A Scot in the Dark (Scandal & Scoundrel #2) - Sarah MacLean Page 0,8
seem to understand me well enough.”
She smiled too sweetly. “My vast good fortune, I suppose.”
He resisted the urge to laugh at the quick retort. The woman was not amusing. She was moments from being sacked. “And what of the respect that comes with the title?”
“It comes from people who are impressed by said title, I imagine.”
“And you are not?”
She crossed her arms. “Not particularly.”
“May I ask why?”
“There have been eighteen of you in five years. Or, to be more precise, seventeen in two weeks, followed by you for five years. And despite this being the first time you’ve set foot in this house, it—and all its contents—belong to you. Are cared for. For you. In absentia. If that’s not evidence that titles are ridiculous, I’m not sure what is.”
She wasn’t saying anything he didn’t believe. But that did not mean she was not maddening—likely just as mad as the other woman in the house. “While your insubordination is impressive and I do not entirely disagree with your logic, I’ve had enough,” he said. “I intend to speak with Miss Lillian, and your task, whether you like it or not, is to fetch her.”
“Why are you here?”
He let stony silence stretch between them for a long minute, attempting to intimidate her into doing as he asked. “Fetch your mistress.”
She was not intimidated in the slightest. “I think it amusing that you refer to her as mistress of the house. As though she isn’t a prisoner of it.”
That’s when he knew.
His ward was not the swooning type, after all.
Before he could speak, however, she continued. “As though she were not a belonging just like the door you summarily destroyed like a great Scottish brute.”
He didn’t mean to hear the word.
But somehow, standing here, with this impeccable Englishwoman in this impeccable English town house in this impeccable English square, wearing an uncomfortable suit, barely fitting in the open doorway, feeling big and out of place, he couldn’t help but hear it.
Couldn’t help but feel it, close and unsettling, like the tight cravat around his neck.
How often had he heard it from beautiful women? Whispered in awe, as though they were too busy imagining the fine, deep notch he would make in their bedposts to keep their innermost thoughts to themselves. When one came in the size he did, women tended to desire it, like a prize. A bull at the county fair.
Massive and beastly.
The word honored their desire even as it demeaned his own.
Just as it had demeaned him on his mother’s lips, marking her regret as she’d spat it at him—always too large to be fine enough for her. Too big to be worthy of her. Too coarse. Too Scottish.
Too much a reminder of her disappointing life.
She’d loathed his size. His strength. His inheritance from his father. Loathed it so much that she’d left, that single word her parting gift to her only son.
Brute.
And so, when he heard it here, in this place, on the lips of another beautiful Englishwoman, with such thorough disdain, he was unable to avoid it.
Just as he was unable to resist retaliating. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be beautiful.”
She narrowed her gaze. “The descriptor does not seem a compliment on your lips.”
A vision flashed, this stunning woman laid across a bed, hair spread like fire and gold across white linen, long limbs beckoning, pink lips parted. Desire shot through him like pain, and he forced himself to remember his place.
He was her guardian. She was his ward.
And English at that.
She was not for him.
“It’s not,” he said. “It makes it far more likely you did it.”
Her eyes were glorious, more expressive than he would ever have imagined, and filled instantly with challenge. “Did what?”
“Ruined yourself.”
The anger changed to something else, gone so quickly that he might not have recognized it if it were not so unbearably familiar to him.
Shame.
And in her shame, in the way it bore the shadow of his own, he instantly regretted his words. And he wished them gone. “I should not have—”
“Why not? It is true.”
He watched her for a long moment—taking in her straight spine, her square shoulders, her high head. The strength she should not have, but carried like honor, nonetheless.
“We should begin again,” he said.
“I would prefer we not begin at all,” she said, and turned away from him, leaving him in the hallway, with nothing to keep his company but the sounds from the square beyond floating through the permanently open doorway.