He pointed at the scarred side of his face. “It might.”
His godmother lowered her voice. “The chances of a tragedy like that striking again—”
“—are as high as they’ve ever been,” he finished.
Crowds. Traffic. The deafening snap of an axle, followed by the sickening sway of an out-of-control carriage tipping over the side of a bridge and tumbling to the rocks below.
Accidents could happen to anyone. At any time.
It was why Titus would not be acquiring a wife or begetting children of his own. He’d already had everyone he’d ever loved ripped from him once. He refused to give Fate any opportunity to rob him of happiness and love all over again.
Solitude was better. Staying home was safe. Adding an impulsive ward into the mix…
“Miss Dodd is right,” Titus said. “You should keep her with you. There’s no reason I should be involved in any part of Miss Dodd’s life or future.”
“No reason? You’re the Earl of Gilbourne, Titus. The very fact that you go nowhere and give no one your approval means that your chaperonage of Matilda will launch her into the highest echelons from the first moment you two enter a parlor.”
“I am unqualified for—”
Lady Stapleton’s palms flashed up in the air as if she’d just dropped a hot potato. “She’s yours until she turns twenty-one. I’m an old lady, Titus. It’s your turn now.”
He gritted his teeth. “When does she turn twenty-one?”
“‘She’ is standing right here,” said Miss Dodd. “I am age twenty and eleven months. My birthday is in three weeks.”
Three weeks. Surely a man could survive three weeks of just about anything.
“And after that?” he asked.
“She comes into an inheritance,” Lady Stapleton answered.
“I come into my independence,” Miss Dodd corrected her. “Three weeks from now, I will not require the interference of Lord Gilbourne or any man. I shall be free to do as I please.”
God save them all.
Obviously this chit could not be allowed to run wild. She’d attended her first ball for all of five minutes before she was kissing strangers behind a potted plant. Titus’s original pronouncement was truer than he’d even realized: Miss Dodd was in want of a firm hand.
If he didn’t want to be the guardian to provide it—and her great-aunt refused to take Miss Dodd back—then there was only one possible solution.
He must marry this chit off to the first fool willing to take her off his hands.
How difficult could it be?
Chapter 5
Matilda could not believe that the angry lord scowling at her so thunderously was the same gentleman who had kissed her senseless not ten minutes prior.
Now that she was seeing him in the bright light of a thousand candles instead of the shadows behind a row of ferns, he looked… Even more like the path to adventure than ever. Regal, her great-aunt had said. Matilda supposed so. The earl acted like a king and held himself like a god. No doubt he was used to people falling at his feet in supplication at the merest glance of those intense, so-dark-gray-they’re-almost-black eyes.
Eyes that were busy glittering at her in open disapproval.
As if she had done all the kissing on her own! All right, yes, she had started the kissing all on her own. And it was becoming mortifyingly obvious that there should never have been any kissing at all, if she had not taken it upon herself to lift her lips toward his cheek.
But after that! There had definitely been an after! One in which he had engaged his mouth and tongue every bit as willingly as she had, no matter how much he now regretted his complicit participation.
To think, she had actually for a moment believed she’d found a man she might wish to marry! Matilda scoffed at her own foolish naivety. This earned herself a deepened scowl from the earl and a confused look from her great-aunt, who had blessedly failed to witness just what her godson and great-niece had been doing behind those ferns.
And now this big illogical ox intended to marry her off to someone else?
