Page 12 of A Remarkable Rogue

He frowned into his cup. Apparently, also with lots of whiskey.

He couldn’t fathom their motivations for being so polite to him, nor did he trust them. He’d called today at Harlow House and was subjecting himself to a very uncomfortable tea with the woman who should have been his aunt only to learn more about Sydney Rowland. After all, few women in thetonwere privy to more gossip than Lady Agnes. He’d been prepared to raise St James’s name, if necessary, in order to convince her to speak with him. But to his great surprise, when the butler told her that he was waiting in the entry hall to call on her, she scurried downstairs, gleefully grabbed his arm, and pulled him into the sitting room.

Granted, Nate didn’t know them well, but the entire female contingent of the Sinclair family struck him as mad.

Lady Agnes was the most flamboyant woman he’d ever met, currently dressed in a yellow turban and orange day dress with large rings on all her fingers, strings of long pearls encircling her neck, and dozens of bracelets jangling from both wrists. But at least she was pleased to see him, unlike Isabel Sinclair. Whenever he’d accidentally met the Countess of St James during the past few weeks, she’d blanched at the sight of him as if seeing a ghost. But then, wasn’t she? While he hadn’t yet met his half sister, Elizabeth, he wondered if he needed to come armed for his own protection when he did.

Or, he supposed, he could just use the pistols sitting on Lady Agnes’s writing desk.Good Lord.A society matron who kept a brace of dueling pistols amid feathered quills, inkwells, and monogrammed stationery.

Averyinteresting family.

“It’s so very nice of you to stop by, Captain.” Agnes reached for the plate of lemon biscuits and helped herself to one. “We’ve been hoping that you’d start spending more time at Harlow House.”

He frowned at her odd choice of words. More time? He had no reason to spendanytime here and no reason that his Sinclair relatives should want him to.

“Thank you for speaking with me, my lady.” He took a sip of his tea and nearly coughed at the strength of the whiskey. “St James said you might be helpful.”

“Anything for family.” She offered him the plate of biscuits.

He declined them as he corrected gently, “I’m not part of your family, ma’am.”

He wanted firm boundaries drawn between them. He was not a Sinclair and never would be.

She waved away his comment as if it were nothing more than a fleeting observation on the weather. “Nevertheless, we are all so proud of you.”

“Pardon?” Proud of a by-blow? He suspiciously eyed her cup of whiskey-tea. How much of the stuff had she drunk before he’d arrived?

“What you’ve done in the army, of course, in rising to captain in a field promotion, how well you fought in the battle at Toulouse, the way Arthur recognized you…” With a beaming smile, she lifted her cup in toast to him. “You’ve done England and yourself proud, my boy.”

He was unable to follow that stream of information. “Arthur?”

“Wellesley.” She blinked and explained slowly as if he were a bedlamite, “The Duke of Wellington.”

“Oh yes. Him.” He hid the smile playing at his lips by raising his teacup to his mouth. “Arthur.”

“Tell me.” She lowered her voice and leaned toward him. “Were the accounts of Waterloo correct? Was the fighting truly as gruesome as the papers reported?”

Nate stared into his cup. He didn’t want to remember that day, how charge after charge of men clashed on the field, how the screams of dying men and horses filled the air, how the booming explosions of the artillery reverberated through every inch of his body so fiercely that he felt it for days afterward. In some places on the field, blood ran as deep as a horse’s fetlock, and he could still feel the agonizing pain shooting through his right arm in its ceaseless slashing of his saber to kill the enemy before they killed him. When his horse was shot out from beneath him, he’d been forced to go forward on foot through the hell of it, certain he would die. Blood covered his uniform and splattered across his face, ran down his legs into his boots where it squished between his toes.

He took a large swallow of his tea to fortify himself against the memories of that day and answered quietly, “Worse.”

“I suspected as much.” Lady Agnes gave her head a slow, knowing shake and sat back against the settee. “The newspapermen think women cannot handle information about war without fainting straight away, developing the vapors, or some other such nonsense, and so do not publish all the facts.” She shook a ring-laden finger at him, then confided as if sharing a secret, “Mark my words. We women are stronger and more capable than men give us credit for being.”

“I have no doubt of that, my lady.” Once again, his thoughts strayed unbidden to Sydney Rowland. Exactly how strong and capable would she prove herself to be?

“The Sinclair family is proud of you.” Her eyes sparkled. “You showed yourself to be a great hero at Toulouse when you single-handedly captured the enemy’s cannon line so our English boys could advance and claim the field.”

He grimaced. He didn’t want to be the hero everyone proclaimed him to be. Certainly not when so many braver men had died that day. “An exaggeration, I assure you.”

She arched a brow. “You captured the commanding officer of the cannon line by yourself, did you not?”

He had done that, in fact, but answered unassumingly, “While other men did the more dangerous work of taking the cannons.”

“Which they could not have done without you.” She shook another finger at him as if she were scolding her nephew St James. “Do not hide your valor, dear boy.”

His gut knotted. It wasn’t valor that had propelled him into the heart of the battle with the mind-numbing ferocity of a madman or kept him advancing even when he could have retreated and regrouped as the other men in the cavalry had done.

He’d simply stopped caring if he lived or died.