He did not look. He forced his face back into a frown. “I haven’t brought any sugar sticks this time, I suppose.”
“Not at all. You’ve brought her a painter to disport with.”
“Please,” he said, “do not use the worddisportin the context of my sister. I find it alarming.”
He found everything about Matilda alarming.
The corners of her eyes were crinkled, but he had not made her smile, not quite. “When did Bea’s mother pass away?”
He drummed his fingers on the firm squabs beside him and then made himself stop. “Twelve years ago. Influenza—it took both our parents. We lived in Devon then.”
“Twelve years ago,” she said musingly, and his heart lurched. Did she recall what he had said in his letter? How he had erred twelve years ago. How he had made mistakes that reverberated through his life and Bea’s and the lives of many others who had depended upon him.
It seemed she did. Her lashes came down, veiling her eyes as she spoke. “That was when you married?”
“Yes.” He did not feel particularly inclined to elaborate. He could remember it clearly enough without putting it into words: his grief over his parents’ death, his sense of his own inadequacy to raising a motherless little girl.
He should have relied upon Mrs. Perkins. He should have done a great many things. But instead he had married Grace, the daughter of the baron on the neighboring estate, and it had cost him almost everything.
“What was she like, your wife?” Matilda stared at her lap, toying with the kid gloves she’d peeled off and stacked there. Her fingers made little whorls around the seams.
Grace had been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, blond and ivory, all elegance. He’d thought it a marvel of fate that her name so perfectly matched the lovely way she had about her. He had been scarcely able to countenance his good fortune when she had accepted his proposal.
“You really want to ask that?” His voice was harsh, and Matilda’s lashes came up finally to look him in the face. “You know I’m meant to have killed her. Murdered her on the moors, or perhaps driven her to her own death with my cruelty.”
Matilda looked at him impassively. By God, she was so bloody unimpressed by it all—his blackened reputation, his roughness. It almost shamed him, that encompassing blue stare. He almost broke her gaze.
“I do not know of that,” she said. “I do not listen to gossip.”
He scoffed. “You listened well enough to hear about my preferences in the bedchamber.”
A wash of pink started in her cheeks and worked its way down her throat. “Indeed. Well. I had that from firsthand reports.”
Oh forGod’ssake. Now he thoughthemight be blushing. He had not been with so many women, even when he was a young idiot at Cambridge. What were the bloody odds?
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I do not believe for a second that you killed your wife, by your hand or through neglect. You’ve never neglected anything in your life, I imagine. And you are the furthest thing from cruel.”
He should not have felt the way he did when she said it. A tightness in his chest, a little relieved leap of his heart. He had grown used to the suspicious glances, the whispers beneath hands as he passed. He’d learned how to prepare himself for the way people shied back at his scarred face or the sound of his name. It did not bother him any longer.
Only he found, just now, that he had not wanted her to believe the old lie. He was glad she did not, and ashamed of his own relief.
“It does not signify,” he said.
She made a little hum, and he thought it was not precisely agreement. “Is that why you moved to Northumberland? Your marriage?”
“No.” He took a fortifying breath. “We moved to London after we married. The marchioness wanted to live in town. She had not had a Season, and she regretted that. She—”
He did not know how to go on, or perhaps he did not want to. So many goddamned mistakes. Grace had been too young, too inexperienced—he had not blamed her for wanting to make friends, to join society, though he had not imagined it when they’d wed. He’d thought they would stay together in Devon, he and Grace and little Bea, and be a family.
But in London the fighting had begun—his surprise and disappointment in what she wanted, her horror at his own refusal to trot about with her all night, to leave Bea with another nursemaid or governess.
He had been such a spectacular fool. He had married too hastily, to a woman much too young, and he had lived to regret it. He had not yet stopped regretting it.
His gaze settled back on Matilda. To his surprise, she was looking back down at her lap, but the corner of her mouth had ticked up.
“What?” he asked.
She blinked and looked up. Her smile faded, and he cursed himself. What an unmannerly bastard he had become.
