Her words echoed in his mind.
I won’t annoy you with my pending ruin any longer. Enjoy hiding in the north.
He rubbed harshly at the back of his neck, kneading the muscles out of habit more than anything else. His shoulders and neck didn’t bother him at the end of the day, not when he no longer spent long hours hunched over a forge.
If Redcliff’s blustering had left Hector unmoved, Lady Clio’s resignation gnawed at him. It wasn’t only that she’d accused him of hiding—something that echoed Matthew’s accusation in a way he couldn’t ignore—or that she’d picked up on his petty satisfaction at refusing one of London’s aristocratic elite.
It was that word.Ruin.
How often had that word been applied to him? His ruined leg. His family’s ruined pride.
He’d spent his life showing that he was worth something. He planned to keep doing so, to show his brother that he couldn’t be chased from London and his birthright. If he were going to leave, he would do it on his own terms.
And he didn’t like the idea that others would try to do the same thing to Lady Clio.
Hector fixed things. He could fix this.
And damn him if he didn’t like the idea offixingLady Clio … at least once.
Well,thatthought did not serve him. He had enough problems in his life without having to deal with completely inappropriate thoughts about some tight-laced Society woman. She wasn’t one of the lasses he’d known in his remote Northern village, one of the girls who knew that a quick liaison after a village fete didn’t need to turn into anything more. Lady Clio wassheltered. She would likely faint dead away at the merethoughtof a man out of his clothing.
He shoved to his feet, determined to convince himself of this, as he strode to his study. He needed a change of scenery, and he needed tonotthink about how Lady Clio hadn’t seemed very much like a shrinking violet at all. She hadn’t seemed like she’d faint over … almost anything.
Hector focused very hard on not thinking about Lady Clio. He thought about it so hard, in fact, that when he walked into his study and found her standingright there, he drew up short and had to blink two or three times before his brain caught up.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he replied.
She’d been trying some sort of polite smile—a trap, no doubt, to trick less suspicious men into thinking she was one of those demure, milquetoast young misses. But at his brusque question, that smile dropped, and the stubborn, pain-in-the-arse expression he’d already come to associate with her returned.
“Charming,” she said flatly.
He scoffed. “I don’t have to be charming when someone is trespassing,” he returned.
She rolled her eyes and dropped into a chair. She hadnotbeen invited to do that. He hated himself for even thinking it. These aristocrats were rubbing off on him already.
She rolled her eyes at him again.
“I’m nottrespassing,” she said, somehow managing to make the word sound ridiculous, even if she’d done such a thing in the village where he’d grown up, she’d be lucky not to find herself at rifle point. “Your butler let me in.”
Damn. Having servants was a right inconvenience, no matter what anyone tried to say about it.
Still, Hector was not about to give up so easily.
“And yet, you show up here alone,” he observed acidly. “Even though, according to your Society’s standards, you have very little left in the way of dignity.”
She bared her teeth in his direction. She had bite, this mischievous little princess, didn’t she?
“I understand that you think yourself to be rather above the rest of us,” she said. “But it is the utmost hypocrisy to separate yourself from the Society into which you were born, and from which you derive all your privilege. You fancy yourself Mr. Nobody from nowhere, but ask yourself: Where would you be right now, after fighting Lord Gwanton, if you were not a duke?”
She didn’t need to say what they both knew. If he’d been a commoner and he’d punched an earl, he would currently be enjoying Newgate’s dubious hospitality.
His irritation flared brighter.
“You think you have me all figured out, then?” he sniped.
She let out a humorless laugh. “No matter your protestations, you are a gentleman. And you are all, at the end of the day, the same.”
