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“Lord Lockford.”
“Lord Lockford, not but an hour ago. You’re clearly intelligent and don’t appear to pander to fools. You’re beautiful. But beyond all of that, you have the admiration of Des, and his judgement of people is unfailing.”
His words wrapped around her, easing her out of the shock of his original question.
His face went grave. “It isn’t that you have a tail, is it?”
For a moment she stilled, then guffawed, her fingers going to her mouth as she laughed. “No. I am happy to report I am without tail.”
Her hand fell away from her lips, her head shaking. “And I don’t have an explanation for you. I searched for an answer to that same question for a very long time and never found it. For far too many nights even after my husband died.” Her shoulders lifted, stiffening. “I tried. I tried to give him an heir. Tried to satisfy him in bed. Satisfy him in life. But it was never more than cold. In the dining room. In a carriage. In the bedroom. Cold. Perfunctory.”
“For the amount of fire you have lacing your blue eyes, burning in you, I find that hard to believe.”
She looked out the window, her hands running along the tops of her thighs. How had he just managed to get her to admit to that? To the very true nature of her marriage that on all accounts to anyone peering in, had been a grand success. Worse yet, she felt her mouth opening with more words. “I was docile then. Doing what was expected of me. Trying to figure out what more I could do to please him. To make him love me. From the moment I could walk I was in training to be the perfect wife of a peer. Manners and French and party planning and witty banter on all manner of topics. But the one thing I wasn’t taught was how to make a man love me. And I never did discover that secret.”
“Yet at some point you left docile behind?”
“I did.” A smile came to her face as she watched a grove of ancient oaks pass by. “The fire in my eyes only came about a year after he died and I stumbled upon the realization that I could do anything I wanted—within reason of course. I was no longer constrained by a husband or the title. The cousin that acquired the earldom had little concern for me other than making sure my thirds was in order and the dower house was adequately updated. Now I only hear from him once a year, if that.”
“Every dowager should be so lucky.”
A soundless chuckle bubbled up through her throat and she nodded, glancing at him. “Exactly. So I learned I could talk with whom I wanted. Go to London and stay with friends. Attend the opera or parties or balls that I chose—ones that were actually interesting to me. I could go and bury myself in Lord Kallen’s Roman baths and excavate and get completely filthy from head to toe and stay down there, day after day, and no one said a word. It was all my own choice. Before that I had done nothing but acquiesce to my husband’s wishes—how he desired me to spend my time.”
Her gaze moved to the window. “So it was a beautiful thing, realizing all of that. The first time I went to the opera with a friend, Lady Hewton, after the earl died, I bumped into an old acquaintance from my childhood, Mr. Drayson. He was the fourth son of a baron, so my mother broke our contact when I was twelve, lest I start to get designs on an illicit love affair with a boy so removed from a title. I hadn’t been able to have more than short greetings with him—and then none at all after I was seventeen and the earl locked me away as his very proper betrothed.”
The right side of her mouth lifted in a smile. “I’d always enjoyed Mr. Drayson’s company and he had always made me laugh, so I stood and talked with my friend for an hour—even as the next acthad started. It was entirely wrong and I knew it. And just when I was to excuse myself to get back to our box, I came upon the realization that there was no one to admonish me. No one to tell me how I’d failed my husband, the title. How I put shame upon our household.”
“That’s a lot of detriment to defer from a simple conversation that lasted too long.”
“Exactly.” Her look went onto him. “Thetonthrives on judgement and that was what I was shackled with. But I was struck at the opera house that none of it applied to me anymore. None of it. And I finally grasped what that meant for me.”
The miniscule smile from the morning resurfaced on Rune’s face. “So what did you do?”
“With what?”
“With Mr. Drayson. Did you excuse yourself to go back to your seat?”
A sideways grin came to her face. “Not exactly.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“I excused myself to go back to his townhouse. He wasn’t married at the time. And I certainly wasn’t.”
A snappy chuckle escaped his lips.
Her hand lifted and fell in her lap. “All of it was wrong. I knew it. But by the next morning, the next day—it didn’t matter. Society didn’t care on me anymore. I was no longer a threat to mamas with respectable daughters to marry off. I’d had my chance to produce an heir of an earl and I’d failed. I was used, tarnished goods.”
A frown set onto his face. “Not producing an heir with a man that wasn’t interested in you hardly seems like a failure.”
“It is. It was.” She shrugged. “I knew what I was supposed to be and I failed at it. It is an honest assessment. My choices after that failure were to be saddened by that fact or embrace the freedom of that fact. I ended up choosing freedom.”
“A finch out of its cage.” His miniscule smile reappeared and widened, actually turning up the edges of his lips. Breathtaking. Impish. She hadn’t thought he could be more handsome than he was, and then the man had dared to smile a real smile.
Everything in her told her to look away, to not meet his eyes.
But she hadn’t listened to common sense in a long time.
Her gaze lifted and locked onto his eyes, transfixed as the copper swirled into the green in his irises, glowing, almost smoldering. Her fingers tightened in her lap. “If I’m a finch, that makes you a hawk. Obnoxiously confident and strong. Deadly. And completely unapologetic.”
