Chapter 18 #2
“What’s your favorite?” he asked.
She pressed a hand to her chest in mock affront. “I am a lady, sir! I am not going to use such language!”
“Oh, very well,” he said. “Tell me the circumstances in which you heard it, then, and I shall imagine to my heart’s content.”
He folded his hands beneath his chin in supplication, and how could she resist such a thing?
“Oh, very well,” she mimicked, feigning reluctance.
“It was my first trip back from Belgium, and I was in a high dudgeon, because my scoundrel brother had gotten married without telling me.” She scowled at the memory.
“And as we were crossing the Channel, there was this unexpected squall, and the wind ripped a rope out of a sailor’s hands.
He was young—fifteen perhaps? Anyway, the rope managed to wrap around both of his legs, and the knotted end hit him in the—“ She coughed delicately.
Hector blinked, then blanched as he realized her meaning.
“Goodness,” he said with feeling, fidgeting slightly in his seat.
“Just so,” she agreed. “The poor lad hollered like he’d had his arm cut off, and that was the day that I learned every possible word for a gentleman’s … gentlemanly portions.”
“Wow,” Hector said after a pause. “I … my goodness.”
Clio felt remarkably pleased with herself for stunning him speechless.
“Your brother married without telling you?” he asked after a moment. “It’s surprising, given that you and his wife seem very close.”
The reference to the circumstances surrounding her brother’s marriage left Clio torn between rolling her eyes and smiling fondly.
“Aaron, as you may have noticed,” she said, “has strong opinions.”
Hector’s brows inched up his forehead. “You don’t say,” he said mildly.
She snorted. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, you aren’t the only person he considered a threat to my reputation.
After he inherited, our elder brother died; Aaron was not initially intended to become the duke—he returned from his time at sea.
And he was positively determined that he was the most dreadful influence in the world and that he would, oh, I don’t know, glower me into a bad reputation? ”
She shrugged, because she and Aaron had worked through their difficulties, but she still found his initial reasoning to be unbearably idiotic.
“So, he sent me to Belgium, to live with our great aunt. I was quite put out about it. And then he married Phoebe, because he also had the idea that marrying would change his entire temperament and not make him glower all the time, I suppose. But the strangest thing is that he was right. They’re appallingly happy. ”
Hector was watching her keenly. “And you love them,” he said, a hint of marvel in his tone.
It was that bit of surprise that twisted something in her chest. It reminded her that Hector did not have a family to love and be loved by in return.
“I do love them,” she said, forcing herself to pause in appreciation of that fact.
Maybe Hector realized that they were treading too close to something dangerous, because he cleared his throat.
“But you returned to Belgium anyway?” he inquired, a note of forced politeness in his words.
“Oh! Yes,” she said, grateful for the reprieve. “I’d grown quite accustomed to it by that point. And things are rather less … rigid there. People still gossip, of course; gossip is everywhere. But there’s something rather less … judgmental about it.”
“That sounds nice,” he said wryly. “I wonder what that is like.”
There was real hurt beneath his comment, and maybe she shouldn’t have pressed, but she couldn’t help it, she found.
“I’m sorry that your family sent you away,” she said. “It was bad enough for me when my brother did it, and I was grown. As a child … I can’t even imagine …”
His jaw moved, like he was tasting the words in his mouth before he spoke.
“It’s different,” he said, though there wasn’t any censure in the words.
“Your brother … He might have been misguided, perhaps, but he sent you away out of love. He thought he was protecting you. My parents …” He let out a bitter huff of air.
“They were only protecting themselves. They loathed me. They saw my leg as a sign of failure, and so they hated to even look at me.”
“An injury isn’t a failure,” she said, surprised at her own vehemence.
“No matter if you were born with it or got it later on. My brother’s dearest friend is missing a hand, and he is a good man, a kind man.
And you—” She didn’t know if she should say this, but didn’t know if she could live with herself if she didn’t.
“You are good, too. And I’m sorry that your parents are dead because I can’t tell them that to their faces. ”
He gave her a look that said that he didn’t quite believe her.
“They wouldn’t have cared,” he said. “To them, I was unworthy from the start. If they could have disinherited me, they would have. But instead, they sent me away—made me a true Hephaestus at the forge,” he said wryly.
“You know your myths,” she said, faintly surprised. Her grandfather, Cornelius, had been obsessed with the Ancient Greeks, and the family had three generations of mythology-inspired names to show for it.
Hector rolled his eyes at her astonishment, but it was teasing, familiar.
“You London toffs think you invented everything,” he said without any real heat. “Even stories that are thousands of years old. You little snob.”
“You stubborn lout,” she responded with the same lack of true censure.
He chuckled, a brief sound, and then the silence between them resumed. But it wasn’t as painful now as it had been before, and Clio almost dared to hope that something good had happened between them, something brave and tender that might make all the difference.