Page 26 of Teach a Rogue New Tricks
“Hmm. You seem to be approaching the virtues as attempts to resist doing bad. What about, instead, you to try to actively do good? You succeed most when you’re doing, I think. Graceling has been put to rights most wonderfully. I wish your mother could see it.”
Hopefully, she would one day. But right now, she needed to think him still in France. Cass could not ask her to lie to Bax and keep his return to England secret. “Excellent idea, Father. I’ll put the virtues into practice starting now with brevity of language. In other words, I must end our conversation. If Mother were to discover me—”
“She’d hug you tight and cry until we all drowned.”
Cass studied the tips of his dusty boots. “She doesn’t hate me?” He’d not asked his father about how his mother had reacted to her youngest son’s villainy before. He’d been too scared. But he had to start facing all that he dreaded in order to make amends.
“She was shocked. Quite angry. But she agreed with me when I took off across the Channel. You could be saved, and we had to try.” Love shone from his father’s eyes. Funny that a year ago Cass would have insisted his father didn’t love him, had never loved him. But the look in his father’s eyes now, he remembered it well. He’d seen that look, taken it for granted, all his life.
“What a nodcock I’ve been.”
“Glad you see it, son.” His father clapped him on the back and steered him toward the hallway. “Button up your waistcoat. None of our footmen walk about in such disrepair.”
Cass buttoned up. “Yes, Father.” He put his hand on the door.
“Cass?”
Cass flicked him a questioning glance.
“I’m curious about this young woman you did not debauch.”
“Oh?”
“It’s just… you’ve hidden yourself away from all but me and the Earl and Countess of Beckingham. Why reveal yourself to her?”
Cass’s heart stuttered. The part of him drawn in muck and mire wanted to say to protect himself, but that hid the bright reality of his answer. In the past, he’d always chosen the nasty words, sharp and guaranteed to keep everyone far, far away from him. He refused to do so now. So instead of saying, Because any bitch will do or Because a horsey-looking girl of little consequence will not tempt me, he answered with the truth. “Because she’s full of light and beauty and laughter, and I want those things for myself.”
“Do you want her for yourself?”
He did. He slipped from the room. After one kiss? Yes. A right mess he’d stepped in to, no doubt about that.
His father’s voice followed him down the hall. “You can always marry her.”
“No, I really can’t. She deserves better than me.”
“Perhaps who you were, but what about the man you are becoming? I think, son, it’s time you stop fixating on your past and focus on your future.”
Cass smirked and stepped into the hall. “A fatherly thing to say.” He turned and sauntered toward the back stairs.
He stepped into the shadowy sunshine behind the townhouse and lifted his face to the sliver of sky between buildings. His future. He could not conceive it. He tried to the entire walk back to Lola and Nathan’s, but as he trudged up the stairs to his bedroom, even a single flicker of an image eluded him. He grabbed his copy of Franklin’s autobiography and a pencil and jolted back down the stairs and across the street to the garden at the center of the square. He sat on a bench and opened his notebook. He wrote:
The pater insists the only way to improve is by looking ahead instead of back. But the past is cozy if you ask me. Been there before. Know the streets. The future is like an unknown city, and I’m a bit afraid to explore it. But maybe the old man has a point. It’s been known to happen a time or two. Why not give it a go?
Below that, he wroteMY FUTUREin giant letters across the top of the next page.
And nothing else. His mind dripped empty as a brandy bottle on his twentieth birthday—well, as all three brandy bottles had been. It had seemed a celebratory occasion.
No matter, the immediate future promised vegetables. Or the planting of them if not the successful rearing and eating of them. Nathan had given him some spinach and potatoes and some sort of herb he couldn’t remember the name of. A rather bland meal. But if he was successful, he could grow them at Graceling Hall, too, when he returned.
Graceling. He wrote its name down.
And forgiveness from Bax, yes. He wrote that down, too.
He’d like his sister-in-law to be able to be around him without feeling terrified. He jotted it down. Each idea lit a new one until a fire roared.
And how about…
The crunch of feet across gravel. Someone approached. He slammed his notebook closed and replaced it and the pencil in his pocket.
