Redeeming the Reclusive Earl - Virginia Heath Page 0,25
needed the solitude. Attempting to be his old self was exhausting. It had involved making meaningful conversation, showing an interest in his sister’s conversation and lying through his back teeth about his plans. And what a plethora of optimistic plans he had conjured out of thin air for her sake. Plans to increase the yield of his fields, stock his stable with the finest horseflesh to breed, to put down roots and live up to his new role as lord of the manor. He even, when pushed, suggested he might soon start to familiarise himself with the local society here in Cambridge. He did, and would continue to do, whatever it took to satisfy her he was finally moving on so she would leave him the hell alone.
Tonight, and no doubt tomorrow, he would also have to suffer the chore of dinner. Eleanor put great stock in the ritual of mealtimes. The communal breaking of bread with others around a table, endless conversation followed by yet more conversation once the meal was blessedly done. Back in London, she and he had locked horns repeatedly with his refusal to play along during his long convalescence and in the dark months since. She wanted him to be civilised and felt those interminable family dinners would aid his recovery and he wanted to be left well alone. By the end, all those meals with Eleanor, her husband and their children only served as a constant reminder of all the things he would never have, leaving him angrier than he might have been if he’d been allowed to take his meal on a tray all alone.
Fortunately, it would just be Eleanor tonight and he already had a plan to escape early, citing his imaginary crack-of-dawn schedule now that he was the lord of the manor. For her sake, and to a greater extent his, he had abandoned her for a second time an hour ago to dress for dinner. Not that his toilette ever took that long, even when he’d had to button himself into his dress uniform and cared about what he looked like. Nowadays, he could complete the task in a fraction of the time and shave blind, so to kill time he had lain in the bath for so long, the pads of his fingers resembled prunes and the water had gone cold.
As tempting as it was to stay put and freeze, dinner was imminent and he had to perform like the brother Eleanor wanted him to be rather than the one she had nursed back to health and still worried about constantly.
Max hauled himself out of the tub and briskly dried himself off. It was only after he had turned to retrieve the fresh clothes he had reluctantly laid out on the bed that he realised the sheet covering the large gilt mirror on the wall had slipped off the frame. Thanks to the lamplight and his nudity, he was confronted with the abhorrent sight of himself in all his glory properly for the first time in months. He instantly felt the bile rise at the ugly, raised and contorted skin marring his left cheek, neck, shoulder, upper arm and chest, like a poorly drawn map of Africa on the cheap papier-maché globe he’d had in his cabin aboard the Artemis.
Sadistically, he stared at himself for as long as he could bear it as a test, silently hoping he could see some sign of improvement to pin fresh hope to, but there was none. The scars were just as big and just as ugly as they had been when he had first seen them almost two years ago. The only difference was the mess was now permanently healed over rather than an agonising, weeping open wound which had threatened to kill him and then cruelly failed to come good on the promise.
Instinctively, he tore his eyes away and snatched up his shirt, shrugging it ruthlessly on before he dared to replace the fallen sheet back on the only mirror left inside his new house. He no longer cared that the old gilt frame was embedded in the wall by several centuries’ worth of plaster, or that the glass was Tudor and therefore very rare indeed. As soon as this blasted dinner was done with, he would take a chisel to the damn thing himself and enjoy shattering it into a million pieces