Page 24 of The Scandalous Deal of the Scarred Lady
“Heavens sir, you sound like you’d call me out on a duel!” Barrington raised his glass and drank, watching him curiously over the crystal.
“You would sell your daughter for five rubies?” James ground out between clenched teeth.
“No. I would buy her happiness if I could, but this deal was not of my making, remember, but hers.”
“You would allow it. Why not let her leave the house? Have her season. She seems no less accomplished than any other young woman of the ton. Let her be courted properly by them as would have her.”
“Are you mad?” Barrington flung the glass across the room, where it splintered against the hearth, causing Prescott to snort and sit up blearily before falling back against the cushion and seeming to fall back asleep. “And expose her to that…ridicule. Or worse, their pity? Oh, she would marry, many would be willing to endure anything for a chance at the only child of a Duke. Her dowry is certainly sufficient.”
“Sir, I would surely call you out for speaking such about one so as refined and beautiful as your daughter.”
Barrington stared at him. “You mean that?”
“I do!” James snapped, too overwrought to couch his words.
Barrington burst into laughter, the sound startling Prescott for good this time. “You honestly mean that? You have hidden depths indeed. No, do not interrupt, let me speak. If you wish to be free of this agreement, then return here Tuesday as we’d discussed. Take the papers and look at them. Have your own solicitor or banker go over them with you.”
“What good will that do?” James asked, furious that the man thought so little of him as to laugh.
“Hopefully it will give you time enough to see reason. Do not be over hasty in your decision. Prescott!” Barrington turned to the banker who was looking around the room, somewhat bewildered as though wondering just where he’d woken. “Gather your things, ’tis high time you went home, do you not think so? Sleep in your own bed and leave my fire for myself and my dogs.”
He shot a glance at James, one corner of his mouth turning up in a wry grin. “Take this young upstart with you before he calls us both out for keeping him up too late. My god, the youth and their dueling…”
James looked from one to the other. “I cannot see myself changing my mind.”
“Nor will I. It should make for an interesting meeting then, will it not? Good night, Sir. I look forward to your company on Tuesday next.”
Chapter 16
“What hell have you placed me in?” James groaned and threw himself into the armchair by the fire. “Tell me this, Lucy, for I truly wish to know. Had you seen the girl beforehand?”
Lucy flinched but continued in her knitting as she sat stolidly as though she had every right to the chair in her Master’s library though he could not remember inviting her into the room. Somehow in the years since she had dandled James upon her knee, she had become something more than a servant.
Truth be told, he wasn’t altogether sure she wasn’t running the entire household behind his back. Had she not just been working in the kitchens the other day? Now here she sat, calmly as you please, knitting as though she had not a care in the world.
“I think I care not for your language. Did I not teach you anything?” she asked, a bastion of calm in the face of his fury. Her knitting needles clicked, yarn forming into a patterned square before his eyes.
“You also told me it was wrong to take a thing that did not belong to me. A lesson you might have done well to emulate.” He threw the brooch down on the table between them. “I cannot be rid of the thing.”
She winced, and set her knitting in her lap, eyeing the brooch with a shudder. “I have expressed my regrets already. I would take the brooch back myself if I thought it would do any good.”
“They would not let you. I am well and truly trapped then.” James covered his eyes with his forearm and groaned.
“You find her so hard to look upon then?”
There was something in Lucy’s tone that made him look up. “When you speak like that, it seems you censure me for something though I know not what. Why would it not be hard to look upon a lady who you feel you cannot be honorable around? I have made this agreement, a thing we are both aware of, and I am surely to suffer for it.”
“Because of her affliction?” Lucy’s voice held the sting of the ice that beat against the window.
“Because I cannot be honorable when the only reason I court a Lady, ANY Lady, is due to the fact that I am being paid to do so. Especially when I would be glad to keep her company—” He stopped there unable to go on, and all too aware that Lucy was watching him with a certain look he knew only too well.
“I am not in love with the girl,” he said and got up to stab at the fire with a long poker, before bending to add another chunk of wood onto what was already a healthy blaze.
“I did not say a word,” Lucy said behind him. He heard the soft clack of her needles as she took up her knitting again.
“You did not need to!” He twisted to look at her and shook his head. “Why do I allow this? You are a servant in my house. You are given liberties that you should not have. Why do you never say ‘Your Grace’ to me? Or worse, feel you can address me at all when I have not given you leave to?”
“Perhaps because I have raised you,” she reminded him softly, a gentle smile playing about her lips. “And you told me yourself that I was never to call you ‘Your Grace’ when you were 12.”
