Page 36 of Rules for a Wicked Wager

She gaped at him. “Concussed? Because I didn’t accept your proposal?”

“Because you fell off your horse rather than accept it. And yet you’d willfully consider an idiot like Percy Randall!”

She dropped her hands onto her hips and faced him squarely. “Percy Randall has a temperate nature—”

“Unless you damage his horses.”

“He will be in the House of Commons.”

“Speaking nonsense about horse-trading laws.”

“And his father is a brilliant, influential man.”

“What the bloody difference does that make?”

She huffed out a breath. “I could help him. Host political salons. Aid his work against slavery. Any number of things.”

“Then you should marry the father.”

She threw up her hands. “He already has a wife.”

“I don’t,” he snapped. “I don’t have a wife, I will inherit an earldom, and my conversation is about more than horseflesh spoken in a stutter.”

She pressed her lips together in a mulish pout, but a second later she was off defending that ass again. “He doesn’t stutter often. Just when he’s at a loss for words.”

“Which happens whenever he speaks about anything but his damned horses.”

She turned to look behind them, presumably at Percy, but Peter had had enough of this ridiculous conversation. It was merely a way to avoid his proposal. So he caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger and drew her face around to his.

“Percy hasn’t proposed, Miss Powel. I did. And I will have an answer.”

She jerked her chin back. “First of all, you didn’t propose. You informed me of your intention. There wasn’t a question in there.”

Of course there was. Except when he thought back, perhaps he hadn’t exactly phrased it as a question. “Well, if you need—”

“Good Lord, no!” she cried. “Truly, I think you’re the one concussed. Lord Whitly, whatever possessed you to think that you and I would suit? We cannot be five minutes in one another’s company without sniping at each other. Can you imagine a year of that, much less a lifetime?”

Bloody hell, she was difficult. “We would rub along just fine if you would cease seeing me as the enemy.”

“And what evidence do you have of that?”

He stared at her. Her eyes were bright in the sunlight, and her cheeks were flushed. She had one eyebrow arched and a tilt to her chin. She was challenging him with every fiber of her being. The problem was she was challenging him with words, and he was not a man who used words well.

“I just know,” he ground out. It was something he’d tried to explain a dozen or more times and had always failed. There were times when he just knew what other people needed: money, attention, discipline. He knew his father would never be pleased with him because Peter had a mind of his own. And he’d known when she’d cut up at him that first time at the ball that every word she uttered was true. He was a useless man floundering on a path that led nowhere.

So he had changed.

He knew when he saw her with that bloody parakeet that he would find her beautiful until the day she died. Her skin could wrinkle, her hair could turn gray, and she could gain four stone in weight, but he would still lust after her. He didn’t know why, he just knew he would.

And sometime in the last six years, he’d known that he would marry her. That he had to marry her because she was the woman for him. But how did he tell her that? He couldn’t, and frankly, he’d never thought he would need to.

“I’ve got a title, wealth to spare, and a temperate nature.”

“I’m well aware,” she said, her voice not hard so much as frustrated. “Though “temperate” is too simple a word.”

Was that a compliment? Knowing her, probably not. “Do you wish for a political man? I have considered it, and I will one day serve in the House of Lords.”

“But it is not your passion.”