“Let’s not start with insults,” he said in his most charming, polished tone, the one that had never worked on her.
She grumbled something abouttoo many to choose fromunder her breath, and, if not for the seriousness of what he wanted to discuss, he would have grinned.
When she closed the door and turned to face him, arms crossed, without making any move to invite him to the small sitting area by the fire, he launched his first volley.
“Letitia,” he said. “Why did you not return to Belgium with the Lightholders?”
Unless the woman had even more secrets than he’d ever imagined, she must have guessed the question. Still, her face turned bone white, and her body became almost alarmingly still.
“I didn’t care to,” she said, not at all convincingly. “I spent most of my life there, and now I want to remain in England.”
“Bollocks,” he accused, relieved when her irritation made itself known in a bright flush on her cheeks. She’d been looking far too pale. “What’s the real reason?”
It struck him in a sudden wave of horror that he did not deserve to feel, that she might have left a lover behind. Or,oh God—a husband? Surely not.
“It is not any of your business,” she said archly. “It isn’t as though you aren’t keeping secrets. So, it’s clear that neither of us is revealing everything.”
This was fair, a fact which Ezra found exceedingly irksome.
“Fine,” he said. “Do you want to know what I didn’t say? That I have been trying to figure out how Iris is associated with my family. I have determined that it’s not any of the current dukes?—”
“Yes, yes, they are all utterly besotted,” Letty muttered, not entirely making it sound like a compliment, and he felt so oddly pleased that she always seemed tounderstand.
“So, it must have been one of the uncles,” he said. “If not my grandfather himself. Whichever one it was, he dallied with some woman—whoever Iris’ grandmother might have been—then produced her mother. As far as I can tell, Iris wasn’t bornon the right side of the blanket, either. Or maybe she was, and the mother just clung to the aristocratic connection—no matter how many generations ago it happened on the Lightholder side.”
“Well, that does rather stand to reason, if we assume that Iris’ mother was telling the truth about her parentage—which I am not saying we absolutelycan, but if we do. So, why the secrecy?”
Ezra's words slipped out before he even knew he was going to say them.
“I need to know if someone is going to try to come take Iris from me,” he said, feeling their truth as they left his lips. “Because I need to know what threads to pull to stop that.”
Everything in her softened. “Oh, Ezra,” she said, and he wondered if she even realized that she had used his given name. He wondered if she could possibly understand how lovely it felt to hear it.
“Someone left her withme,” he said quietly. “She’s safe here. She’s happy here, I think. And I will not let any of my bloody cousins and their goddamned ‘family loyalty’ try to interfere with that. This is her home. And I intend for it to stay that way. I want to protect her.”
There was an unmistakablyfondlook on the governess’s face. He had seen it before—directed at Sarah, directed at Iris—but never toward him.
Ezra wasn’t the kind of man who looked down his nose at a good opportunity. He seized his moment.
“And I will protect you, too, Letty—if only you tell me what it is that you are hiding from.”
CHAPTER 14
Letty turned her face from him. She could not.
God, she should never have let him into her room.
“Leave it alone,” she said, perfectly aware that it sounded like she was begging.
When she dared to glance back, there was a determined look on his face.
“I can’t, Letitia,” he said. “You are here. You are a member of this household. You are mine to protect. And I can’t protect you from something that I don’t know how to guard against. I don’t even know what it is—but I know it exists, and I...” He shook his head. “It’s driving me mad, because I need to know how to keep you safe. You must tell me.”
Something inside Letitia split into two. There was a small, sensible part of her that understood that Ezra was saying this outof the same kind of concern that he had just shown toward Iris. She had been touched when he spoke of his desire to protect the child. She should, that quiet voice reasoned, feel the same when he was speaking about her.
But a much louder part of her was not being sensible at all. It didn’t hear Ezra—it heard another nobleman, another gentleman, telling her what to do. Telling her that she wasowned. That she washis.
And that loud, frightened part of her didn’t hear Ezra at all. It heard Peter.
