Page 45 of The Beast of Beswick
As such, after finishing up with his estate business, Thane found her curled on her usual bench, her shoes discarded and her feet tucked beneath her, a book in her lap. He handed her a glass and filled it with a flask from his pocket.
“Thank you,” she told him with a soft smile.
“How is Isobel?” he asked, checking on a few of the flowering plants.
Astrid shrugged. “She has gone to bed after a very full afternoon. Patrick has been teaching her how to ride. And Fletcher has been teaching her how to shoot.”
“Has he?” Thane arched an eyebrow at that information. Fletcher had taught him to shoot when he was a boy. The man had annoyingly good aim. “What about you? Did you not wish to learn as well?”
“I have a job to do, Your Grace, if you recall, of categorizing your father’s antiques,” she replied. “Which I am very close to finishing, I might add. However, my eyes were so tired that I was afraid I would hit the wrong target.”
“Good thing I wasn’t out there,” he joked.
“If you had been, Your Grace, then I would have insisted on my turn.”
Thane grinned at her teasing. “An untrained woman, deep-rooted dislike, and a pistol do not a good combination make.”
“I am not untrained,” she said as she took a sip of her brandy, licking a drop off her bottom lip, and he fought back a hiss of breath. “My father taught me how to shoot. Isobel was not inclined to learn anything outside the normal realm for girls, but me…I wanted to know everything that boys did.”
“He indulged you.”
Intractable eyes met his. “I prefer to think that he gave me a fighting chance to stand up on equal footing with other men.”
“You are a lady, Astrid, not a man.”
Her eyes flashed and her chin rose, both signs that she was ready to do battle. “And that gives me the right to be inferiorly educated? To be treated as the weaker sex? To be discounted at every turn? To excel at waltzing and whimsy?” She said the last three words with so much heated contempt, it was a wonder they did not cinder the nearest shrubs.
“That’s the way the world works.”
Not that Thane agreed. Women in other communities across the globe had different roles, fought as hard as their men, and were treated on near-equal footing. His own mother had not been a weakling. She wouldn’t have survived, not with a father like his. The Duchess of Beswick had understood her role, but she had not let society’s rules govern her. Much like his aunt Mabel. Thane smiled inside. Female revolutionaries surrounded him, it seemed.
“Wollstonecraft would disagree,” Astrid countered. “She contended that the value of a woman extends beyond the value of her womb and that education is the only thing that separates our sexes.”
For a moment, his mind blanked at the sound of the word “sex” on her tongue. Her eyes shone with indignant passion, lips parted, breasts heaving. Suddenly, Thane was overtaken by a slew of lewd images that left him breathless. He blinked and shook himself. He’d gone to half-mast in his trousers.Hell. Hurriedly, he turned to check on one of the pipes that fed the irrigation system.
“Is that why you’re hell-bent on learning?” he said over his shoulder. “You want to be like a man?”
Astrid threw back her head and laughed, and Thane went full tilt at the uninhibited sound, swelling against the placket of his breeches. Hell, she fired his blood like nothing else. He sat on the bench beside her, hands folded over his lap to disguise the bulge in his pants.
“No, of course not,” she said, her tone amused, “but I do want to bevalued. I want to be a partner, a companion, instead of a broodmare whose only worth is to procreate. Women arenotproperty to be traded like chattel, Your Grace.”
God, but she had passion in spades.
“I, for one, am glad you’re not a man,” he said.
Her attention fell back to the book in her hand, but the movement did not hide the rosy tint seeping into her cheeks. Good. Thane counted that as a victory.
“What are you reading tonight?” he asked, examining the volume she held in her elegant fingers. The sight of her hands made his insides clench as they always did. It baffled him that he’d be so tied up in knots over a woman’s fingers. Who knew he’d be such a quixotic fool? Peering down, he read the title on the book’s embossed cover. “Byron?” He chortled out loud. “You surprise me. Wollstonecraft is quite a shift to the prince of poets.”
With a blush, Astrid mumbled that she loathed the poet as a man but enjoyed his poetry from time to time.
“If you dislike him, why read his work?”
“It’s interesting to compare the man with his poems. He was terribly indiscreet about his lovers.” She paused. “Men can get away with so much, but shame if it’s a woman. Then, she’s vilified for life. Like Wollstonecraft.”
Thane nodded. “One of Byron’s mistresses was linked to Wellington.”
“My point exactly. Lady Annesley inspired ‘When We Two Parted.’ Beautifully composed, but honestly, love isn’t found in haste, is it? Although,” she remarked cynically, “it can be lost just as quickly.”
