“Good morning,” he said groggily, a smile lighting up his handsome face as his gaze landed on her.
“Good morning,” she said back shyly. Suddenly, it occurred to her that a staff member of West’s household could enter his room at any moment. Abruptly sitting upright, she said, “I should go. It wouldn’t be seemly to be caught in your room. You know how servants talk.”
“Relax,” he said, pulling her back down beside him. “My valet won’t come before I ring for him, and there’s a screen concealing view of the bed from any chambermaids who’ve come to stir the fire and leave warm water.”
Priscilla was still uneasy that they might be discovered but settled back into his side anyway, not wanting to leave the warm comfort of his arms. Technically, they were doing nothing wrong. She was a widow, and polite society believed them to be in a relationship. Though intimacies occurred between couples like them all the time and thetongenerally ignored such matters, one did not want to place themselves in a compromising position and become the object of gossip.
Looking up at West, she noticed he was rubbing at his left eyebrow and wore a small frown. He also felt tense beneath her.
“Are you thinking about last night?” she asked, worried. “Do you have regrets? You seem tense.”
Dropping his hand from his brow, he smiled at her reassuringly. “No, I have no regrets about last night. I was just thinking about business matters,” he said with a sigh.
“Why do you always do that?” she asked, her curiosity overtaking her.
“Do what?” he asked, brow furrowed in confusion.
“I’ve observed you rubbing the scar on your eyebrow several times when you are worried about something. You were doing it just now.”
“I was?” he asked, clearly surprised.
Priscilla nodded. “How did you get that scar?”
West sat up, settling himself into the pillows and leaning against the headboard of the bed. “I was ten,” he began, staring at the fireplace as he wrapped his arm back around her.
“As you know, my family has always been very fond of horses. My father was going to Tattersall’s to look at a new horse and brought me with him. He quickly became engaged in conversation with a few other gentlemen who were there, and one of the grooms was showing them a few horses. He was distracted and had no time for me, so I wandered off to look at the horses myself.”
Priscilla had an uneasy feeling about where this story was going.
“A boy a little younger than me was running around in the loft above the horse stalls. He must have been the son of one of the grooms at the place, for he wasn’t dressed like gentry. I went up to play with him, and we had a marvelous time. I got rather dirty from tumbling about in the hay, and at one point, I don’t really remember how, but I took a fall and smacked my head on something on the way down. It cut my eyebrow, which started bleeding rather profusely.”
He was telling the story while gazing unfocused into the distance, lost to the memory while absently running his fingersup and down Priscilla’s arm. It tickled a bit, but she bore it, not wanting to disturb his story. He’d never opened up to her in this way before, and she was fascinated.
“We made a commotion in the tumble and drew the attention of the gentlemen. They all looked over, and I could see the displeasure on my father’s face. But he quickly masked it so the others wouldn’t see. One of the men laughed and asked my father if I was his son. He looked right at me as he answered no, shaking his head to warn me not to contradict him.”
Priscilla sucked in a breath, shocked that West’s own father would deny him like that. “Why would he lie? What would prevent him from claiming his own son?”
“Because I had embarrassed him. He firmly believed children should be seen and not heard. Not only had I drawn attention to myself, but I did so when I was completely disheveled and did not look like a model young man of the aristocracy.”
“What happened then?” she asked, unable to help herself from prodding further, though it was clearly an unpleasant memory for him.
“He returned to his conversation, and understanding his message, I went back to our carriage to wait for him. When he got back in the carriage later, he was stony in his silence, ignoring me for nearly the entire ride home. Then he told me that I was an embarrassment and could never control myself and act like a polite young gentleman. He told me he’d think twice before taking me out with him again and that if he did so, I was never to behave in such a base manner again.”
West tucked his head down to his chest and cleared his throat, emotional from the retelling.
“What did you do? Did your mother see to you? You were injured.” Priscilla’s heart ached for what he had experienced.
“No. Father wouldn’t allow mother to care for us in such ways. He thought it would make us feel coddled. He left me inthe carriage once we stopped and didn’t look back. I got down myself and made my way into the kitchen. Our housekeeper took me into her office and cleaned up my face. She put a stich in my eyebrow, as it was a deep gash. My father never inquired if I was well and never spoke of the incident again.”
West’s expression turning stony, he said, “That was the day I understood that my father valued his respectability more than he loved me. He believed that appearance and status were worth more than his own son.” West uttered this so coldly that it sent a shiver down Priscilla’s spine.
“I vowed then and there that I would never live like that, that people mattered more than what others thought of them. I would be my own man, not my father’s puppet.”
A sense of dread began to creep through Priscilla. Hearing West’s story, for the first time she finally understood just how deep of a wound his father had left and why his memory still held such a grip on his life.
Any small bit of hope she had felt earlier, sensing a renewed opportunity to appeal to his feelings after their lovemaking, withered. He would never do anything that he believed his father would have approved of, or that others could interpret as him trying to improve his standing in society. Due to her upbringing, standing as a duchess, and wealth, the former marquess would have loved her, and so for West she would never be an option. He would follow his pride before he would follow his heart.
CHAPTER 27
