Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [77]
He was still staring at the page where his birth had been recorded. His sardonic expression hadn't changed, but there was turmoil in his dark eyes. Jessica wondered whether it was the entry directly below that troubled him. It had saddened her, and she had grieved for him.
"I lost my parents in the year after you lost your mother," she said. "They were killed in a carriage accident."
"Fever," he said. "She died of fever. He entered that event, too." Dain sounded surprised.
"Who entered your father's death?" she asked. "That isn't your hand."
He shrugged. "His secretary, I suppose. Or the vicar. Or some officious busybody." He pushed her hand away and slammed the ancient Bible shut. "If you want family history, we've volumes of it on the shelves at the far end of this room. It's recorded in tedious detail, going back to the Roman conquest, I daresay."
She opened the Bible again. "You are the head of the family and you must put me in it now," she said gently. "You've acquired a wife, and you must write it down."
"Must I, indeed, this very minute?" He lifted an eyebrow. "And suppose I decide not to keep you after all? Then I should have to go back and blot out your name."
She left the bookstand, crossed to a study table, took up a pen and inkwell, and returned to him. "I should like to see you try to get rid of me," she said.
"I could get an annulment," he said. "On grounds that I was of unsound mind when the marriage was contracted. Lord Portsmouth's marriage was annulled on those grounds, only the day before yesterday."
He took the pen from her all the same, and made a grand ceremony of recording their marriage in his bold script, with a few flourishes to heighten the effect.
"Ah, handsomely done," she said, leaning over his arm to look at the entry. "Thank you, Dain. Now I shall be part of the Ballisters' history." She was aware that her breasts were resting on his arm.
So was he. He jerked away as though they'd been a pair of hot coals.
"Yes, you have been immortalized in the Bible," he said. "I expect you'll be demanding a portrait next, and I shall have to move a famous ancestor into storage to make room for you."
Jessica had hoped that a bath, dinner, and a glass or two of port would calm him down, but he was as skittish now as he'd been when they'd entered Athcourt's gates.
"Is Athcourt haunted?" she asked, strolling with studied casualness to a tall set of bookshelves. "Should I be prepared for clanking chains or hideous wails at midnight or quaintly attired ladies and gentlemen wandering the corridors?"
"Gad, no. Who put such an idea into your head?"
"You." She stood on tiptoe to examine a shelf of poetic works. "I cannot tell whether you're bracing yourself to tell me something ghastly, or you're in expectation of something ghastly. I thought the something might be Ballister ghosts popping out of the woodwork."
"I'm not bracing myself for anything." He stalked to the fireplace. "I am not braced. I am perfectly at ease. As I should be, in my own damned house."
Where he'd learned his family's history from a tutor, instead of his father, she thought. Where his mother had died when he was ten years old…a loss that still seemed to hurt him deeply. Where there was an immense, ancient family Bible he'd never looked into.
She wondered if he'd known his dead half-siblings' names, or whether he'd read them this day, as she had, for the first time.
She took out a handsome, very expensively bound volume of Don Juan.
"This must have been your purchase," she said. "The last cantos of Don Juan were published scarcely four years ago. I didn't know you had a taste for Byron's work."
He had wandered to the fireplace. "I don't. I met him during a trip to Italy. I bought the thing because its author was a wicked fellow and its contents were reputedly indecent."
"Which is to say, you haven't read it." She opened the book and selected a stanza from the first