Page 52 of Give Him a Chance

“I must say, I cannot help but scorn a system like that,” Bernard said as they turned to once again return to the Lindow townhouse.

Lucy glanced up. “A hotel that offers rooms for rent?”

He nudged her playfully with his shoulder, and she laughed, her stomach twisting and her heart telling her to do it again, just to gain the contact. “No! I mean the fact that poor old Forthright felt obliged to decline your request merely because you were a woman, and yet he had to accept mine for exactly the opposite reason.”

Lucy swallowed. It was a tad more complicated than that, she knew—but she was not going to be the one to reveal Mr. Forthright’s unfortunate and unmerited tangle with the law. “Yes. Most irritating.”

“It’s two-faced, that’s what it is. Treating people differently due only to the way they were made, it’s—it’s barbaric,” Bernard said, and there was a power and a passion in his voice that made Lucy look up.

He certainly looked riled. The injury to the back of his head had faded somewhat and was mostly covered by the borrowed hat, yet there was the same look on his face that Lucy had seen when she had followed him to that alleyway.

A look of power, and rigid control. As though Bernard losing his temper would be a terrible thing to see indeed.

“I know. I have to go to great lengths to go anywhere without a proper chaperone—as you saw today. How we had to lie—first that you were my brother, and then that you were some grand man who was holding some sort of event for which you wanted to book a room.” She smacked her lips. “I suppose the way women are treated as inferior to men is close to lying, which is something that all humans ought to abhor, even though I’m no stranger to it myself when I want a bit of freedom,” she said lightly as they turned onto her street and its familiar trees. “Lying, keeping the truth from another, mistruths by omission… It’s all the same. I wish I never had to do it. I think there’s something in us that, at our core, repels liars, don’t you?”

There it was—something strange flickered across the man’s face. Bernard did not change, not in any real sense, but a darkness overwhelmed him for a heartbeat. A darkness, a shadow, something malevolent but also terribly sad. Something that altered him, in that moment, from a man whom she trusted and felt as though she knew to…to a stranger.

And the moment was gone, and Bernard was smiling and saying jovially, “Well, I have left my lying ways behind me, Lady Lucy,” as they stepped back into their home.

My home, not ours, Lucy corrected quickly in the privacy of her own mind as her cheeks burned. She certainly did not want to live in a house with Bernard. Not for the rest of her life. Obviously.

That would have been ridiculous.