Proof by Seduction (Carhart 1)

“But that is not what either of us wants, your lordship. You don’t want Lord Blakely to take me to bed, either. And yet I think you’ve forgotten how to be Gareth—just Gareth—altogether. And everyone suffers. I suffer. Ned suffers.” She paused. “Even your staff suffers. How ever did you train them all not to laugh?”

“I don’t take responsibility for the expressions on their faces.”

“Really? Name one you’ve seen smiling.”

Name? To the best of Gareth’s knowledge, the vast majority of his servants were nameless. To the extent that they came to his attention at all, it had better be hiding behind a feather duster. Servants were supposed to blend into the background. Gareth was aware that his servants were real people. They undoubtedly had real emotions to go along with that status. That didn’t mean he needed to familiarize himself with those details.

Madame Esmerelda frowned at him.

“There’s White,” he finally offered.

“White is…”

“My man of business.”

“Excellent,” Madame Esmerelda said. “Make friends with him.”

“What? Friends?”

“Friends,” she affirmed.

“Insupportable. I’d rather take you to bed.”

It was the most terrible task she had set to date. The worst part was that some treasonous organ deep within him—perhaps his liver—wanted to comply. He wanted to talk to the man, as if it were perfectly normal.

“I can’t make friends with him.”

“Why ever not?”

“He’s in service,” Gareth protested. “Think what his origins must be. Madame Esmerelda, I am a marquess.” He folded his arms and nodded. “Surely you must see I cannot go about making friends of all and sundry.” He was arguing with himself as much as her.

“One man,” Madame Esmerelda said, “hardly constitutes ‘all.’ Nor is the man you yourself hired properly cast as ‘sundry.’”

It wasn’t the prospect of having friends that bothered him; it was the process of making them. Gareth remembered those first years at Harrow. He hadn’t been able to do it then. He’d tried, those first, tentative efforts so painstakingly slow. But the others his age formed their little groups so quickly, he’d been left on the margin. He wasn’t bullied, like some—his lineage had made sure of that—but he had been isolated. Two years of hesitant advances, gently rebuffed; two years standing silently, only thinking how to add to the conversation long after the moment passed.

“Oh, do stop looking so sullen,” she admonished.

What had started as awkwardness and isolation had soon become superiority and a fierce reclusiveness. He’d stopped desiring others’ good opinion. And that, of course, was when they’d granted him theirs. It was a terrible thing she did to him, rousing these old memories. As if she were his equal, free to disturb his past. As if he were the sort of man who could make friends with his man of business. Who could have fun with a woman.

“Friends. Bah.”

She tsked quietly.

Gareth looked down at her. It was not so dark that he missed the rounding of her eyes, the subtle relaxation in her cheeks. He knew exactly what she felt right then.

Pity.

He almost hated her for the emotion. He almost hated himself.

But she shook her head. “My poor Lord Blakely. It must be very lonely being superior to everyone else in the world.”

And that, more than anything else, froze the lust right out of his body.

She was a fraud and a charlatan and a veritable succubus of a ruined woman. But she’d seen right into his desolate heart. And without once touching him, she’d tied him up.

Again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TASK MADAME ESMERELDA had laid Gareth had seemed monumental on the dark of the previous evening. In the bright light of the next afternoon, it became clear the task was not just monumental. It was insurmountable.

The scritch of White’s pen reverberated throughout Gareth’s study. The sound should have been dampened by the thick, red-and-gold carpet that lay over the wooden floors. But even the dark velvet curtains covering the windows didn’t swallow the incessant scratch of writing.

Scientifically, Gareth knew that the apparent volume of noise must be the product of his own fevered mind. Logically, he knew noise could not echo in the room; there were no hard surfaces present for the sound to bounce around.

Knowing this did nothing to lessen the irritation he felt at the continuing scrape of nib against paper. It did nothing to ease the sullen ire that lodged deep in his breast.

Madame Esmerelda had the matter completely backward. Gareth had no desire for friendship. He wasn’t lonely. He’d spent weeks at a stretch without human contact in Brazil, and he’d never hungered for conversation.

Well, maybe once. Or twice. A day. But it had been the same sort of longing he’d had for a warm bath or a swallow of brandy—a temporary thirst, one that could be eventually slaked and then forgotten.

Whatever point Madame Esmerelda hoped to make with this latest task was assuredly based on faulty logic. Gareth didn’t need anyone. And even if he did, a friendship with his man of business was not the balm that would assuage the temporary itch in his breast.

Scratch, scratch. Rustle.

Gareth looked up in irritation. White turned over a leaf in the account book, spreading a new sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. No doubt penning a quick suggestion on how best to modernize some mill on one of Gareth’s far-flung estates. Later in the afternoon, they would discuss those ideas. Rationally. Businesslike. At an impersonal arm’s length, as Gareth preferred.

He wasn’t going to befriend the man. The idea was ludicrous. He’d tell her as much. He didn’t give a snap for Madame Esmerelda’s foolish tasks, and he would tell Ned—he would tell him—

But this third task wasn’t about Ned any longer. It wasn’t even about the triumph of science over illogic. No; it was about Gareth. The year his father died and Gareth had been shipped off to Harrow, he had openly hungered for the sort of easy camaraderie the other boys enjoyed. He’d thought that desire had left him. Instead, it had only lurked like some subterranean beast, waiting to be drawn to the surface by Madame Esmerelda.

Gareth damned her.

“White.” The word tasted chilly and forbidding in his mouth. The delivery was just as his grandfather had taught him.

White looked up. “My lord?”

Gareth stared at the man’s pen, the source of his annoyance, in veiled frustration. What was he to say? He couldn’t order the man to leave off doing the work he was hired to do. Gareth made an impatient motion with his hand. The excessively competent White correctly deciphered the gesture as put down that damned pen and listen to what I have to say.

No doubt he expected some discussion of Gareth’s estate. Unfortunate that he was getting small talk. Friendly talk.

“Are you married?”

The attentive look in White’s eyes faded into puzzlement. “Yes, my lord.”

“Have you any children?”

“Four.”

Silence stretched. Gareth bit his cheek and shut the estate book on the desk in front of him with a slam. Befriend his man of business? The very notion was impossible. Their situations were entirely dissimilar. Gareth paid the man’s salary. White was a family man, with children and a wife. Surely, Gareth had nothing to say to him. It was absolutely ludicrous to suppose friendship possible.

Ludicrous seemed to be Madame Esmerelda’s style.

Gareth performed a mental inventory of his library. Volumes on agriculture. Texts in Latin and Greek. Taxonomy; biology; natural philosophy. Mathematics. He’d read them all. Many, more than once.

He could think of no fewer than six ways to prove Pythagoras’s theorem off the top of his head. He had at least twelve ideas for new industries to stimulate employment in his East Midlands holdings.

The ways he could think to continue this conversation totaled zero.

He tried

anyway. “What think you of the weather?”

He could hear the cold formality in his own voice. It clanged, unpleasant even to his own ears. He sounded as if he were embarking on his own personal branch of the Spanish Inquisition—perhaps the heretical meteorology division.

“My lord?” Unsurprisingly, White looked uneasy. “Are you feeling well?”

Gareth flung the ledger on his desk open. Numbers—cold, yet comforting—sprang to life in front of him. The sums detailed debits and credits, purchases and sales. Feed for livestock; investments in a new pottery-works on one of his properties that had been recently connected to a rail line. Money flew forth and trickled back, adding up after months and months into substantial sums. Every last penny was accounted for between these pages.