AllFreeNovel
Share Us
To hear her first name on those lips was the least helpful sound in which she should indulge. It brought back a cart-full of memories she did not care to retrieve—memories which ended up in rejection and bitterness.
“Miss Kendall.” She corrected him with a glacial inflection.
His decadent lips had the temerity of curving up in a smirk. Knowing, sarcastic, hypnotic. “Otilia,” he insisted, uncaring if he uttered it for the third time in as many minutes.
Her name reverberated deeper, with a trace of command and another subtle quality kin to seduction. It shifted her insides as if someone displaced the floorboards without warning, making her lose her footing. She did not have the luxury to fall. Not here. Not ever. And not for this man who had snubbed her before when she had been a tender-hearted girl barely out of the schoolroom. She was not that girl anymore. Twenty-six, on the shelf, twice orphaned, destitute, and hopefully out of this manor sooner rather than later. She steeled herself, cast a wooden look at him, not allowing him to give the cards at his will.
“As you wish, Lord Thornton.” She would not pronounce his first name, not if she could avoid it, for the rest of her days on this earth.
Edmund had been the man inhabiting impossible dreams. The name she used to repeat in the night, in her round-eyed reveries. It had meant the chance of happiness, fulfilment, and escape from her lonely destiny. It meant the possibility of something more, and out of her world. But he had been quick to shatter all of that, her heart included. And made her face the cold reality of her situation.
A
Eight years away had not prepared Edmund for the woman before him. When he last visited, she had marked him with her tenderness and openness, wearing the proverbial heart on her sleeve. Her enormous, long-lashed, fringed eyes hid nothing. They did not strive to do so. Her presence had felt like fresh air after spring rain with the scent of grass and flowers. But at twenty-five, he had already become the disillusioned, sceptical scoundrel he would forever be. None of her displays convinced him of their authenticity.
Having made a fortune on his own and with a title on the way, women did not spare attempts to ensnare him. One of them had succeeded and turned him into a cynical bastard.
At this moment, he was confronted with this block of iceberg, giving nothing away. The look she dispensed him with rivalled that of a queen high on her pedestal. Never mind she was an orphaned miss, with no prospects. The way she bore herself left nothing to be desired from a fine lady of the ton. It got to him. It really got to him.
After their last conversation, conversation being just a metaphor, he kept away. His sporadic visits to his cousin ceased. He had left that summer determined not to come back. He returned to London focused on increasing his fortune, diving into work, and nothing else. The occasional mistress or dinner party did not divert him from his pursuits, hell-bent on oblivion.
His memory would not let go of her though. In the most unexpected of instants, he would remember a word she had said, a look on her flawless face, or a girlish mannerism. And he attacked work with even more eagerness. In his mind, she had been one more of those title-hungry misses he met all too often. More so because she had the advantage of her connection with the late Earl. For him, her fresh innocence seemed false. Her naivety fabricated. Her sunny optimism a strategy for seduction. In his experience, this was what women did. Prevented from building wealth on their own, their only recourse would be marrying into it. But he would serve as no conduit for greedy women. He had almost fallen into this trap. And learned his lesson.
Here she stood, however, every bit of the detached woman he did not imagine her to be. But what he imagined played no role in her stance. It played no part in the way she had matured, blossomed. A fully-grown woman of unique beauty. A beauty of which she barely seemed aware. Contrary to him, whose body responded to every one of her gestures. That she still owned the weaponry to affect him this much was proof he had to do something about it. And soon.
“What I wish for is a bath sent to my room at once,” he ordered. He swung out of the room before she induced him to do something he would regret later, like inviting her to join him.
A
Otilia poured water in the cauldron to boil it for his majesty’s bath, fuming at the same temperature as the water would be in a few minutes. The insensitive scoundrel knew they were short of servants and did not have the decency of offering help. All right, so this was an unfair thought. He inherited the title and the prerogative of being served. Her fury did not abate, though.
The menial task sent her mind down memory lane. Edmund had been a constant, if not a frequent visitor to the manor, and he showed genuine affection for Uncle Earnest. She had always nurtured fondness for him. He never forgot to bring her a gift or to hear her blabbing about the things her governess taught her.
As she turned eighteen, he had spent the whole summer in Leicester. At twenty-five, his handsomeness was reaching its peak, but still withholding a boyish air on the side. She fell hard for him.
There had been countless strolls in the garden, riding with her maid as companion, and conversations in the moonlight. She could barely hide her infatuation. Did not even try, to be honest.
A few days before he left, she decided to declare her feelings. She had fantasised about it for a long time, imagining him reciprocating her. The giddiness inside her grew to bursting point. Dinner over, she approached him as he strode the hallway to his bedchamber. She gave him a handkerchief she had embroidered with his initials. After saying she loved him, she placed her hands on his broad shoulders, lifted on her toes and deposited a kiss on the corner of his mouth.
The bristles greeted her together with the warmth of his skin and the soap of his recent bath. She wanted to stay like this forever.
Only when she got down and looked at him did she see his scowl and realised something had gone terribly wrong. He stared at her with eyes turned icy and stony.
“Paving the path to
becoming a countess, I see.” The voice she always listened to as the most beautiful opera now rang like bullets shot at her.
Her honey eyes went from starry to confused, to hurt. Not for a moment had she thought about his future title. All she had in her mind was him, his intelligence, his gorgeousness. His unfeeling words broke the last of her girlish illusions. She wanted to deny his accusation, but his flinty expression said he would never believe her.
She ran to her chamber, closed the door and cried for what seemed like weeks. Like the girl she still was, she avoided him for the remainder of his stay.
It dawned on her then; she was a nobody and always would be. With no breeding, no parentage, and no pedigree, no decent man would have her as a wife. She had been condemned to loneliness from the start. Even with the support of her uncle and aunt, she would need to fend for herself in this world.
Edmund hurt her so acutely, she could still hear his merciless words in her mind. And in her heart. In the coming years, she hardened both. She shut herself from any and every man who tried to come closer. Many of them confirmed her fears, propositioning her to become their mistress. The thought she might be mistress, not wife material had appalled and infuriated her to such a boiling point, she had been a hairbreadth from slapping several of them, be it at balls, soirees, tea-parties or garden-parties. But she refused to become a scandal. More than she already was that is, and distress Earnest and Agatha in the process. She would not disappoint them though, the only family she possessed. They gave the impression of being convinced their protection would be enough, but it was not. She must accept it, end of conversation. It did not lessen the sorrow, though—even less the distrust she had for the new Earl.
These remembrances held no place in her life, however, and even less in her present circumstances. Pushing them away, she concentrated on the task at hand.
Warm water in pails, she carried them from the kitchen to the main bedchamber two stories above the kitchen. It contained a tub in the dressing room, making it easier to prepare the bath.
