Page 18 of Becoming Lady Dalton
“As much as I am entertaining yours, my lord.” Viola dipped a mocking curtsey. Hurt silence stretched between them.
“Why won’t you accept me?” Piers demanded. “I may be an arrogant fool, but I have eyes. Unless Admiral Saxon possesses charms invisible to the casual observer, I consider my offer the superior one.”
“Because your kind cannot accept me,” she replied. It was easier to parry with a flippant response than to tell the truth. His flinty gaze bored into her.
“My kind,” he snorted.
“Aristocrats,” Viola clarified.
“Your grandmother and your sister are aristocrats. Whatever you were before, Viola, you’re one of us now.” Piers took her hands in his larger warm ones. A chill no fire could chase away had seeped into her bones. Her fingertips were blue around the nails with cold.
“I will never be more than a farmer’s wife. Look at my hands, Piers. See the scars? No matter how much oil my maid rubs into them each night, I will always have the hands of a working woman. Not to mention that having a maid in the first place is an unfathomable luxury.”
Piers examined the nicks and blemishes. After a long minute, he folded them together and raised her clasped hands to his mouth.
“Every inch of you is beautiful, Viola,” he murmured, brushing a kiss over her knuckles.
Heat surged through her body as if he had lit the fuse to a firecracker.Let him help you,her heart whispered.
What if he couldn’t protect her? What if all she had to offer him was pain?
There were only a few weeks before the Christmas holiday, and after the new year, Matthew began school in the countryside. He was with his tutor now, learning mathematics and science—or, at least, pretending to.
Viola slipped her hands out of Dalton’s grasp. “You flatter me.”
“I can think of no better recipient more deserving of praise,” Piers replied, clasping his hands behind his back, his posture wary. “Why was Reed here?”
His words stabbed through her heart. Viola inhaled sharply before turning to face Piers.
“You know his name,” Viola hedged, running her hand along the carved surface of a walnut chair. It was the sort of seat a cellist might take to play an instrument. Perhaps, her father had sat in that very spot while seducing her mother. Mum wouldn’t have been much older than Lady Margaret when her parents had eloped. Perhaps younger, closer to Viola’s age at marriage. Viola closed her eyes. She didn’t like to think of her adoring father this way—as a man who had taken something precious from the woman he claimed to love. Viola knew he’d been besotted with her mother, yet there was no denying that his love had been selfish in the sense that it had cost her mother her family and wealth. She’d died poor and proud.
“Reed wanted to know more about my circumstances,” she said with a brittle laugh. “Aparvenusuch as myself necessarily comes under suspicion, you see.”
“I wouldn’t care if you had stolen the gems, Viola,” Dalton offered gently.
“Iwould care,” she declared vehemently. “I have survived thirty-one years on this planet without once resorting to thievery. Now that I have every luxury I could possibly ask for, why would I be so stupid as to take what I want, when I could ask for it instead?”
Anger heated her blood. With her back as straight as a plank, she whirled to face Piers. Viola’s heavy skirts swirled about her knees, a physical reminder of how much she stood to lose.
“Help me,” she pleaded. There must be a way to let Piers into her fragmented, scattered life without revealing all the details about her apparently unresolved marriage.
Tell him the truth.
She couldn’t. Her selfishness made her gag. With Reed’s threat hanging over her, she needed the aid and influence of a powerful man. A viscount, for example. It had nothing to do with how badly she desired Piers’ touch. The memory of her one brief kiss of gratitude scorched her nerves. What she would give for more?
Almost anything, but her pride. She could no more ask Piers to use his position to help her than she could ask her brother-in-law. The possibility of Sam’s continued existence on this earth had rocked her to the core, but it was her duty to protect her family from harm. She’d fix it even if that meant leaving Matthew in Gran’s care and going with Sam to some hovel. For fifteen years, Viola had protected her extended family from her husband’s dogged determination to fleece them out of house and home. She wasn’t about to back down from one final battle.
Nor could she justify dragging Piers into the mess that was her life.
The thoughts tumbled over her in a cascade of confusion. When Viola met his brooding gaze beneath the cascade of his dark hair over his pale brow, she quailed at the darkness she saw there.
“How?” he demanded.
The spell broke. Viola shook herself back to the present. She must get to the bottom of her husband’s fate without Piers finding out. She’d wasted months while settling into this lovely new lifestyle, but ultimately, she needed to know the truth. She’d been avoiding it. Now, she had no time for jewel thefts and intrigue.
“We must discover who the culprit was, of course,” Viola proclaimed with all the lightness she could muster, regretting that she’d asked for help in a moment of desperate panic.
Piers groaned. “That’s what the Runners are for.”
