Neat handwriting dotted the margin.
Was this Lady Charlotte? Had she written this?
He flipped through pages in earnest.
Nearly every page had underlined bits of text and scribbled notes, all in the same precise hand.
His eyes lit on one passage that had been underscored twice:
In literature, as in life, women are to be leveled into one character of yielding docility and gentle compliance. A wife must be an angel, or she is an ass.
Scrawled in the margin beside it, the sentenceBetter to be an outrageous ass than a docile angel!leapt out at him.
He laughed, a crack of startled surprise.
Thishadto be Lady Charlotte.
She had said this book was one of her favorites, had she not? Vividly, he remembered the impassioned words she had lobbed at his head before storming from the room, leaving the painting of a smoldering dragon looming over him.
He glanced at the dragon still hanging beside his bed, its ruby-red eyes drilling into him.
Why this painting?
Was she calling him a dragon with it? Or was she perhaps wishing to give him a not-so-subtle reminder of her own fighting spirit?
Regardless, Alex flipped back to the beginning of the book and began reading in earnest, eagerly devouring Lady Charlotte’s commentary in the margins.
He read for hours, the pain in his leg forgotten. The sun set, a maid lit candles and stoked the fire, a footman brought dinner and helped Alex see to his physical needs.
And still Alex read on. He laughed at the sardonic tone of Lady Charlotte’s witticisms and nodded in agreement with her opinions.
It was as if the entire exercise cracked her head open and allowed Alex to see the mechanical workings inside.
It was utterly captivating.
Worse, he intrinsically understood her points, the manner at which she had arrived at her conclusions. Often, he would think a thought and find she had written the exact same idea in the margin.
Somewhere around midnight, he snapped the book shut, mind racing, heart whooshing in his ears.
He had come to a rather alarming conclusion—
Lady Charlotte’s interior thoughts were as beautiful as her exterior.
It seemed unfair somehow. That she should be graced so thoroughly.
Shame instantly surged in behind.
As Wollstonecraft argued again and again: Women were more than the aggregate of a pretty face and genteel manners.
And what had he done to Lady Charlotte?
He had assumed that her lovely exterior appearance was her only dimension. Not that he didn’t appreciate her considerable external charms . . .
But if her scribbled notes were any guide, Alex suspected that Lady Charlotte’s external beauty was theleastinteresting of the two attributes.
Ah, bloody hell.
There it was.
