Page 53 of Rules for a Bastard Lord
“Worse, I knew him. He’d been a fair man in school, though a few years older. He’d once helped me defend a boy, and so I’d counted him a friend. But he was a younger son, so I hadn’t realized the connection until too late.”
“He hurt you?”
“Worse. He told me the truth. He told me that Cara was blackmailing his father. And that the blackmail wasn’t even true.”
She snorted. “All blackmail is true. That’s the point, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “There is truth, and there is scheme. She claimed James’s father had buggered a boy so hard, the child bled to death. There was no evidence but her whispers. And as the man was in the House of Lords, the scandal could have ruined him.”
She gasped, and too late he realized he was speaking to a woman. He should guard his tongue better. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should not—”
“I know what it means.”
He blinked, startled. “But… How?”
“The witch-woman taught me a great deal.”
He shook his head. “I am sorry you know these things.”
“Be sorry for the boy, whoever hurt him.”
He nodded. He was. He was more sorry that he had beaten the man without knowing if any part of it was true.
“James’s father refused to pay and may indeed have hit Cara for suggesting such a thing.” He swallowed, then set to tugging on each of her sweet toes. “Cara sent me to teach him that there were consequences to not paying.”
“And his son came to teach you that there were consequences for listening to Cara.”
He nodded. “They whipped me.” Three words that could not convey the depth of the pain. He’d nearly died from the ribbons they’d made of his back. He had wanted to die when he realized that Cara had lied to him. “It was a message to her, and she…”
His voice cracked. He felt as if he stood apart from himself, wondering why he struggled with the tale now. Compared to her lies and the things she stole from his flat—this next part was nothing. And yet, it burned still.
He felt Miss Bluebell’s fingers on his face. The caress across his jaw and the brush of her thumb across wetness on his face. A splash from the basin, of course, but she stroked it away as if he had cried.
“Tell me it all.”
He looked into the clarity of her blue eyes and poured out the last. “I had broken ribs, you understand. And I was bleeding from the whip. I stumbled home.”
“Was she there?”
He nodded. “I hadn’t expected her to be a nursemaid, but…” He had to take a breath. He had to focus on the darkness of her pupils surrounded by a blue more vibrant than the sky. He had to look at that before he said the last. “She left me.”
She blinked, and then her eyes widened. “Just like that? She left?”
“I told her what James had said. I asked if it were true.”
“And?”
“She sniffed and threw a tantrum.”
“Wot?”
It was that break in her language that drew the smile from him. It made him feel as if he were speaking directly to her soul and not the facade of a lady. Somehow that made it easier.
“She said that I had insulted her and stomped off. I discovered later that she’d robbed me too.”
“The blighter!”
His smile widened. He loved her accent, he realized. Every missedh, every rough cant. He loved it, and in thanks, he rubbed deeper into the hard places of her foot.
