Was he being sarcastic? Impossible to tell.
“Shall we set a time for tomorrow?” he went on.
Olivia shook her head. “I cannot. I have prior obligations. Indeed, the coming week is difficult. The only time I have free is the day after tomorrow. Shall we say in the late morning, around eleven o’clock?”
He hesitated for a fraction, and then gave a curt nod. “Fine. I will see you then.”
Chapter Eighteen
No.
The word was still like a demon’s red-hot pitchfork, its hellfire prongs jabbing at his consciousness no matter how many times over the last two days he had tried to banish it from his brain.
Frowning, John looked up from studying the notes for his speech and pinched at the bridge of his nose. The Beacon—that eloquent Master of Eloquent Rhetoric—had not bothered to embellish the sentiment when she had refused the offer of his hand.
She had given him naught but a single syllable.
No.
He should, by all accounts, be relieved. That a moment of madness would not chain him to an unmeditated marriage ought to be cause for rejoicing. And yet, his emotions were far from elated.
The truth was, he was feeling rather melancholy.
Miss Sloane—Olivia—had gotten under his skin in ways he had never imagined. She was intelligent, she was witty, she was sensual, she was…
She was, in a word, exhilarating to be with.
“Exhilarating,” he muttered aloud, with a grimace of self-disgust. “I sound like a puling schoolboy, not a battle-hardened soldier.”
And that was the trouble—duty was at war with desire, and he wasn’t quite sure which side he was on.
Did duty demand his allegiance to Lady Serena? He had made no formal offer, and while she was cordial and seemed to enjoy his company, there had been no sign that her affections were truly engaged.
Which was, John reminded himself, exactly as it should be among members of the ton. Most matches were made for practical reasons. Money, position, power—God perish the thought that such a mercurial emotion as love might swirl in like a North Sea gale and blow all such careful consideration to flinders.
“But who the devil said anything about love?” he growled, turning to a new page of his notes.
Olivia was most certainly not in love—she had made that clear as crystal. Nor did marriage hold any appeal. He could understand her intellectual opposition, for he was in agreement that as the laws were presently written, women had painfully few rights.
Yet he sensed that her fear was of a more personal nature. She had been seduced—oh, how his fingers itched to pou
nd the slimy Frog to a pulp—and then jilted by a cad. Though she hid it well, he had caught a telltale glimpse in her eye and in her mannerisms that she felt herself unworthy.
Unattractive. Unwanted.
The damnable dilemma is that I see her worth…
“But she said no,” John reminded himself. “So in fact, it’s no dilemma at all.”
Scowling, John forced his attention back to the notes.
Shuffling through the pages, he decided to recopy the section with Olivia’s last corrections written in the margins. The rehearsal earlier that morning had gone well enough, though the tension between them had been thick enough to cut with a knife.
“Blast, where is my pen?” he grumbled, shifting a pile of old letters. The top one floated free and fell face up on the blotter.
“Hmmph.” John picked it up and made a face. It was the note Lady Loose Screw had sent to Prescott, giving directions to the garden meeting where she had failed to show up.
Thank God that embarrassment has disappeared from my life.