“Shewhat?”
“Surely, you can see what your influence unleashes?” He forked up a bite and chewed slowly, watching her mouth gape like a fish. He couldn’t tear his gaze away. In the same fashion a person could not tear their attention from a horrific accident.
She managed to rein in, what he was certain, a temper that would likely rival the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. “I see.” Her gloved fingers drummed the table. She hadn’t taken a single bite of her dinner.
For years Sebastian had managed to avoid allowing Rebecca Thatcher to Dorchester for visits with Gabriella. “Consider this from my point of view, Lady Rebecca.” Bad of him perhaps, but Gabriella was just too… too… “I have my sister to protect, and she is just too susceptible for those”—with less ability to not be swayed—“with a strong will.”
Rebecca tapped her lips with her serviette, her eyes—frank, intense, hazel eyes—never wavering from him. “And you believe that I have somehow persuaded Gabby that she no longer wishes to be a countess.”
“Gabriella, had no doubts prior to her wedding.” It was true, Gabriella had become a confident young woman since school. His other sisters had suffocated Gabriella’s natural exuberance that had blossomed when she’d left home. Unfortunately, his sister had followed her friend blindly into whatever outrageous scheme Lady Rebecca managed to cook up. After that last stunt: the one where the two had played sick then snuck into the village to visit a stable boy. A stable boy for God’s sake! That had been the last straw for Sebastian. They’d finally managed to make him lose his temper, and he brought Gabriella home. “Why else would my sister make insinuations of leaving her husband? I’ll tell you, Lady Rebecca, the common denominator is you.”
“Me!” Her outrage turned her, what he previously believed were slightly plain features, to an animated and understated beauty. Her dark hair was pinned up with tendrils falling loose, framing a heart shaped face. Her small nose turned up at the end. Something he’d been too furious to notice seven years ago when she’d thrown herself at him. “I had no idea I had so much sway over my friend, Your Grace.”
He forced himself not to react. Obviously, she was still the same troublemaker. Anunmarried mother of twin boys, on her way to visit his oh-so impressionable sister who’d decided she didn’t wish to be a countess any longer. It was the most ridiculous notion he’d ever heard. Clearly, the blame for this latest antic belonged at Lady Rebecca’s dainty feet.
The woman had never grown up and, God knew, her children would pay the consequences.
Her gown of soft green didn’t look the least bit uncivilized with its matching slippers. The wispy strands of hair at her nape straining to be freed did something unusual—uncomfortable—to his insides. Angered him all over again.Shewas solely responsible for his sister’s unhappy marriage, he’d wager. She’d instigated every other incident she and Gabriella had been embroiled in, and there was no reason to believe any different of this latest debacle.
“Whydidyou attack me in the garden that night?” He gently speared a piece of pheasant. He spoke pleasantly, because that was his nature. He was, after all, known for his level headed, pragmatic deductions. Cool assessments of even the most dire situations in the heat of the moment. It was a source of pride, truth be known.
“Attack!” Her cheeks stained a brilliant scarlet, he found utterly enchanting—notenchanting—telling. A telling story of guilt. Guilt well-deserved. “I seem to remember an inappropriate oath you uttered just beforeyoukissedme,” she said with all the hauteur of a patroness of Almack’s defending a green girl. He detected a slight breathiness as well that had his own breath hitching. Annoyance crossed her features. He watched, fascinated, as she tried to rein in emotions that had run amok.
She was right. She’d flown at him so suddenly that night, as if she’d tripped. He’d caught her by the arms, and she’d been too irresistible. He’d danced with her too, as he recalled. Gabriella had insisted. She’d begged him. Something about how men were intimidated by Rebecca and how women didn’t understand her.
“I don’t wish to talk about this,” she said through a clenched jaw.
He shrugged. “You brought the subject up, my lady. Not me.”
“A mistake on my head, obviously,” she muttered, giving the pheasant an indelicate couple of stabs before it stuck into the prongs of her fork. She took in a deep inhalation. “I was not myself that night.”
“Oh? And who were you that night as opposed to now?”
“An idiot,” she said under her breath.
The duke laid down his fork—gently. “Let me make something perfectly clear, Lady Rebecca.” He spoke softly, relegating his tone to ducal hostility, something he’d learned at a very young age to his great advantage. “You and Gabriella are no longer school girls. Do not think for one second that I will tolerate your influencing her to your unbridled ways. This time I shall be there to block any machinations you manufacture. Am I making myself understood?”
Fury appeared to shake her from the inside out. She opened her mouth to blast him, no doubt. Not that he didn’t deserve it. Somehow, this woman had the ability to shake his unwavering self-mastery.
Lust blindsided him. God, he wanted to take that mouth. To cover those full lips with his own, taste her with a frenzy that left him dizzy and believing he should drive himself to Bedlam without wasting another second. The thought shocked him to his core. Crazed thoughts that dangled him from the top of his childhood school’s battlement. The one from which Damian Bellamy plunged from on a reckless dare from another schoolmate—he shucked the horrible memories that had turned a serious-minded boy into one who weighed every decision’s probability of risk. He was long past such childhood horrors to focus on the present.
Lady Rebecca should have married—been tamed by someone—by now. Instead, she had bastard twins that no man in his right mind could or would overlook.
“Mama?”
Her head snapped to the door. Sebastian’s gaze followed hers.
One of the boys—Peter most likely, as Percy didn’t seem inclined to talk—stood in the arch. His blue eyes gave Sebastian the once-over before going back to his mother. “I was worried for you,” he said.
Rebecca’s entire demeanor instantly softened, then just as quickly, to his surprise, shifted to suspicion. Her glance flicked to Sebastian. She pushed away from the table, hurrying to her son, kneeling before him and whispered something Sebastian couldn’t hear. Again, she glanced over her shoulder at Sebastian, the guilt in her expression, unreadable but telling. She rose, keeping her hand on the child’s shoulder. “Thank you for dinner, Your Grace. I fear I must see… Peter to bed. I believe I shall turn in as well.” The door latched on her exit.
“How disappointing,” he said to the room at large. Sadly, there was no answer. He stared at the door long after she left, wondering how he could crave kissing a person he despised to such a degree. She’d tried to trap him into marriage for God’s sake. He was not his sister to blindly follow where this formidable creature led.
The fact that no respectable man would have her now did not escape him.
Sebastian finished his brandy. With a heavy sigh, he set his glass on the table and went to the door. He started for the stairs then stopped, angling his head to one side. Rebecca was speaking too softly for him to make out her words to Peter, and then she wasn’t.
She straightened and lifted her chin. “Certainly not for someone as strapping and brave as you,” she told the boy. She then took his hand and led him down a back hall.
