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Bleeding? Elizabeth hated that she cared, but she couldn’t stop her gasp, and she immediately turned to James. She would never forgive him for what he’d done, and she certainly never wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want him to be hurt.
“I’m not bleeding,” James muttered.
Caroline looked up at her husband and said, “She hit him twice.”
“Twice?” Blake grinned. “Really?”
“It’s not funny,” Caroline said.
Blake looked down at James. “You let her hit you twice?”
“Hell, I taught her.”
“That, good friend, shows an incredible lack of foresight on your part.”
James scowled at him. “I was trying to teach her to protect herself.”
“From whom? You?”
“No! From—Oh, for the love of God, what does it matter, I—” James looked up, saw Elizabeth carefully inching away, and bounded to his feet. “You’re not going anywhere,” he growled, grabbing at the sash at the waist of her costume.
“Let me go! Ouch—oh—James!” She wiggled like a fish out of water, unsuccessfully trying to turn around so that she could glare at him. “Let. Me. GO!”
“Not in a million years.”
Elizabeth looked at Caroline pleadingly. Surely another woman would be sympathetic to her plight. “Please tell him to let me go.”
Caroline glanced from James to Blake and then back at Elizabeth. Clearly torn between her allegiance to her old friend and her sympathy for Elizabeth, she stammered, “I—I don’t know what’s going on, except he didn’t tell you who he was.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Well,” Caroline hedged, “James rarely tells people who he is.”
“What?” Elizabeth squeaked, whirling around so she could shove James in his aristocratic shoulder. “You have done this before? You despicable, amoral—”
“Enough!” James roared.
Six costumed heads peeked out from around the corner.
“I really think we ought to move inside,” Caroline said weakly.
“Unless you prefer an audience,” Blake added.
“I want to go home,” Elizabeth stated, but no one was listening to her. She didn’t know why this surprised her; no one had been listening to her all night.
James nodded curtly at Blake and Caroline and then motioned to the house with a quick jerk of his head. His grip tightened on the sash of Elizabeth’s dress, and when he started to walk inside the house, there was nothing she could do but follow.
A few moments later she found herself in the library, the cruelest stroke of irony. HOW TO MARRY A MARQUIS was still lying on the shelf, just where she’d left it.
Elizabeth suppressed an irrational urge to laugh. Mrs. Seeton had been right; there was a marquis around every corner. Nobility everywhere, just lying in wait to humiliate poor, unsuspecting women.
And that was what James had done. Every time he’d given her a lesson on how to catch a husband—a marquis, damn him—he’d humiliated her. Every time he’d tried to teach her how to smile or flirt, she’d been demeaned. And when he’d kissed her, pretending to be nothing more than a humble estate manager, he’d soiled her with his lies.
If James hadn’t been holding on to her sash, she probably would have grabbed the damned book and heaved it out the window—and then pushed him right along after it.
Elizabeth felt his eyes on her face, burning into her skin, and when she looked up at him, she realized that he had followed her gaze to Mrs. Seeton’s book.
“Don’t say anything,” she whispered, painfully aware of the presence of the Ravenscrofts. “Please don’t mortify me like that.”
