Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [86]
He turned and looked down into his wife's pale, upturned face. Her eyes were wide with shock. Then, incredibly, they were glistening…with tears.
"How dare you?" she said, angrily blinking the tears back. "How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one— and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son."
"I might have known you could make even this romantic," he said mockingly. "Will you make the hot-blooded harlot out to be a martyr to— to what, Jess? Love?"
He turned away from the portrait, because the howling had started inside him, and he wanted to scream, Why? Yet he knew the answer, always had. If his mother had loved him— or pitied him at least, if she could not love him— she would have taken him with her. She would not have left him alone, in hell.
"You don't know what her life was like," she said. "You were a child. You couldn't know what she felt. She was a foreigner, and her husband was old enough to be her father."
"Like Byron's Donna Julia, you mean?" His voice dripped acid irony. "Perhaps you're right. Perhaps Mama would have done better with two husbands, of five and twenty."
"You don't know whether your father treated her well or ill," his wife persisted, like a teacher with a stubborn student. "You don't know whether he made the way easy for her or impossible. For all you know, he may have made her wretched— which is more than likely, if his portrait offers an accurate indication of his character."
And what of me? he wanted to cry. You don't know what it was like for me, the hideous thing she left behind, shut out, shunned, mocked, abused. Left…to endure…and pay, dearly, for what others took for granted: tolerance, acceptance, a woman's soft hand.
He was appalled at his own inner rage and grief, the hysteria of a child…who had died five and twenty years ago.
He made himself laugh and meet her steady grey gaze with the mocking mask he wore so well. "If you've taken my sire in dislike, feel free to exile him to the North Tower. You may hang her in his place. Or in the chapel, for all I care."
He headed for the door. "You needn't consult me about redecorating. I know no female can live two days in a house and leave anything as it was. I shall be much astonished if I can find my way about when I return."
"You're going away?" Her tones remained steady. When he paused and turned at the threshold, she was looking out the window, her color back to normal, her countenance composed.
"To Devonport," he said, wondering why her composure chilled him so. "A wrestling match. Sherburne and some other fellows. I'm to meet them at nine o'clock. I need to pack."
"Then I must change orders for dinner," she said. "I think I'll dine in the morning room. But I had better have a nap before then, or I shall fall asleep into my plate. I have been over only about one quarter of the house, yet I feel as though I had walked from Dover to Land's End."
He wanted to ask what she thought of the house, what she liked— apart from the soul-shattering portrait of his mother— and what she didn't like— besides the offensive landscape in the dining room, which he hadn't liked, either, he recalled.
If he were not going away, he could have found out over dinner, in the cozy intimacy of the morning room.
Intimacy, he told himself, was the last thing he needed now. What he needed was to get away, where she could not turn him upside down and inside out with her heart-stopping "discoveries"…or torment him with her scent, her silken skin, the soft curves of her slender body.
It took all his self-control to walk, not run, from the room.
* * *
Jessica spent ten minutes trying to calm down. It didn't work.
Unwilling to cope with Bridget or anyone else, she ran her own bath. Athcourt, fortunately, boasted the rare luxury of hot and cold running water, even on the second floor.
Neither solitude nor the bath calmed her down,