Proof by Seduction (Carhart 1)

“He was a complicated man.”

Another pause. This one, Jenny felt, she must fill. She walked round Gareth’s desk and glanced at the papers stacked on top. Columns of figures filled them.

“No drawings of birds this time?” she asked.

“It’s after noon. I bundle up all the things I care about after noon. Now, it’s only estate business.”

“Hmm.” Jenny poked under a stack of hot-pressed paper and found more figures. “Where did they go?”

He crossed to her side and slid out a drawer. A thick sheaf of papers, bound with green cotton tape, lay inside. Gareth removed it almost reverently and untied the ribbon.

“Here.” He ducked his head as he spoke, as if he were embarrassed. “I’m working on this monograph.” He shuffled pages—charts, drawings, and a great deal of text. When he looked up, there was a sparkle in his eye.

“You see, I’ve been thinking about Lamarck’s theory—” He cut himself off and suddenly straightened, flattening the paper under flat palms. “That is to say—I fit everything I care for in the mornings. I have another appointment this evening in any event. And you don’t care about Lamarck, anyway.”

Jenny laid her hand over his. “But you do.”

He glanced at the door, as wary as a child sneaking sweets from the pantry. “Well…”

Jenny plucked the pages from beneath his hands. “So this is everything you care for.”

She flipped through his work before finding the ink sketches at the end.

“Here,” Gareth said. “That’s a male macaw. I wish I could show you the bright red of those wing feathers. There’s no color here in England to match it. And there’s the female, less splashy—”

He turned the page and froze.

Because the sketch on the next page was no impatient ink drawing of a macaw. It was her. He’d even labeled it: Jenny.

He’d drawn her in the same rough style he employed with the birds, strong, dark lines that hinted at movement and luminosity. Jenny could not have pointed to any one feature that was drawn incorrectly. And yet—

“I don’t look like that,” she protested.

Because the woman in Gareth’s sketches seemed ethereal, light bouncing off dark eyes and coiled hair.

He compressed his lips together.

“You do to me,” he finally said. He reached for the papers and stacked them together, binding them up again.

“Gareth.”

He didn’t look at her but wound the tape savagely around his work and cinched a knot. “I told you those pages held everything I cared about.”

“Gareth.”

He hefted his drawings from hand to hand.

“Some people,” he said, looking down as if addressing the desk, “think that being a marquess means you sit in the House of Lords and collect myriad rents from dreary little tenants. They think it means you enter the dining hall before the earls and after the dukes. They think it means ceremonial robes, and plenty to eat even in times of hunger. They think you can sample a bevy of eager, beautiful women.”

“And do you not?”

His hand danced idly down his drawings. “Maybe one beautiful woman. But that is not what it means to be a marquess here in England. You see, somewhere in my distant past there was a first lord, lifted above the common folk as reward for a great service to his king.”

“What was it, with your ancestors?”

“Drubbing the Welsh, actually. But you see, the title is a reward with a sting—it is not a onetime payment for services rendered. It is a promise that condemns your firstborn son, and his, and his thereafter. It binds them, through the title, in service to the land. My grandfather was harsh, but there was a reason for it.”

He set his bound drawings in the drawer and then slowly, firmly, slid it closed.

“When a marquess takes a man’s pound in rents, he does not just make a profit. He makes a pledge. I cannot sleep at night, sometimes, thinking about those pledges. Should I establish a cotton mill, like the ones in Manchester? On the one hand, they provide employment, and if my dependents are starving, I am responsible. On the other, the accidents that inevitably result…Well, I am responsible for those, too. It did not take me long to realize why my grandfather deprecated laughter. There’s little room for it in the marquessate. There’s too much human suffering, and too little a marquess can do about it.”

“You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Jenny said. “Hundreds of other lords don’t—” She couldn’t make herself tell him to become like everyone else. “There’s no warmth in your life. How can you stand it?”

