Page 44 of The Rogue and the Viscountess

“He hurt you?” Pete spoke as if his lips were numb.

“Only by the way he behaved about town. As if I had taught him no morals. As if he hadn’t a family name to uphold.” She pursed her lips. “I blame Eunice, his mother. Her blood was just as bad. Weak.”

“You didn’t like him, so you killed him?” Pete gaped at his grandmother as if seeing her for the first time.

She drew back her shoulders. “Liking had nothing to do with it. He was going to tear apart my home. He meant to take it apart, change things, spoil everything. Erase what I had built. And he said he’d find me another place to live when he married.”

“Did you fear him?” Pete persisted. “Did you think he would harm you?”

His grandmother scowled. The lamplight carved deep hollows in her cheeks, tracing the grooves of the lines and wrinkles. Prunella fancied she could see the skull beneath, stripped of its flesh and pretenses.

“Did you not heed me? He was going to destroy Rowan Hill. Dismantle what I had made with all my years of efforts, then turn me out.”

“So you had Mrs. Grist poison him.” Pete’s voice caught, and his throat clenched as he worked out the next words. “Have I— Do I have this weak blood also? Is that why I chose a life of violence?”

Barbara hugged her wrapper to her chest and studied him, her eyes dark and shrewd. “The madness never touched Nathaniel. He was my sweet boy, the one who saw clearly. The one who cried in my arms when his brother or father were cruel.” Her lips pressed together, twisted with the pain of memory. “Your mother, Nia, came from a good family. Peasant stock, but sturdy. I made inquiries once I knew he was courting her. All of your family, hale and strong. You might have done well if it hadn’t been for the smallpox.”

“Yes.” Pete’s hands were rigid on the chair. “There was that.”

Barbara leaned forward. “You couldn’t keep at the work you were doing. I made inquiries about you, too. The shame of it, Peter. But I knew I could redeem you. Give you a place and a home. Teach you how to go on, how to uphold the name. Show you the responsibility you owe to this place and to the family that bore you. I gave you a great boon. I hope you will prove yourself worthy and grateful.”

Pete rose from the chair, a pillar of strength, but his feelings were tightly constrained. “I shall take those thoughts under consideration. For now, it has been a trying day. I believe I shall retire.” He turned to Prunella. “Nell?”

She took his hand, and what a relief it was, to have Pete’s body like a shield beside her, Pete’s big hand around her own. They climbed together to the first floor, and he opened the door to her room.

Then he sat on her bed—on her bed, not the chair—and began tugging at his boots.

Prunella saw it then, the knowledge hitting her like a great wind that nearly knocked her over. Everything she wanted for her life, for her future, could be expressed in this one image: Pete sitting on her bed, taking off his boots.

Prunella walked toward him and sank to the rug at his feet. She placed his boot on her thigh, the part of her that was her mother’s daughter noting that he’d scraped the soles of his boots at the outside door, and the part of her that was the new Prunella not caring if he left prints on her wrapper. She wanted to be marked by him. She wanted signs of this man everywhere in her life.

“We can’t let her live here with us,” he remarked as Prunella levered the tall boots off his feet. “She might come at us with a kitchen knife every time we move the furniture about.”

Prunella laughed, but her breath caught. He had said us.

“She is very attached to this house. It would take great persuasion to make her leave it. Perhaps I should send her to live with Lydia for a time? The dowager requires a companion. She is not a woman who can live alone.”

“And I can build a dower house for Barbara when she returns.” Pete placed his other foot in her lap. “Perhaps for both of them, if Lydia wishes.”

“Lydia wants to live in town. I was the one who wanted a house in the country.”

His eyes grew dark as he looked at her. A maid had lit candles that danced on the bedside table, making the room enchanted.

“In the country, you say?”

“Yes. A little vine-covered cottage with rose bushes in the garden and berry bushes in the back. I was going to live quietly, maybe adopt an old, large cat, and be the merry widow of the neighborhood, entertaining my fellow gossips and being discreet about lovers.”

“Lovers, you say.”

She sat on her heels, holding his stockinged foot in her lap. Pete’s feet were overlarge, like every other part of him. He fit her perfectly.

“I thought a vicar,” she said. “A nice, staid, quiet cleric who would be kind to me and never make demands.”

His gaze roved over her, tracing the lines of her face, down her throat, lingering on the exposed tops of her breasts. Her skin tingled, aching for him to kiss her.

He drew her toward him, lifting her easily and transferring her to his lap. He pressed his face against her neck. “I,” he growled, “will make demands.”

She gasped at the sear of his lips on her skin, a caress that was torture and divine. “I may have some of my own,” she said when she could catch her breath, digging her fingers into his arm to hold him to her, hold him.