“You didn’t even esteem your father. You had not seen him in years when he died,” he says. “Why would you keep his choice?”
I settle him with a stare.
“Because it pleases me to do so.”
“Could there be a personal reason? You are an unmarried lady, Miss de Lacey. And Mr. Saintsbury went off with you unaccompanied yesterday—don’t think I didn’t notice.”
“Few would regard me as a woman in need of a chaperone, Mr. Thompson.”
“Ah, perhaps not, but who is to say—perhaps you are?—”
He splutters. His imagination cannot even reach in the direction it wants to go.
“Yes, perhaps it is not that the man carried a weapon, but that he was trying to arrange a tryst. Good day, Mr. Thompson.”
“You cannot dismiss me!”
“I very much can and I very much just did.”
“The living belongs to my son.”
“Out,” I say. “Or I should see you escorted.”
He rises with a huff and turns on his heel.
What an absolute imbecile.
It is comical really. He knows I cannot be ruined and yet still tries to threaten me on that score.
Absurd.
I shake the encounter from my mind.
I must focus on what istrulyimportant.
I am ready to seduce Alfred Saintsbury definitively and finally.
I am ready to bed this man.
I desire him, and I am done with waiting, with delaying my pleasure.
I am ready to begin the process of begetting myself an heir.
I have delayed too long. I have enjoyed playing with him too much. I have to remember my objective and where this relationship will lead.
The more I know him, the more I like him. Which makes me all the more convinced he is the right choice for the sire of my future child.
But it does present other problems.
I hope that my emotions, my vulnerability to him, might quell when I finally bed him.
I was determined to ruin him, get with child, and discard him. But when I am with him, I struggle to remember that scheme.
I must remember my plan.
Because ever since our carriage ride on Wednesday and his heroics in defending me from the angry mob of Trescott residents (it is hard to see his actions in any other light), I have been unable to stop thinking of him.
I imagine him in his little vicarage, his cock hard and angry, and I touch myself. He assails my consciousness at odd times, such as when I look over the reports from my counting house in London or my ledgers for Trescott, and I feel sick at heart and in need of physical relief.
