The woman shrugged. The gesture poked at him. The past tense of his admission was important. It meant he’d stopped using spirits to speed himself unto death. It might not make a lick of difference to her, but it was something to him.
It was time to put an end to this farce. “Your service in this household is terminated immediately.”
Disbelief marched across her face, a second held, then she laughed. Not the response he’d expected. He’d witnessed more than one man quake in his boots when he’d employed that particular tone, a fine blend of entitlement, arrogance, and anger.
Not this woman.
“You cannot terminate my employment.Youdo not truly employ me.”
He’d never met such a saucy minx. “Tell Nick—”
“Tell him yourself,” she said. “That’s what this is all about.”
He couldn’t escape the feeling that she wanted to finish her sentence withyou dunderhead, and he experienced the prick of truth. He’d been wrong to shut his brother out of his life these last several months, but he’d had no choice. Or, at least, that was how it felt. It was as if his very life had depended on him retreating from the world after his parents had unexpectedly died and he’d taken over the marquessate, his rather vague plan to have drunk himself into an early grave before the eventuality of inheriting the title, a failed effort.
“You may leave.” He gave a flick of the wrist, the gesture intended to convey highhanded, aristocratic indifference, even if the opposite veered closer to the truth.
“Thank ye, milord,” she said on a small, mocking curtsy, the Cockney accent returned. On silent cat feet, she crossed the room and was pulling the door open when she stopped. She pivoted and pinned him with her striking blue gaze that cut through the shadowy light. “Would you like to know something?”
“Likely not,” Jamie replied, honest.
He’d never spoken to a woman thusly. But then, neither had one ever spoken to him like she did. Before he’d become an actual marquess, he’d been a future one and the Earl of Pembroke, which had afforded him no small measure of awe and respect, particularly from those of lower rank and class. This woman clearly didn’t give two figs about his title or the awe and respect due him. He braced himself for whatever words were about to spill from her pert mouth.
“You are Nick’s brother.”
“An established fact, I believe.”
“I thought—” Her head canted, and an assessing light glinted in her eyes. “I thought you would be more impressive.”
With that, she exited the room as silently as she’d entered it. Her words, however, stayed behind and permeated the air like a noxious flume, crawling through Jamie and filling him with their poison, so all he could do was steam and stew, even as he wanted to roar with frustration.
He was a lord. Lords were impressive. Therefore,hewas impressive. Everyone knew it.
But she’d been speaking of a different sort of impressiveness, or a lack thereof.
Her disdain wakened a primal animal inside him. He tried to tamp it down, but to have a woman—any woman, but especially that woman for some cockeyed reason—speak those words to him—a marquess, aman—well, they made him want to spring up from this chair and prove to her exactly how impressive he was.
He shoved back in his chair and released a rough breath. He stared into the low fire and attempted to let its calm seep into him. Most nights it worked, as this study was his retreat, the only room in this sprawling mansion that felt like his. The rest of it, well, the rest of it felt liketheirs.
He snorted. Nottheirs. Not anymore. Ghosts didn’t hold possessions. Those possessions and titles were passed down to first sons, whether they cared to have them or not.
He cast an eye toward the empty brandy decanter no more than ten feet away. Five months ago, he’d drained it to the last dregs, on the night Father and Mother’s carriage hadn’t successfully negotiated a hairpin turn and careened off a cliff.
Dead in each other’s arms.An awed light had entered the magistrate’s eye when he’d related that detail. Jamie had accepted the words stoically and refrained from informing the man that his parents would rather spend eternity in the seventh circle of hell than a single minute locked in embrace.
Jamie had emptied the brandy decanter, gulp by bitter gulp, that night.
And, the next day, he hadn’t refilled it.
Or the next.
Or the next after that.
Oh, it had been a temptation. Every night, hands shaking, he’d unstoppered the decanter and inhaled deeply of sweetish, heady fumes with their promise of oblivion, if only he would have it filled. He’d been a wastrel as the heir. Why not now as the master? It wasn’t as if the Marquess and Marchioness of Clare had left behind a legacy worth preserving.
Quite the opposite. To say they would be missed or mourned was a lie.
The hate Father and Mother had borne one another was an inheritance of a more malicious sort. For that sort of hatred reached long tentacles and poisoned all it touched, including any relationships their two sons had ever formed. Nick’s marriage to Mariana had suffered for a decade beneath the burden of it, until, somehow, they’d worked their way through it.
