Jones’s eyes crept to the right side of Adam’s face, though he quickly pulled them back. The movement was not lost on Adam. He knew precisely what Jones was seeing—he’d seen it often enough himself . . . seen the repulsion on faces for years.
Adam had been born with a stub of flesh where his right ear ought to have been. A long line of sap-skulled surgeons had, in a vain attempt to locate the ear they were convinced was somehow just beneath the surface, spent most of his early years butchering him until he was left scarred from the place his ear—which was never located—ought to have been, out across his cheekbone, with smaller scars running up along his temple and out along his jaw.
The stub of an ear was long since gone, but he wasn’t much improved in looks. Quite the opposite, in fact. His mother had watched him pityingly for the first six years of his life, whimpering over her “poor boy.” Eventually she’d moved to Town. Adam only ever saw her when he wandered down to take his seat in Lords—something he did only out of a sense of duty, not for the pleasure of the company. Thetonhe had discovered was not much different from Harrow, very little toleration for deformities.
No one mentioned the scarring any longer. Adam had seen to that. He’d gained a reputation that bred fear into the chickenhearted, which he decided was just about every person on the face of the earth. He was generally left alone, but he was never ignored.
Not once had even the most ambitious of parents attempted to convince him to so much as dance with their daughters.
“No one is that desperate,” Adam answered his own question, his footsteps echoing through the room as he walked to the glass-inlaid doors installed by his grandfather, cut directly into the outer wall of the castle. The door overlooked the back gardens, a formal hedge garden which would be the envy of all England if Adam ever permitted tours. Tucked up as near to Scotland as one could get without actually leaving Britain, Falstone Castle was not precisely a destination for travelers.
“If I knew of a family of good lineage but very limited means with more children than could possibly be provided for,” Jones said, his voice apprehensive, “and possessing a daughter of marriageable age, would you consider the possibility?”
“Blast your eyes, Jones!” Adam spun around to face the quivering mass of jelly. “If you have had the audacity to act without my permission—”
“No, Your Grace! Of course not, Your Grace!” Jones’s face turned as white as Irish linen. “I merely thought—”
“I do not pay you to think.”
“No, Your Grace!”
“Have you been so bacon-brained as to contact this family?”
“Not yet, Your Grace.”
“Yet?” Adam thundered. “Had you planned to?”
“Only if you wished me to,” Jones insisted, beads of perspiration appearing on his forehead.
“I think you had better take some air, Jones,” Adam said, narrowing his eyes. “Take a refreshing walk.”
“Refreshing . . . ?”
“My pistols are kept in this room, Jones. At the moment I am sorely tempted to do far more than clean them.”
He could hear Jones swallow from across the room. “A walk would be most refreshing.” Jones slid out of his chair and slipped behind it, walking backward toward the door.
“A long walk, Jones.Verylong.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” With that, Jones fled.
“Coward,” Adam mumbled under his breath. At least he wasn’t as confoundedly stupid as Gordon Hewitt.
The thought of his not-distant-enough relative had Adam seething once more. He would not leave Falstone to that lack-brains. The idea was nauseating.
But marriage?
Adam felt himself tense at the very thought. She, whoever this impoverished young lady with the horde of siblings was, would run—on foot, if necessary—all the way back to her run-down hovel of a home rather than tie herself to him. One look at the tangled remains of his face and she would get that look of revulsion on her face, perhaps even faint. Others had.
He wouldn’t subject himself to that. Not even for an heir.
His mind was quite suddenly assaulted by the picture of Gordon Hewitt selling the Falstone tapestries to an oily London pawnbroker, the Falstone Forest, the work of generations of his family, leveled, the lake drained. He would put none of it past Mr. Hewitt.
Adam couldn’t prevent Mr. Hewitt from inheriting unless he were to provide an heir apparent to usurp the heir presumptive. And to do that, he would have to marry.
Adam muttered an impressive string of curses, though they were wasted with no one near enough to overhear and feel appropriately apprehensive.
She would run. He would offer, she would come to Falstone, then she would flee.
