Page 39 of The Good Duke
“Hmph.”
“Is there a problem, Miss Forsyth?” He paused. “It still is Miss Forsyth, is it?”
Because he’d expect she’d never snagged a husband. He wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t make his accurate assumption rankle any less. Especially as the sting of her past mistakes still burned.
Persephone found her voice. “Itisstill Miss Forsyth.” It almost hadn’t been. There’d been one gentleman who’dpromisedto make her his wife…and naïve as only a girl could be, she’d believed him.
Simon raised an eyebrow. “Some things haven’t changed, then.” He gave her another mocking toast.
“While many things have.” Persephone tipped her chin back at a defiant angle. “Youdrink brandy,Your Grace.”
She shouldn’t be surprised he consumed spirits.Allgentlemen did.
“Cognac.”
She cocked her head.
“This is cognac,” he clarified. “Brandyis made fromanyfruit juice.”
A duke, a cynic,anda liquor connoisseur to boot.
Simon displayed the bottle still held in his left hand. “Cognac, on the other hand, has a fruit base made exclusively of white grapes that come—”
“Never tell me,” she interjected dryly, “from the Cognac region of France?”
Simon eyed her with some surprise. “You know something about cognac and brandy after all.”
“I don’t know a fig of difference between brandy from cognac from whiskey,” she said, disabusing him of that erroneous conclusion he’d drawn. “Ido, on the other hand, recall some from the geography lessons my father insisted I take.” Lessons that hadn’t really mattered beyond this moment; lessons that would have mattered more had she actually seen the world outside of the English countryside.
Simon folded his arms at his chest so that the decanter dangled near his right below. “Do I detect a hint of disapproval?”
Oh, it was more than ahint.
“A wise man once said, a spirit is a spirit is a spirit,” she said. “They’re all a type of vile, just a varying degree of it.”
Such an agreement they’d come to, and words he’d himself uttered when they’d sampled from each bottle of spirits on the late earl’s sideboard.
“Stammered.”
Persephone stared at Simon.
Another grin formed on his hard lips. “A wise man oncestammered.” Unlike the jeering, cynical one of prior, his smile now contained a wealth of self-disgust.
He lifted his glass in salute to her and his old self and then downed a swallow.
“No,” she said softly. “He didn’t.”
For Simon had hardly ever stammered with her. When they’d been together talking, his words had almost always came out effortless—as they did now. Neither had Simon been irreverent, as he was now.
A shadow flickered over his eyes, a shift so subtle that had Persephone not been contemplating him so closely, she would have missed.
But it was there…indicating the Simon she recalled did live within the hardened, ironic façade he now presented to the world.
Persephone clung to that faint shimmer of the boy she once knew.
“Simon,” she began softly, “you were always perfect as you were.”
As he poured himself another drink, Simon chuckled, a derisive, bitter-sounding laugh.
