Page 107 of The Scandal You Started
“I concede that sometimes a compromise can satisfy the egos of both parties.” He narrowed his eyes. “Butnotin the matters you have persistently argued with me over.” She rolled her eyes, and he growled, “Do not dismiss me thus. Learn to obey me instead.”
His words held no real fervour, so she smirked sarcastically. “The only time I’ll ever ‘obey’you is when you’re shoving your fat dick in me. That’s about it, honey.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she acknowledged that she’d called him“honey.”She never called anyone honey, but it just…rolled off her tongue for some reason.
He chuckled, and the way it vibrated through her sent the thought scattering. “That is a start, I suppose.”
They shared a beaming moment before Rayna lowered her chin, nuzzling her cheek against his chest. His caressing hands travelled up to her lower back again.
“What were you like as a child?” she muttered after a while.
“Oh, I was fascinated with my father,” he said, his timbre thick with reminiscent pride. “Art and I followed him everywhere, and rather than banishing us to the nursery, our father encouraged it, much to our governess’s dismay. The only reason Mrs Hutch managed to educate us sufficiently enough was because Mother Penny barred Father from interrupting our lessons.”
He brushed his scratchy jaw against her hair. “But I spent many a day going to town with Father, or visiting farmers and tenants, or working alongside the stable boys. And when Art and I could not accompany him, we were usually stealing Mary and the twins from the nursery to play outside.”
“Mary’s the one who married your friend, and Patricia and Solomon are the twins, right?”
“Yes, that is correct,” he said, squeezing up the shape of her hips and back down again. “It used to frazzle poor Mother Penny when Mrs Hutch found us, or I brought them back indoors covered in dirt. She would fuss while Father scolded us while trying not to laugh. Then when the weather suited it, Father would call for a picnic, and when it didn’t, they’d scrub us down and have dinner with us in the nursery. There were times when we would dance in the drawing room too, while Mrs Hutch played the piano.”
His voice grew softer. “As a young man, I was far more reluctant to participate in such frolicking, professing it wasn’t at all enjoyable while pretending Mary or Patricia were forcing me to dance. But looking back, those evenings in the drawing room were some of the best.”
A faint sting prickled across the back of Rayna’s nose and eyes. They weren’t as a result of tears but rather an overwhelming sense of happiness in the memories Dominic spoke of, combed through with nostalgic sadness of a time that would never come back.
It made a lot of sense why he was the way he was.
He was the product of being the eldest child and brother in a tight-knit, affectionate family. Confident and responsible. Persistent and protective. Caring and romantic.
It was sweet, but an odd, crawling sensation thinned her smile.
Likely, Dominic imagined having a similar family himself one day.Am I stopping him from having that?
She erased the thought the second it appeared because it was absurd. She wasn’t stopping him from doing anything. They were just having some fun, and then he’d return to his place in history, and he’d have the family he was meant to.Without her.
Not that she wanted to have a family with him. No, no. Gosh, no. That—that wasn’t it. Rayna couldn’t. Obviously. But…
It was…weird. Thinking about him lying with another woman the way he was with her in just over two months’ time. He wouldn’t remember a single moment of it either.
But she’d remember it all.
Swallowing down what she didn’t want to think about, she shifted against his arm until she was looking up at him again. “Your mum passed away giving birth to Art, didn’t she?”
He nodded. “Yes. I was only two, so I do not remember her. But Father always spoke fondly of her. Though they had more of a friendship than the kind of love he shared with Mother Penny.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Who? Father and Mother Penny? Or do you mean my mother?”
“All of them.”
“I suppose I miss the idea of my mother, but I do not remember her, so it is hard to say.” His tone grew wistful. “But there is not a day that passes where I do not miss my father or wish I had somehow been able to change the outcome of the accident, maybe stopped him from getting in the carriage altogether.” After a moment, he smiled. “Mother Penny and my siblings, however, I miss not being able to share this experience with them.”
He moulded the back of her neck in the gentle cushion of his palm. “I believe they would have enjoyed meeting you. Especially Patricia. She is rather fed up with the way men are allowed to dictate so much in the world. I think she would have liked knowing that in two hundred years’ time that would no longer be the case.”
“I would have liked meeting them too. Especially Patricia,” Rayna echoed. And she meant it. She meant it with everything in her.
His irises glittered pale and bright before he laid a heavy kiss on her forehead. “What about you, my darling? What other mischief did you get up to with George and Benedict?”
“Too much to tell you all in one night, but you’ve heard a lot of the stories from them already.”
