“My brother suffered our father’s temper far more brutally than I was ever forced to endure,” Lord Ashley said, his tone vibrating with stark honesty.
His words resonated deep within her, for although her brother Dev had done his best to protect his siblings from their father’s wrath, Father’s cruelty was a bitter memory which would not soon be forgotten. Nor would the sting of his whip, lashing her until Dev had saved her one awful day.
“I am sorry, Lord Ashley,” she said. “My father was not a kind man, and I know all too well the scars our pasts can leave upon us.”
“Some on the heart, others on the flesh,” he agreed. “Coventry endured more than any child ever should.”
“That is one of the reasons I feel responsible for my sisters,” she admitted. “I am the eldest, and we are motherless. Our father only cared to earn more coin, however he could.”
It was the first time she had ever spoken those words aloud.
But saying them left her with such a feeling of peace. Of relief, almost. As if by the mere revelation, she had cut the ties of some of the chains binding her to the past.
“I understand,” Lord Ashley said quietly, still staring into the fire in a most pensive fashion. “I feel the same. We are, all of us, bound in one fashion or another by our pasts, our blood, and our own senses of duty.”
“Indeed we are,” she agreed.
She wondered, then, if she had finally stumbled upon the true reason Lord Ashley was aiding Coventry in his search for a bride. Perhaps he did so out of obligation.
“Tell me something else about yourself, Pru,” he invited before she could pursue the matter and pose another question.
“Are you asking on behalf of His Grace or do you ask for yourself?” she asked pointedly.
The delineation was clear to Pru: if he asked for the duke, she would say nothing. If he asked for himself, however…
“I ought to be asking on my brother’s behalf,” he conceded quietly, turning toward her once more. “But I am asking for myself.”
The library suddenly felt as if it had been starved of air. Her heart was beating fast, and madly flitting butterflies were once more fluttering about in her belly. Their elbows brushed yet again as she shifted on her feet, trying to find her balance.
“What do you want to know about me?” The question left her, although she knew quite well she should not prolong this intimacy.
She could not seem to make herself leave, to force distance between them.
“Tell me something you have never told anyone else.” His request, like the silky tone of his voice, was wicked.
Delicious.
“I will if you do,” she countered, thinking she had bested him.
“I once dumped my father’s unemptied chamber pot in his bed,” Lord Ashley said, “I did it in the midst of the night whilst he was asleep, and I took great care to make certain nothing touched him. He woke to a foul mess, quite irate. He assumed it was Coventry who had done it, and my brother accepted his punishment without ever mentioning I was the guilty one.”
She had not expected a confession from him at all. But this one—it was shocking, slightly humorous, and rather sad, all at once. It also told her a great deal about Lord Ashley Rawdon, she thought.
“Is that why you feel so indebted to your brother?” she dared.
“One of the reasons, perhaps,” he allowed. “One of many. But that is neither here nor there. I have revealed my something I have never told anyone else to you. You must now tell me one of yours.”
She thought for a moment.
There was the time she had poured salt into Grace’s pillow. The time she had hidden a wedge of cheese beneath Christabella’s bed in the heart of summer. The day she had secreted a toad in Eugie’s chamber pot…
But, no. She did not wish to confess her childish pranks. They were all horridly embarrassing.
“Pru,” Lord Ashley urged, “I have yet to hear a word from your pretty lips. Out with it.”
He thought her lips were pretty?
Heavens, how was she to form coherent thought after such a revelation?
