I’d rather eat my shoe than take anything from you, you unfeeling lummox.
Yet she reined in her temper, hating that she couldn’t afford the luxury of giving in to her feelings. Outrage was for the rich and free, not the poor and dispossessed. She had survived this long by keeping her head down. She was not about to risk the ire of some local toff who had the power to make her life miserable. In the past, her complaints to employers about rude and even abusive patrons had fallen on deaf ears.
As much as Xenia hated her powerlessness in this moment, she knew better than to make things worse. One day, when she had money and security, she would live on her own terms. She would tell this selfish, ill-mannered cove and others like him where to go. Until then, she would have to stand in the freezing rain and comfort herself with sarcasm.
“Thank you for your kindness.” She aimed a saccharine smile at him while muddy rivulets slid down her face. “I would not wish to detain you from your obviously urgent business.”
The tiniest of furrows marred the space between his straight brows. She had the fleeting hope that he might have discovered his humanity after all.
“Suit yourself.” With a brusque nod, he turned and strode back to his carriage.
The callous nodcock!
Fuming, she watched as his driver smoothly navigated the equipage, taking the turn that led to Chudleigh Crest. After the carriage vanished from sight, she let out a yell of frustration that rivaled the boom of thunder. Picking up her heavy skirts, she stomped toward the other path, the one that led to Chuddums.
ChapterTwo
Lord Ethan Harrington hated being coddled.
Coddling reeked of pity, and he wanted none of it, especially from his older brother James, the Earl of Manderly. James had a tendency to take charge, which Ethan, the younger by two years, had always found annoying but never more so than now. Ethan had come to this manor in the middle of nowhere for one reason: to be left alone. Yet there his older brother was, paying a visit and putting his nose where it did not belong.
From across the desk, James perused the study. “Your manor is, er, coming along, old boy.”
“It’s a rubbish heap,” Ethan said bluntly.
Which is fitting, considering where my life is headed.
The familiar darkness welled inside him. Beneath his desk, he clenched his hands…or tried to. The damage in his left hand prevented him from forming a fist, reminding him of everything he’d lost. Of the man he’d been and who he was now. Three years ago, at eight and twenty, he’d been a rising piano virtuoso, hailed as the next Beethoven.
Now he couldn’t use his left hand to wipe his own arse.
Ethan fought back the tide of rage and despair. After his injury, he’d been gripped by grief of such intensity that he’d feared he might drown in it. Nay, not feared—sometimes he’dwishedit would kill him and end the torment. The anguish of waking up day after day, knowing that the one thing he was meant to do in life—the thing that had absorbed him from the time he played his first note on his grandmama’s piano—was no longer a possibility.
Music had been his unrelenting obsession, his joy, his everything.
Now, there was only…silence.
The silence followed him like shit on his shoe. He couldn’t bloody get rid of it. The sudden hush when he entered a ballroom. The anxious quiet of his parents and siblings, who tiptoed around him and treated him as if he were made of glass. The silence was even louder at night. He’d never been a good sleeper, and the only cure he’d found was playing. Beethoven’sSonata quasi una fantasiahad always relaxed him, untangling him from the troubles of the day, but that was lost to him too.
Then there was the silence that had surprised him six weeks ago, when his fiancée had jilted him just before the wedding. That silence had doused his last spark of hope for normalcy and instead fed the demons of self-doubt and failure. It was a wonder he had any pride left. Yet he must have at least a shred because, as bad as things were, he refused to let his older brother condescend to him.
“Why are you here?” Ethan asked. “Did Mama and Papa send you to check up on me?”
James studied the perfect crease in his fawn-colored trousers.
Knowing him, he’d come because he felt duty-bound to look after his pathetic cripple of a brother.
“I came because I wanted to see how you were faring,” James said. “After the…er, incident.”
“By ‘incident,’ are you referring to my former fiancée running off with my former crony? Or perhaps you are inquiring after my shattered hand?”
“There’s no call for sarcasm. As it happens, I was inquiring after the former.”
“My engagement ended over a month ago,” Ethan said curtly. “I’ve nearly forgotten what’s-her-name. I’m fine.”
James studied him for another moment, and Ethan returned his stare. There was a family resemblance in their height and the general shape of their features. However, James had inherited their papa’s bronze hair, steel-blue eyes, and brawnier frame, whereas Ethan took after Mama with his black hair and indigo eyes. As boys, they’d gotten along in the way of brothers close in age: they had fought and bickered and competed over everything. They’d also defended each other, and woe to anyone who even dared to look askance at their younger brother Owen or their baby sister Georgiana, whom everyone called “Gigi.”
The incident three years ago had changed everything.
