Page 106 of One Night with an Earl

Undeterred, she marched into the room. “It’s been a week, and I have not heard from you. I thought I’d never see the day that you would behave in a similar fashion to your father and brother.”

Oliver stiffened. It was the worse insult she could give him and had the same reaction as a slap in the face. He’d knew he’d drunk too much, but he had an excuse, dammit.

A good one, and if she didn’t understand, then he was best left alone.

He lifted his glass to his lips, then grumbled when he remembered it was already empty.

“You are frightening the female servants and agitating your butler,” she said.

“Leave, then.”

“Why? So you can sulk in misery?”

He slammed down his glass on the desk. “I’m not sulking. I never sulk. Why must you insist on insulting me?”

Harumph. His grandmother approached his desk like a vulture ready to scavenge off of what she’d aptly named his misery. “I take it your sudden change in behavior is due to Miss Gardner. Or Miss Woodbridge.” She waved a hand. “Or whichever name she prefers.”

He did not want to talk about Ana. A nagging guilt burned in his chest and left a sour taste in his mouth. For as long as he lived, he’d remember the look of despair on her face as she turned to him after she’d been dismissed from her position. He’d been convinced of her subterfuge and had not believed her.

“I know you tried to search for her years ago. You have a good heart, my boy. You always have.”

“It does not matter now. I never found her.” Oliver let out a held-in breath. He never approved of his father’s lack of morals. If he had found Ana all those years ago and tried to right his father’s wrongs, would things have been different between them?

The dowager sat in a chair across from his desk and pursed her lips. “Life has a strange way of throwing the past into our present. Perhaps God made her Lady Penelope’s companion for a reason.”

“God had nothing to do with it,” he snapped.

He hadn’t met her through the Malverns, not initially. He’d first set eyes on Ana at a notorious brothel. It wasn’t something he’d discuss with his grandmother. He’d thought about that first meeting a thousand times over the course of the week.

Had Ana known he would be at the Silver Chalice that night? The more he thought about it, the more he’d come to the conclusion that it was highly improbable. Even he wasn’t sure he’d accompany his brother’s friends until the last minute. And even more compelling, Ana’s reasoning to be at the brothel and to dress as Lady Scarlet had nothing to do with his presence there. She wanted to experience passion before her thirtieth birthday, she’d said, and he’d been lucky enough to be the one she’d chosen to accomplish the task.

She couldn’t have planned that encounter.

“You may not agree with me that fate put her in your path, but does it really matter how you two became acquainted?” the dowager asked.

It mattered if, once she’d learned his identity, she had agreed to an affair for the sole purpose of revenge. God only knew she had sufficient motive to hate his father, his brother…and himself. He’d been ignorant the entire time Ana had been at Rosedown.

What must she have thought, have felt, to revisit her home yet not be the mistress there? He’d even taken her to the greenhouse. Looking back, no wonder her eyes had been full of longing and adoration as she’d identified each rosebush, each exotic flower. She wasn’t taken with the greenery; she was reminiscing about precious time spent with her mother.

Fate was a cruel bitch.

He rubbed an ache in the center of his chest. He needed more whisky. Now.

“I may have been at fault.” His grandmother circled the room, then sat on the chair across from his desk.

“How?”

“In my ambition to see you settled as the new earl, I overlooked your happiness. I admit I desired an heir to the earldom before I died—I still do—but I do not want you to repeat your parents’ mistake of a loveless and empty marriage.”

“I do not blame you. I know you meant, and still mean, well.”

“Then you should know that I saw love in Ana’s eyes.”

Oliver’s fingers tightened on the edge of the desk as he looked at his grandmother. “You are mistaken.”

She rose, pressed her hands on the surface of the desk, and met his gaze with one of ferocious intensity. “No, Oliver. I am not mistaken. You may believe me old as a dried turnip, but I loved your grandfather. Our marriage was a rare and passionate match, unlike your parents’. I know love when I see it.”

His chest tightened as if a giant hand reached inside and squeezed his heart in a vice. Had Ana told the truth? Was she about to confess all when they’d been interrupted in the music conservatory?