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“Can I have one of those?” I asked.
“Do you smoke?” he asked in return.
“No.”
“Then no.”
He was sitting in the middle of the couch.
I sat in a chair opposite him.
“Where are Portia and Daniel?” I queried.
“Who knows? Who cares?”
I cared, obviously. Since I asked.
Though, with his oppressive mood, I didn’t share that.
I gave it a few minutes, and in those few minutes, Ian set his burning cigarette in the clean ashtray, pushed out of the couch, went to the drinks cabinet, came back, and reaching across the low table between us, he handed me a snifter of Amaretto.
Thoughtful. Funny. Gorgeous. Protective.
Ugh.
I took a sip while he folded back into his sofa, reclaimed his cigarette and continued smoking pensively.
Then I noted carefully, “She’s very beautiful.”
“If that’s your effort at trying to make me feel better I fucked that bitch, I’m afraid, my darling, it’s not going to work.”
“Is that why you’re in such a mood?”
“I’m not telling you about Dorothy Clifton to get you in my bed. I’m telling you because you want to know.”
“I know that.”
“As I told her about Joan because she wanted to know.”
“Will you tell me about Joan?”
“You didn’t do very well with your research if you don’t know about Joan and Thomas, Daphne,” he chided.
“Well, I do. The Cuthbert affair. You just seem to know so much more than the internet.”
“My great aunt considered herself an Alcott historian. She listened avidly, researched single-mindedly, and these efforts bore fruit. There are about twelve of her handwritten diaries on the history of Duncroft and the Alcotts.”
“Have you read them?” I queried.
“Every last one.”
“Is that a prerequisite to becoming an earl?”
He stopped watching the smoke curl lazily from his cigarette and turned his attention to me.
With the brand of that attention (“brand” being the operative word, for I felt scorched), I braced.
“No. It was a young man’s desperate attempt to learn all the reasons why his father was an inveterate adulterer in an effort to circumvent that happening to myself should I fall in love with a woman and make her my wife.”
