“His expectations are of no account since I will not have him. You are mistaken also if you believe that I will not inform any prospective suitor of my association with Breckenridge. Our family’s good name will remain above scandal as long as you do not force my hand.”
“You are threatening me?”
“You may characterize it in any manner you choose. I am merely explaining what I will do. I do not desire marriage to any gentleman of your choosing and will expose your name to ridicule if you proceed along that path.”
His eyebrows lifted a fraction. “You are changed, Olivia, but I cannot think that you are improved. Insolence is not attractive in a child.”
“I am not a child.”
“You aremychild.”
Olivia wanted to clap her hands over her ears.My own sweet girl. My own. My very own.The voices she heard, however, did not come from her father as he stood before her now, but as he’d stood before her once, and placing her hands over her ears had never served any purpose but to amplify the echoes of her past.My dearest girl. Come sit on your papa’s lap.
“You look unwell,” Sir Hadrien said. “Are you unwell?”
Olivia fairly recoiled when he took a step toward her. The desk at her back kept her from going into full retreat. She moved herself along its edge, ignoring the pain in her hip when she caught the corner, and stopped only when she was able to put the desk at least partially between them. “It is nothing,” she said. “A slight megrim.” And an urge to release the contents of her stomach at his feet. “I will take a headache powder before I return to the faro table.”
“I suppose you are eager to do so, though I understand none of it. That you would use your considerable talent in the service of Breckenridge and his hell seems rather lowering, even for you. There are gentlemen’s clubs, you know, where discretion is practiced as a matter of course, that would better suit you.”
“I am content here.”
Sir Hadrien shook his head, mystified. “Let us come to terms regarding the ring, then. I will expect it on the morrow. Your stepmother will be away from the town house the entire afternoon. It is then that you should come as she will not want to see you.”
Olivia would have pointed out that she was of a similar mind, but coming to terms about the ring was more than deciding on the time of its delivery. “As I have said before, you will have to speak to Lord Breckenridge about the ring. It may be that he has decided to forgive Alastair’s debt entirely and means to keep the thing for himself.”
“He would not. That is unconscionable.”
“Is it? I confess, I am not familiar with the gentlemen’s agreements that cover such arrangements, but if you say that it is so, I will defer to your judgment. You should know, however, that Breckenridge will act as his own conscience dictates. Your opinion will not matter in the least.”
Sir Hadrien stopped rolling the tumbler. His fingertips pressed the glass with enough force to whiten them. “Your manner is increasingly impudent. Does he permit you to speak to him in that fashion?”
“He encourages it.” Olivia was not surprised to see she’d provoked her father’s scorn, but it had the odd effect of steadying her. Before she thought better of it, she stepped away from the desk. The tightness in her chest eased, and she straightened, this time in a way that communicated confidence, not defiance. She folded her hands loosely together, presenting herself as a woman unbowed. “There is nothing about speaking my mind that threatens him.”
Sir Hadrien set the tumbler down once more, this time softly. He covered the distance to Olivia in four easy strides. “Do you think I am threatened? Speak up, Olivia. Say what you think now.”
A fine line of tension seized her, but she held her ground. “You are deserving of nothing so much as my pity, but I have none for you. I also have no rage. No fear. No disgust. Certainly no love. It’s happened, I think, that I have no feelings at all to spare for you, unless indifference is a feeling. In that event, it is everything that I know. And, yes, I think you are threatened, doubly so that you cannot touch me any longer.”
She’d chosen the wrong words. In retrospect, she knew it, but at the time they seemed to be exactly right. His arm came up so swiftly that she had no time to recognize the danger, nor react to it.
The blow was powerful. He caught her full on the side of her face with the back of his hand. She staggered sideways, tasted blood in her mouth, but managed to stay standing. Her vision blurred with the sting of tears. Bright bits of color floated in front of her.
“Shall I touch you again?” Sir Hadrien asked. He was breathing hard but perfectly in control. “Shall I?”
“You must do as you like,” she said, facing him again. “I will neither give you permission nor beg you to do otherwise.” She did not look away from his cool, disdainful gaze, but held it calmly and without the rejoinder of a challenge. When he did not raise his hand a second time, Olivia was careful not to indicate her relief or gloat in her victory.
Sir Hadrien took a step back, then another, and this time it was he who put one corner of the desk between them. Olivia wondered at his retreat, whether the distance was in aid of restraining himself or protecting him from her. She hoped it was the latter, that he’d come to understand that she was capable of retaliation. Nothing had outwardly changed, yet Olivia did not think she was imagining there’d been a shift in power.
She had taken her own back.
“You should leave now,” she said. “If you desire to speak to Breckenridge on the matter of Alastair’s debt, then return tomorrow in the early afternoon. I will be gone from the house, and as I don’t wish to see you again that time is also agreeable to me.”
Allowing him no opportunity to protest, Olivia went straightaway to the door. She opened it and turned her hand in a gesture indicating his interview with her was at an end. She had no clear idea what she would do if Sir Hadrien stood fast, but it was not something she had to contend with. He did not surrender a fraction of his imperious air, but he took his leave nonetheless.
Olivia watched him turn toward the stairs and listened for the diminishing sound of his footfalls. When the noise from below covered them, she finally shut the door and leaned heavily into it. She closed her eyes against the rush of emotion and still she trembled with it. There’d been no running from him this time, no withdrawing into herself. She’d faced him down, and every part of her felt the effort now as a physical pain.
She had no idea how long she remained there, but she never once felt any urgency to move. It was only when her heartbeat calmed and the wave of sickness passed that she pushed away from the door and went to the fireplace. She removed her wig and tossed it aside, then rubbed at her face with the back of her hand to erase the artifice of powder and paint. After plucking the pins from her hair, she shook it out and combed it with her fingers. A wave of ginger curls framed her face and fell softly over her shoulders. She caught all of it in one fist and ruthlessly pulled it back.
Olivia examined herself in the mirror, not for evidence of any injury that Sir Hadrien might have done, but to see if she was marked from her struggle with him in some other, more subtle way. She’d survived a battering, and the blow he’d struck was the very least of it, but what she observed in her face, in her carriage, was not a wounded warrior, but one already healed and made stronger by experience and sense of purpose.
