“Your steward can wait.”
Not when today’s the only day that suits us both. I must visit the tenants’ properties while the weather holds.
“I suppose that’s as good an excuse as any.”
Charles let out a huff. Why did John always find a way to slip under his skin? Perhaps because he was one of the few people who could look into his soul. Did John realize that Charles was as fearful as his wife? Not fearfulofher, of course, but of furthering her distress. She seemed such a fragile little thing, with no knowledge of the world and none of the hardness that glittered from the eyes of more sophisticated women.
But with each step he took, each gesture of his hand, he onlysucceeded in widening the gap that existed between them.
He was a coward for avoiding supper last night, and a fool for resisting the urge to visit her chamber. But the last thing he wanted to witness was the terror in her eyes of their wedding night.
Very well. Tell her I’ll join her for supper tonight.
John grinned, revealing even white teeth—and a morsel of bacon stuck between them. “Very good. I’ll tell her maid.”
She has a maid?
“She appointed Susie as her personal maid last night.”
Charles raised his eyebrows. Who the bloody hell was Susie?
“The one barely out of the nursery.”
Oh,her. She’d scuttled away in wide-eyed terror when Charles encountered her in the hallway yesterday afternoon. She feared him almost as much as his wife.
Devil’s breeches, what had he done to deserve their fear? No man could call himself a man if he terrorized the timid. It made him no different to those who had tormented him at school, no different to the man who sired him, who tormented his mother to death.
“I’ll ask Mrs. Groves to prepare something other than pie for supper,” John said. “You wouldn’t want your wife to choke on her food while you’re wooing her.”
I want you to join us.
John stared at Charles’s hands, then barked with laughter. “Are you in need of a chaperone to lessen your fear?”
No. To lessen hers.
John’s laughter died and he nodded. “Very well.”
They continued eating in silence, and Charles focused his attention on the sounds outside—the distant clatter of pans in the kitchen below, the chatter of servants. But the one sound he yearned for—his wife’s soft footsteps—was absent.
A footman appeared to inform him that Mr. Carlton was waiting in his study. Charles drained his tea, gestured for John to follow, and exited the breakfast room. Today he’d discover exactly how much ofthe ten thousand Whitcombe had given him would need to be spent.
And how badly he’d need the other ten thousand he had yet to earn.
Chapter Twenty-Two
He doesn’t wantyou.
You disgust him…
Olivia stumbled on the path as she turned her foot on a stone.
A jolt of pain shot through her ankle, and she lifted her head upward and screamed at the sky through the treetops.
“Leave me be!”
But no matter how hard she strove to banish the voices from her mind, they followed her everywhere. Even in this remote part of the estate they plagued her with their taunts, sharpening into the brittle tones of the debutantes who’d triumphed over her as she limped through her Season from one disastrous party to another.
Her husband had made no attempt to conceal his lack of regard for her, but it was another level of torment to hear his disdain declared so starkly by his valet.
