Page 58 of The Good Duke
“It is absolutely something I have done before.”
“Given your current lack of employment, I trust it is also something you can do now.”
“It is, Your Grace.” She paused. “Were the circumstances different.”
Simon frowned. “Different.”
“I’ve provided such services for ladies…not…gentlemen. Notanyman, Simon.”
“Ah, but do women and men not both bleed,Persephone?” he murmured, tugging back into the present those long-ago words she’d spoken as a girl to Simon in abject frustration.
“You recall that?” she whispered.
His answer was only a further echo, verbatim, of what she’d once said. “Do they not each possess hearts that beat and minds for thought? Do women and men both not carry dreams and hopes? No, women and men are really just the same. That is but for—”The fact men have penises and women furry thatches.
She gasped as she recalled the scandalous remainder of that sentence.
“The ways in which they’re different,” he substituted.
Simon followed that with a playful wink; a flutter of his long, golden lashes that said he knew exactly what she’d been thinking and that he merely teased her with that veiled reminder of long-ago uttered words.
Her cheeks burned in ways they never had around him.
Persephone resisted the urge to pat her burning face.I’m a grown woman and certainly not a weak nelly to go blushing about an old friend.
“Those words?” she finally said. “They were the views of a child.”
“And you don’t still believe them?”
It didn’t matter what she believed. Her believing that men had no greater right to power and freedoms didn’t change the fact that mendid.
And because Simon didn’t have the misfortune of having been born a female in a world that didn’t allow women to step outside the very straight line they were forced to walk, he didn’t understand. Hecouldn’tunderstand.
“You expect I should take the post because I have no other prospects, Your Grace. Were I to do so, however, it would mean I, an unmarried woman, live here with you—a bachelor. I understand you’re proposing an entirely respectable arrangement. I trust you and I can work together in that capacity.” She paused. “But it would never be seen that way by the rest of society. By the very nature of the strict rules thetonhas for suitable interactions between ladies and gentlemen, my being here with you would be nothing less than scandalous.”
Frustration at her lot, and the lot of all women, brought her forward in her seat, and the words kept tumbling from Persephone’s lips.
“And while you, being a powerful duke with a fortune at your fingertips, would still marry because lords and ladies—and their daughters—are willing to overlook any transgressions on your part for the right to marry you. I, on the other hand, will be—would be—ruined. Your post would be my first and last here in London.”
At some point, she’d wrapped her fingers in a claw-like hold over the arms of her chair; her fingers left crescents upon the wood. She forced herself to relax her death grip. “I thank you for the offer, Simon, however—”
“I’ve already anticipated—and sorted out—those concerns you’ve raised.”
She eyed him warily. “Go on.”
“As my late mother and father’s goddaughter and my ward—”
She laughed before she registered his absolute seriousness. “I’m too old to be anyone’sward.”
“My unmarried ward who happens to be of more advanced years, then.”
Advanced years?
Her previous amusement faded, and she resisted the urge to wrinkle her nose at his lack of protestations regarding heradvanced years.
“I’ll not pretend to be your w—”
Simon waved his hand, cutting her off. “Very well. You can be my late parents’ beloved goddaughter.”