He made a little gesture. “Spare me your pity. Do listen to yourself. Poor Gareth—forced to be a marquess. I imagine the human suffering between me and my tenants is distributed in a relatively inequitable fashion.”

“Hire an estate manager. Let others share the responsibility.”

He spread his hands. “And who would I trust? I was born to do this. Nobody else has gone through the training my grandfather required. And it is my responsibility. How could I ask another to shoulder it?”

It sat between them, that crystalline thing. He’d been taught that he was bound ruthlessly into service, obligated to break his spirit against his iron-hard will. She wished she could despise him for it.

She could not. In fact, she was very afraid that the emotion that caused her hands to tremble was something close to the opposite. The man who hollowed himself out for the sake of a burden undertaken by his many-times-great-grandfather did not falter from responsibility, nor try to evade it.

Whatever it was she felt now, she knew it could not be love. Love would not feel like this. She would not feel his own hurt, as if she were clutching shards of glass to her chest.

“You understand—” He stopped, and took her hand. His fingers seemed cool against her own. His words sounded slow and metallic. “You understand,” he finally continued, “why I am telling you this. It is not so you will pity me. It is because you need to know I will never risk legitimate sons.”

Jenny’s heart thumped. The corner of his lip curled. Not a smile, but an expression of ineffable sadness.

“You see,” he explained, “I could never inflict the marquessate on anyone I cared about.”

All the best of Gareth, Jenny thought, had been bound over to serve Lord Blakely. She turned his hand over in her palm and squeezed.

“So it won’t bother you to inflict it on Ned?”

She intended to tease him, to make him forget his own pain. But he merely shook his head—not in answer, she thought, but frustration. “Now,” he said softly, “you understand why I tried not to care for the boy.”

Jenny looked away. Her chin trembled. He captured it with his fingers and turned her face to his. “And that,” he said gently, “is why I will buy you anything you want.”

He kissed her as if she were the sole source of sunlight. It felt as if he were spearing her with giant wooden splinters.

He wanted her to stay. He would give her anything she wanted. But what she wanted was to be able to respect herself. And the more he offered to buy her, the le

ss likely the prospect seemed.

AFTER JENNY LEFT, grim responsibility once again beckoned to Gareth. He finished dressing. The journey to Ned’s home was short, but weighed heavily on his heart.

But when he stepped onto the walk outside the stone stairs that led up to his cousin’s door, he stopped in his tracks, unable to believe what he saw.

He’d pleaded with Ware and finally cajoled the man to agree to a second appointment. He’d informed Ned of the time most specifically. He’d underscored the importance of these discussions: As the days passed, gossip grew. Another tense week, and Ned could be ostracized, perhaps for good. Lady Kathleen was already the object of both pity and scorn.

But the situation could still be saved for the two of them.

Rather, it might have been saved, were it not for the scene unfolding before Gareth’s eyes.

The good news was that Ned was dressed. And washed and shaved. The bad news was, he was not waiting for Gareth in the parlor as instructed. Ned was stepping into a closed carriage. Without Gareth. Too-loud laughter rang from the conveyance as his cousin reached for the door.

The out-of-kilter sound of that laugh was all too familiar. Gareth remembered that lopsided tempo. At Cambridge, it had always been mixed with loud conversation and the heady smell of cheap spirits. It had heralded annoying interruptions to Gareth’s valuable study time. And complaints, of course, never had any effect on drunken men. Gareth’s skin prickled in visceral reminder. It was still light out, and the men were already drunk. And Gareth had specifically told Ned to wait for him.

Gareth jumped from his own carriage and strode toward his cousin. “Wait one moment!” he called.

Ned’s head turned. Gareth couldn’t make out his expression from this distance, but he didn’t need to be able to see his cousin’s face to translate the sharp jerk of his head back toward the carriage. It was no surprise when Ned pulled himself in. Another fellow—hatless, cravat-less, unbuttoned coat flapping untidily in the wind—looked around the street with a secretive air and then ducked inside the carriage, as well.