he now was. He knew better. She was not going to offer a chance to finally be forgiven, a way to redeem himself, and yet…
“What is it?” he asked.
“I need ye to watch over Adaline. I’ve tried, but she is clever and refuses to listen to me about the dangers of unscrupulous men. She flees her chaperone at balls and most assuredly avoids me. Ye are the only one who can control her with yer father gone. I’ve no notion why ye are refusing to go to this ball, but ye must put yer sister’s welfare above yer feelings.”
And if I do this, will you finally forgive me?
He didn’t ask it, though he wanted to. For one, he’d do anything for his sister, whether it meant his mother could finally forgive him or not. But the other reason was he was quite sure he would not want to hear how she answered the question. Sometimes it was better not to know how someone might answer a question. Like the one he’d replayed in his head a mind-numbing number of times in which he confessed to Lilias that he’d kissed the girl he knew his brother liked and that he’d not allowed Owen to pull ahead of him in the race because Nash had been too busy trying to impress her himself: What do you think of me now, Lilias? He’d never ask the question; he didn’t want to know the answer.
“Will ye attend the ball or not, Greybourne?” His mother’s lips pressed together in a line of annoyance.