Chapter 10 #2
Her expression dampened his enthusiasm. No—it was outright dread that pierced him.
“Oh, yes?”
“I asked about her medallion,” the governess said, her fingers tapping restlessly on the arm of the chair. “And she said that her mother was a Lightholder.”
“She really said that?”
The medallion indicated that the little girl was somehow associated with his family. He’d known this from the start. But for the child, through her mother, to outright claim that she was a Lightholder?
It wasn’t as though the thought had never occurred to him, but he had not considered it likely.
“She didn’t say anything more,” Miss Knightley said, frowning in concern. “I don’t think she knew anything more. She said ‘Lighthomer’ at first, but recognized the proper name. She did say her mother was dead, though.”
“Oh, hell and damnation,” Ezra muttered, massaging the space between his eyes. Then, he glanced up. “Apologies, Miss Knightley.”
Again, she waved him off.
“I have heard worse. And I can’t deny that I thought much the same when she told me. That poor girl.”
Ezra nodded, thinking. “And her father?”
The governess shook her head. “She didn’t mention anyone, and I didn’t pry. But I got the implication that it was just her and her mother, alone. Nor did she say how she got here,” she added before he could ask.
He nodded again.
“Do you think it’s possible?” Miss Knightley asked after a moment. “That her mother was truly a member of your family?”
Ezra wanted to deny it on impulse, but he recognized this as the na?ve thought of a child, not the rational allowance of a grown man.
He’d been raised to be wary of pretenders to the family name, to fear interlopers and opportunists who would seek to enrich themselves by claiming connection to the Lightholder name.
But that wasn’t the same as knowledge, and Ezra prided himself on being a man who sought knowledge. Facts. Truth.
And did he trust his grandfather to have been faithful to his wife? His uncle? Any of his cousins?
Well, all right, he actually could not see his cousins having affairs. The lot of them were absurdly besotted with their wives.
“It is… possible,” he allowed, all too aware of Miss Knightley’s eyes on him as she waited for a response. “Who knows what they all get up to?”
She frowned at this.
“What?” he demanded.
She scrunched her nose. “I am sure it’s not my place to say...” she said demurely.
He fixed her with a droll look, and she rolled her eyes.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine! It’s just… You don’t seem to like them very much. Your family, that is.”
Well, that was his own fault for pressing her, he supposed.
“There is no quarrel between us,” he said, which was mostly true.
“Really?” she asked, looking doubtful. “Because they do rather talk as though you are somewhat more absent than the rest of the clan.”
Ezra cursed himself for all the times that he’d thought that it was nice to have someone who wasn’t afraid of him around the house.
All the times that he’d been charmed by Miss Knightley’s obduracy.
This was his own fault. He should have hired some sort of shrinking violet who cowered whenever he spoke, no matter if this governess was the one who had clearly changed everything for Iris.
What was the point of being a duke, after all, if you could not be a selfish sot who cared only for your own interests?
But here he was, lying in the bed he had made for himself.
“They are charmers,” he insisted dismissively. “They use their polish to hide their secrets, flaunt their wealth to stop anyone from asking any questions.”
Her lips pressed together into a thin white line.
“Some people,” she said airily, “might suggest that you are charming. And some people—say, governesses who have been paid handsomely to keep a little girl’s presence in a ducal household quiet—might argue that you use your wealth to stop anyone from asking questions.”
This was an infuriatingly fair assessment. He tried another tactic.
“I attend all the formal family events,” he said. “Weddings. Funerals. Christenings.”
“Right. Well, I suppose that’s that, then. You are all as close as hand and glove then, aye?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” he accused.
She smiled as though she knew this was not true in the least. He sighed. His own damn bed, indeed.
“When I was a young man,” he began, surprising himself as the story spilled from his lips, “there was a fire at my uncle’s house. Xander and Helen’s house, now.”
“I know the story,” she said quietly. He supposed she would. There were still some places on the estate that bore scars from that dreadful night.
