The Problem with Seduction - By Emma Locke Page 0,12
more brandy than I can afford this month.”
“I can’t believe you both hold our family’s reputation in such low regard.” Tony blackened each of them with a scalding glare. “And I suppose Darius would side with you two, gambler that he is.”
“It’s just that responsibility is such a weighty word,” Montborne said, returning to the center of the room. His regular devil-may-care expression was back in place. “Constantine can’t be expected to start owning up by picking his biggest foible and fixing it. Maybe something smaller, like arriving home on time to take Mother to church after he’s said he would. If I have to hear one more sermon on chastity, my ears are going to bleed.” He slanted Con a rakish grin that didn’t quite meet his eyes. “I intend to bill you for a new cravat if mine is stained by rivulets of blood.”
Con drew up in annoyance. “I’m not as bad as that.”
Tony raised a shoulder, then dropped it. “I suppose it could be worse. I suppose you could be in the gaol again.”
Con went cold. He hated remembering King’s Bench. “I don’t know what you want me to do. She wanted her son back. I see no way for the three of us to keep house together, for she’d be a fool to marry me and I can’t afford to be her sole protector. I can’t even afford a child. Is that it? Do you need me to admit that? I made a mistake and I have no idea how to fix it. There. So what do you want me to do?”
His brothers looked at him with the same weary disappointment their mother had cast on him the previous week.
He’d really made a mess this time. It wasn’t even as though he could just tell them the truth and pay Elizabeth back. The money was already gone, save a very small amount of pin money. It would take years, if it wasn’t entirely out of the question, for him to scrape together enough to repay a sum of that magnitude. The depths of his debts were why he’d accepted Elizabeth’s bargain in the first place.
The problem was…he’d never earn his brothers’ respect, so long as he left Elizabeth alone. And she very, very clearly wanted to be left alone.
Chapter Four
LORD CONSTANTINE CALLED three days later. Elizabeth gently bit the tip of her finger as she considered her options. Have him tossed on his arse again? See him? What could he possibly want that she hadn’t already denied him?
She walked the short length of the nursery, then doubled back. A familiar path she’d worn in the carpet over the last three days as she’d paced like a caged tigress. But she wasn’t entirely cornered, not yet. Nicholas had backed her against a figurative wall and now Lord Constantine was in her drawing room, but she could escape. She could pack her things, gather Oliver to her breast, and leave through the mews.
She had every reason to leave.
Then why didn’t she?
She cast Mrs. Dalton a reassuring glance. The new nursemaid had watched Elizabeth’s behavior over the last two days with a calm sort of understanding at odd with her youthful appearance. She knew nothing of Elizabeth’s plight, yet she didn’t seem the least surprised to learn that her employer wore her carpets like a barrister making his case before the Recorder.
In that sense, Elizabeth’s reassurance might have been more for herself than for her servant’s. With her teeth gritted into a semblance of an indifferent smile, she forced herself to sit in her rocking chair. “It is always good to make a man wait,” she said, as if she were ignoring the man in her drawing room because she desired him too much, rather than because his arrival inserted yet another cog into her rattling wheel.
Truthfully, she’d barely had a thought to spare for Lord Constantine until this moment. She’d been too torn by the need to decide between staying in London and risking another meeting with Nicholas, or leaving London, and maybe even England, altogether.
But why stay? Why debate about it, even for a moment? Nothing held her in Britain; the strings most people used to keep themselves anchored to their homeland had been severed long ago, due to a different mistake, one that had set her on her path to ruin. Her parents hadn’t replied to her letters in ten years. How foolish was she, if she felt bereft at the thought of her son never