Redeeming the Reclusive Earl - Virginia Heath Page 0,53

He could feel himself scowl as she poked that raw nerve. Feel the wrench in the pit of his stomach. The call of the sea. The freedom of the ocean. The lure of adventure which had always set him at odds with his father...

‘Or maybe do something entirely different? A new challenge, perhaps? You have this huge new estate and a veritable army of tenants. Lord Richard was a good landlord, but he wasn’t a forward-thinking one and was most resistant to any new ideas. Experiment with new crops or breed horses. Become a magistrate?’

Each comment was accompanied by a prod of her finger.

‘Take up your seat in the Lords and practise politics, perhaps? Study. Travel. Invest in stocks and shares. Speculate. Start a business.’ Her finger jabbed him again and he caught it and held it to stop it doing any more damage to both his battered breastbone and his wounded pride. ‘You might have a few scars, Max, but you are as fit as a fiddle now and still a man beneath them, and a rich and titled one to boot.’ She snatched her finger from his grip to throw her palms in the air. ‘The world is your oyster. How I wish I had your choices! Yet you squander them to count the seconds on the clock face and punish those who become rightly exasperated with your self-indulgent belligerence.’

‘Thanks for your heartfelt sympathy.’ She rolled her eyes at his annoyingly churlish sarcasm and both things galled. What was the matter with him? Why couldn’t he move forward? Especially when he felt so mired in the past he was well and truly sick of it.

‘You don’t need my sympathy, Max. You’ve had far too much of everyone else’s and, frankly, today you don’t deserve it. I am livid with you! You made poor Eleanor cry!’

‘I did not mean to make her cry...’ And now he felt wretched as well as frustrated and betrayed. Somehow more wretched than he had when he had read that damn newspaper and been slapped in the face with Miranda’s happiness.

‘I know. You were hurt and you lashed out. But you cannot keep doing that. It is unfair.’ He abhorred mirrors nowadays, even metaphorical ones, but she was holding one up to his face regardless and making him evaluate what he saw. It wasn’t pleasant. ‘Now she doesn’t feel as if she can go home tomorrow...’

‘She never mentioned she was going home?’ He wasn’t being fair to Eleanor. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

‘Well, she isn’t now and wild horses will not drag her from here on the back of this no matter what either of us say. But she had thought you were making progress and felt she could risk taking a step back. The poor woman misses her family.’

‘And I feel guilty for keeping her from them. It is one of the reasons I left London in the first place. That and the constant mollycoddling.’ And the pity and the platitudes. The staring and pointing. The newspaper story confirming blasted Miranda’s confinement. ‘This morning was a shock and I handled things badly.’

‘It wasn’t a complete shock, Max. You knew she was with child and were probably counting the days until it arrived.’ Effie was much too intuitive. Clearly she saw right through him. ‘You live in Cambridgeshire now because you claim to be tired of London, yet diligently read the London newspapers—and not, I’ll wager, only for the important news if you were concerning yourself with the birth, marriage and death announcements.’ She did more than see through him! The blasted bane could read his mind!

‘One doesn’t have to be a genius to work out you were actively looking for the notice.’ Which, of course, he had been. ‘Which beggars the question as to how you intended to deal with the news, Max? Or did you just accept today’s tantrum as a given and had no plans beyond that?’

A few months ago—hell, a few weeks ago—he’d have bellowed his denial from the rooftops. Yet the anger he usually felt at the mere mention of Miranda or his scars or his behaviour had apparently fizzled out because it was the bane who had done the mentioning. ‘I live from day to day, Effie.