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“Good afternoon, Simon,” she said.
Silly Simon. Scared Simon. Scorched, singed and seared Simon. “I asked you not to call me Simon.”
“You have,” she agreed. “And yet you have not told me why. Simon is a lovely name. Your father’s name, in fact.”
“I know,” he snapped. Willard had ruined even that.
Naturally, they’ll be some ribbing from the older boys, his father had said as he’d bundled him off to school.
Ribbing, even aggressive ribbing, he could have, and had, survived. But Willard was a different kind of animal, one Asquith’s loving, protective parents had done nothing to prepare him to face.
He’d been stunned. Defenseless. Willard, with his conscienceless malevolence, his dormitory tyranny, and his lip-curl sneer, had stolen Asquith’s pride in his family name and then he’d driven Asquith to senseless violence.
“Why would you detest your father’s name?” She approached, studying him closely. “Was your father not the man your mother believes him to have been?”
Asquith snorted. “If anything, he was an even better man.” Asquith looked away. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. “Or so I am always told.”
“People do sometimes get the wrong impression.” She hesitated. “Everyone considered my father a paragon.”
Her father had been a paragon, universally esteemed, although, according to his mother, not the most attentive of husbands and too strict with the girls.
He glanced back. “Why don’t you proudly bear your father’s name?”
Her face briefly blanked. Then, she lifted a shoulder in a careless, gallic shrug. “Luckily, only Eliza had to be called Miss Wainwright. I prefer Miss Lenora, in fact.”
Luckily. Something glimmered at the edge of his consciousness. Something he was too angry to grasp.
“But answering a question with a question is impolite, Simon.”
Another deliberate provocation.
“Why do you shun your name?” she asked again.
Because of the taunts. Because he’d been wronged. Because he was deeply ashamed of what the taunting and torture had driven him to do.
But had his paragon of a father truly been at fault?
His socially shrewd, but brutality blind mother?
His chest contracted.
Perhaps he’d simply been weak. Perhaps he didn’t deserve to bear the name.
The devil. Couldn’t the changeling leave him in peace?
“Don’t call me Simon.” He gritted his teeth. “Don’t ask me questions. And stop looking at me with that intrusive, insolent glare! You cannot pry into my mind against my will.”
She shrank back.
His voice rose, “I resent every one of your unwanted attempts!”
She gasped, threw up her arm, and jerked her head down and away.
The moment froze, crystallizing into intricate facets too complex for him to follow. But he knew that posture. She’d taken a physical blow from someone much larger before.
Had she truly believed he, too, would strike?
Oh, God. What had he done?