“Three of my uncles died. Three of my cousins inherited. My father lived—and that was good,” he hastened to add. “I wasn’t jealous of them for inheriting. I knew I was the lucky one for having my father survive. But he was badly burned.”
Miss Knightley—Letitia, he thought on a sudden impulse—watched him levelly with those blue, blue eyes.
“It was never the same after that,” he continued, tracing a finger over the carved arm of the chair. “The family, I mean. My father was on the outside. He wasn’t a real Lightholder, you see.”
“And you?” she prodded gently.
He scoffed. “Why should I want to play happy family with people who treated my father like he was less than nothing?” he demanded. “Even when they were alive, my uncles were clearly one set, and my father was on the outside. It wasn’t right.”
“And your cousins?” she asked after a moment’s consideration.
“What about them?”
She shrugged, but he could tell that it was for show, not because she was truly ambivalent about what she was saying.
“They seem kind. Friendly. Even to me—and I am just staff.”
He didn’t like the idea of her calling herself just anything, but he found that he disliked her defense of the rest of his family even less.
“I am perfectly aware of your admiration for them, Miss Knightley,” he said stiffly.
She looked disappointed in him, and he found that this dug deep inside his chest. She stood, as if to leave, and he mimicked her, not certain if he intended to stop her.
“You do recall that you are half Lightholder, too, don’t you?” she asked. “There is no them, not where you’re concerned.”
He raked his fingers through his hair.
“Not for lack of trying,” he said, aware that he sounded too bitter, that he was revealing too much of himself.
“My mother was never satisfied with my father. His dukedom struggled compared to the Godwin estate. She was never satisfied with that, never mind that she had more than she could ever need—a hundred times more than most other noblewomen, and a hundred thousand times more than most common women in this country. To her, he was always the impoverished, lowly man that her father had forced her to wed, because Grandfather Cornelius wanted to shore up his own power, his children’s happiness be damned. ”
“Are you sure it was about the money?” Letitia asked. “Women’s unhappiness is often about more than money. You know that, don’t you?”
He bristled.
“Don’t,” he said, taking a step forward.
He was behaving badly, he knew. He was taller than her, stronger, more powerful.
He had rights that she didn’t. It was unconscionable for him to step into her space like this, to come at her in anger, even if he would never, ever raise a hand to a woman.
But, in the grip of his temper, he could not seem to quite control himself.
Besides, she didn’t look intimidated in the least. She stubbornly squared her shoulders and looked up at him.
“Don’t what?” she retorted. “Don’t imply that women aren’t just thoughtless, venal creatures that only care about money?”
“That’s not what I was doing,” he snapped back. “You were implying that it was my father’s fault.”
She didn’t deny it. She just shrugged her shoulders.
“In my experience,” she said, “women’s problems usually don’t originate in money. They originate in men.”
He didn’t know what he hated more—the implied slight against his father, a man who had always been treated as if he were less than those around him, or the suggestion that other men had been bothering Letitia.
“Stop it,” he ordered.
Her eyes went dangerously narrow, but, hell, he was feeling dangerous, too.
“Of course, that would be what you say,” she said, a new thread of tension in her words.
Oh, now the slight was against him and his father.
“I am warning you, Miss Knightley,” he said, his voice rigid with ducal authority. It was the kind of tone that usually made people go pale and back away. “You need to stop this.”
Miss Knightley was not most people.
“I will not stop it!” This time, she took a step forward.
“I am tired of you all—all you gentlemen. You think the world revolves around you! You think you are the only ones who matter. And you...” She jabbed him in the chest. “You are as insufferable as any of them.” She fluttered her fingers near her temple.
“Always driving me mad, and being so troublesome, and—”
She jabbed him in the chest again, and he caught her fingers. Her hand was so warm in his.
She didn’t pull away.
Her palm flattened against his chest.
He took another, minuscule step forward.
His breath caught.
And when their lips finally met, it was because she had pressed up to meet him.