Page 49 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

With another sharp nod, he began stuffing his feet into his boots and his arms into his now hopelessly wrinkled coat. “Neither does General Scott,” he said at last. “My assignment was to make the French believe I’m on their side. Something must have happened to persuade Scott they’re right.”

Maxim was suspected of turning traitor? Might he have? When in France, I am a Frenchman, he’d told her. She tried to shake off the suspicion, but six years was a very long time to pretend.

Together, though not touching, they began to walk along the beach, to a place where they could more easily ascend to the Marine Parade that ran along the top of the cliff. “Mrs. Drummond thinks you tried to poison me.”

He paused and turned toward her. “Do you?” Fanny’s accusation seemed not to surprise him. He was too used to people assuming the worst, she supposed. But she could see in his eyes that he did not want her to be one of them.

With a dismissive flick of her wrist, she tossed the ridiculous question aside. But afterward, her hand hovered between them, near his face. “May I?”

After the briefest hesitation, he nodded.

With an upward stroke of her fingertips, she traced his scar, from the edge of his jaw, where no whiskers grew, along his sunken cheekbone, around his eye, through his eyebrow and over his temple, the silvery line growing ever thinner, until it disappeared into his dark hair. That wound had healed, however imperfectly.

But what of those that were still raw? What if they never healed at all?

His eyelids squeezed shut. Did her touch give him pleasure or pain? “When you look at me that way,” he whispered, turning his face into her hand and pressing a kiss against her palm, “it makes me wish I could be the man you seem to see.”

“Maxim.” She could not make up her mind whether to comfort or to scold. “Your scars are a sign to the world that the past has shaped who you are. But you don’t have to be done changing, becoming the man you could be.”

When his eyes flew open, she saw a blaze of disbelief, but also a flicker of hope.

“Your hand is cold,” he said suddenly, reaching up to cover it, cupping her palm against his cheek.

“You should feel the rest of me.”

A new emotion flared in the depths of his dark gaze. But he said nothing, just wrapped an arm around her shoulders to hurry her toward home, toward something much more than she had expected when they set out that morning.

She was laughing—excitement and nervousness tangled in her belly—when they reached the steps of the house. The sound caught in her throat as the door opened. “You have guests, Your Grace,” Geoffrey said, his expression inscrutable.

“Who?” Maxim demanded.

But Caro, who had preceded him up the stairs, already knew the answer.

“You’re letting in a draft, Caroline,” scolded her father, gesturing imperiously for her to cross the threshold. “Marriage hasn’t cured you of the habit of running about without being properly dressed, I see.”

Oh, but she was cold, ever so much colder than she had been when standing ankle deep in the north Atlantic. Her heart thudded dully, struggling to move her suddenly congealed blood.

“Well,” he said as he turned toward the dining room, where the rest of her family appeared to be enjoying a hearty repast, “I suppose you can afford both the bill for the coal and the cost of making yourself a spectacle.”

“If she cannot,” said her husband as he stepped up behind her, his voice as deep and rich as she had ever heard it, all hint of raspiness gone, “I can.”

Chapter 16

Laughton started but recovered quickly, bowing and then waving an arm, as if inviting guests into his own home. “Ah. Chesleigh. I had no expectation of finding you here.” Though the sounds of silver against china had fallen silent behind him, Maxim could see full well that the family was at present devouring the breakfast he’d once so pointedly denied them.

“It’s Hartwell, now,” Maxim said.

The effect of his voice on Caro’s father was radically different from its effect on Caro herself. Color drained from the man’s face, reminiscent of the night at Earnshaw’s. He seemed to understand immediately that it had been one thing to flout the will of the disgraced heir presumptive, particularly when he had taken himself off to parts unknown.

Quite another to defy a duke to his face—his scarred and scowling face.

“I see,” Laughton said when he had recovered himself and bowed a second time. “Do I offer my condolences, or my congratulations?”

“Neither,” he replied. “We have no need of anything from you.”

As that pleading stack of letters had made plain, however, the Brent family had need of many things…and expected Caro to provide them, even over her husband’s prohibition. As if on cue, the family members arrayed themselves behind their pathetic patriarch: the aunt who fancied herself ill, the desperate and deluded wife and mother, the spoiled sister, and last of all, the debauched brother, wiping grease from his chin with the back of his hand, looking as if he’d just stumbled in from a hard night or three at the tables.

Of course, Maxim wasn’t meant to know any of that.