Page 44 of A Lady of Conscience

She shook her head.

“I’m not incapable of it,” he said.

“Only very rarely amused?”

A frown clouded his brow. “I suppose, when one is the heir, one learns to maintain a certain dignity.”

“Laughter is undignified?”

“Not laughter. A lack of control.”

It was very much as Hannah had suspected. “Have you always been so adept at keeping your countenance?” she asked. “Were you never…”

“What?”

“Less strategic?”

His eyes found hers as he drove. “It’s difficult to dispense with strategy when I want something as much as I want you.”

Hannah’s heart performed another disconcerting somersault. She was keenly conscious of the scorching heat rising in her cheeks, but this time she didn’t shyly lower her eyes. She returned his gaze steadily. “You don’t need to be strategic with me,” she said. “I only ask that you be yourself.”

Chapter Fourteen

James drove Hannah back to Camden Place in a far more optimistic frame of mind than he’d been in when he’d arrived to collect her. They had experienced something together this morning. Smiles. Laughter. A shared sense of the absurd. It had lent a lightness to their conversation that had never been present before. She had been, for a short time, suddenly and remarkably at ease with him.

She had also asked him to be himself.

James wasn’t entirely confident he could oblige her.

He had spent so much of his life keeping ruthless control of his emotions that he’d forgotten what it was like to relax his hold. To be impulsive. Frivolous. Fun. The very qualities that characterized his reckless younger siblings.

Unlike them, James had had no older brother to pave the way, either at school or in fashionable society. He’d been the one to take all the slings and arrows. To deal with the slurs, the slander, the outright insults. There had been only one way of doing so. Rather than rising to the bait, engaging in endless bouts of fisticuffs over his family’s honor, he’d learned to affect an air of intimidatingly cold reserve.

At the time, it had been a studied copy of his father at his most formidable moments. But James no longer had to affect that glacial formidability, to don it like a suit of armor as he’d done during his years at Eton and Oxford. It had become who he was, as natural to him as breathing.

The closest he’d come to abandoning his control was in his decision to pursue Hannah Heywood. She wasn’t part of his master plan for the Beresford family. She didn’t fit. And in the end, it hadn’t mattered. His attraction to her had overshadowed all sensible concern. Just like that, he’d been willing to cast away years of planning and calculation. Tempted to give it all up if only he could have her for his own.

James despised the weakness in himself, even as he relished every moment spent in Hannah’s company.

On returning, he escorted her into the house. He was on the verge of inquiring when he might see her again, when a footman approached them.

“Captain Heywood awaits you in the library, my lord,” the footman said.

Hannah’s hands stilled in the act of untying her pink satin bonnet ribbons. A glimmer of anxiety shone in her eyes. “I’d forgotten he wished to speak with you.”

“I hadn’t,” James replied. “If you will excuse me?”

“Of course,” she said.

He bowed to her before following the footman from the hall. The library was at the back of the residence in a similar location to the library in the Beresfords’ house on the Circus.

Captain Heywood was inside, seated behind a carved walnut desk in the corner. He appeared to be writing a letter. He didn’t rise. “Lord St. Clare,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

James took a seat in one of the leather-upholstered chairs across from him. The desk between them gave the meeting an air of formality. No doubt Captain Heywood had intended it to. James was, after all, a suitor for his daughter’s hand. A once-spurned suitor who had had the temerity to return to the scene of his defeat. And Captain Heywood was nothing if not a protective father.

A very protective father.

Indeed, if Hannah’s story was to be believed, Captain Heywood was cold-bloodedly ruthless when it came to the defense of his family.