Page 66 of Lessons for Marquesses
He asked in the midst of his shock, “May I ask why?”
“It is difficult to say, but it is true. My father left me in debt. No, someone stole his fortune. Regardless, it is a debt I shall never repay in full, though I have tried. You see, I believed I would overcome the impossible odds. That is, I didn’t realize they were impossible until five days ago.”
The day he had arrived at Farendon and discovered her drunk under her tree of dreams. Had the bank disclosed their plans to transfer the mortgage to him? He had directed Tate to forward his post to Farendon but as yet hadn’t received word on Farendon’s fate.
“How much do you owe?”
“Too much.”
Admiration might be too inadequate a word. He had provided her the chance to lament her circumstances and denounce Eastwick, and she had refused.
What he felt was respect.
Untying the leads, she offered him Spinner’s and walked away with Dearg, leaving him to gather Teague and meet her as she mounted Minion. “If my boys were to be claimed by another, it would be unfair to them and your generosity.”
Wily woman.She didn’t want the Marquess of Eastwick to have them.
They skirted the barley field. She worried her bottom lip. “Do you know, I think I shall fight further.”
Against his own cause, he actually hoped her strategy proved sound. “How so?”
“Allow me the rest of the afternoon. After dinner, once my aunt has retired to her room, meet me in the study.”
The energy emanating from her lithe, athletic body bowled him over like no liquor or drug he had tasted. How would she feel beneath his hands, beneathhim? Alive and strong like no woman he had ever possessed. How very strong were her thighs? How vigorous a bedding could she withstand? How long, how deep could she take him inside and ride him to hell?
Because that was where he was going, damn it. He thickened further upon a glance at the trim space between her thighs where they spread over the saddle. He looked up to the breasts covered by her green frock coat, cursing his physical desire. His pulse raced in his chest at the mouth that could take an entire sausage…
He deserved this, didn’t he?
Georgiana put him off until the next morning, slipping him a note before dinner asking for more time to outline her plan. Then she delayed again with another note found at his bedroom door at dawn. She promised a meeting after dinner. The entireafternoon while they put Minion through her paces and the Witch tried twice to bite his arse, Georgiana never once alluded to what he was dying to know.
Had she found a loophole? A means of escape from her debt he had failed to take into account? Why had he goaded her into fighting?
In the study under a single taper, he flipped through a ledger. Georgiana was a pauper. Yet he continued to search, worried that within these books, a clue to her deliverance might be found. He had scoured four years of transactions, telling the deserved tale of William St. Clair’s misfortune. From what Nicholas could see, no one had stolen St. Clair’s money. He had, indeed, lost such a sum.
And yet a single question plagued him. And would remain unanswered. With the evidence right below his nose in these ledgers, how had William St. Clair, a renowned man of industry, allowed the continued bleeding of his fortune?
Nicholas reached for another ledger when Aunt Charlotte’s voice drifted down from the first floor, bidding Georgiana good night. He shoved the volume back to the shelf, poured two whiskeys, and eased into a settle near the window.
He set the second whiskey to the low table and drank deeply to ease his nerves.Nerves!He had never had them. But then he had previously tread the straight and sure path of revenge.
Why had he urged Georgiana to fight?
If he had let her go on the castle wall…
“Shut up,” he hissed, dropping his face into his palm. He was not that man. But he had been. He’d been paid six pence a day to be a murderer for the king.
Dread engulfed him as he thought of letting her go from the castle wall. The image, over and over, ran relentlessly through his brain, of his fingers failing and watching her plummet toearth. But he had saved her and in some terrifying way, he had saved himself. She had savedhim.
He fell back to the settle and sat up at a rustling sound. From behind a cushion, he pulled out a drawing. Squinting in the gloom, he studied the sketch of a fat, hook-nosed fop riding an ass. Two slits marred the man’s figure. One at his head. The other at his crotch. Along the bottom, the artist had written,the Most Honorable, the Marquess of Eastwick.
“I thought my aunt would never retire!”
Nicholas looked up at Georgiana striding across the room, her fingers loosening her simple cravat. She froze, judged the paper in his hand, his stunned expression, and hurried to divest him of the caricature.
“My friend Kitty has a devilish sense of humor.” She crumpled the paper and threw it ten feet into a bin. “And quite a talent for drawing.”
“And the holes?”
