Page 36 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“He won’t.” He held out his hand expectantly, and he saw the indecision flicker across her face as she realized he expected her to surrender the poker. “No doubt I shall use a great number of words no lady should be subjected to,” he said. “But you’ll not be kept waiting overlong. Give me the poker, now.”
A long moment passed in a taut silence. Gradually her tight fingers uncurled from the handle of the poker, and he managed to take it from her hands. “The tea, Lizzie,” he urged, and with a small sound of thwarted fury, at last she stumbled toward the door and slipped out, the vicious pound of her footsteps retreating in the direction of the stairs.
“Disloyal child,” Talbot muttered beneath his breath, his posture relaxing once the threat of the poker had vanished.
“Rather excessively loyal, I should think,” Luke corrected. “Toward those deserving.” He let the poker trace a line through the air toward the chair which had been set before the desk, and to which he had recently become accustomed to directing those who had earned his enmity. “Sit, Talbot. We are going to have a conversation.”
Though his tone did not brook argument, still it disgusted him that Talbot complied without even a murmur. What manner of father found a strange man within his home in the dead of night and simply followed orders without a qualm?
As Luke settled himself into the chair behind the desk and set aside the fireplace poker, he held out his hand expectantly. “I’ll have what you’ve taken now,” he said.
Talbot bristled. “Now, see here—”
“Now.” Luke let the word drift ominously into the silence that stretched between them. With a muttered curse, Talbot dug into the deep pocket of his greatcoat and withdrew a bulging sack—a sack which Luke knew he’d left securely within the bottom drawer of the desk some hours earlier. The coins within clinked as Luke tossed the sack once more into the drawer. “My thanks. Now, Talbot—I believe you’ve some explanations to make.”
“And who are you to demand such of me, sir?” The caustic tone was largely bluster; by the darting of Talbot’s eyes it was clear that he was uncomfortable and perhaps even afraid.
“My lord,” Luke corrected idly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“As you damned well ought.” Luke felt his hands clenching, and jammed them beneath the desk lest the mad impulse to reach across it and strangle the very life out of the man overtake him. “I am the goddamned Marquess of Ashworth, and you’ll address me as such.” He didn’t even recognize the guttural snarl that had come from him.
Talbot fell silent, shrinking from the vitriol in Luke’s voice. “Sir—my lord—”
“What manner of father leaves his children to fend for themselves, returning only when he is short of funds to steal whatever is not nailed down?” Luke inquired in a wrathful hiss. “What sort of father steals his son’s future? His daughters’ security? What sort of father leaves a child—achild!—to care for his children in his absence!”
“Now, that’s hardly fair,” Talbot whined. “Lizzie was seventeen when I left,morethan capable—”
“Christ.” Luke rubbed at his temples. Seventeen, and with three children, two of them little more than infants, clinging to her skirts? That would make her perhaps six and twenty now, managing responsibilities her own father had fled from. “And how was she meant to support these children—yourchildren—at such an age, on her own?”
“She’s resourceful.”
Luke’s harsh bark of laughter made Talbot jump nearly a foot in his chair. “Resourceful—yes, I suppose she is.” But she shouldn’t havehadto be. “Resourceful enough to go in search of the man who ruined Imogen in a mad attempt to force him to the altar to save her reputation. A responsibility which ought to have fallen toyou.” He flexed his hands beneath the desk. “Rather unfortunately for you, she caught the wrong man.”
Talbot performed another uncomfortable wiggle in his chair, and one hand rubbed at his knee as if it pained him. Given what Luke knew of the man, he suspected an injury—one he’d seen before in a number of young men who had played too deeply at gaming tables with money not their own, and had then suffered the consequences of failing to repay their debts to their creditors, which tended to be some of the less savory characters which populated London’s seedy underbelly.
Talbot seemed to be grappling for a response, and belatedly he settled upon a rather pitifully inflected, “I do apologize if my daughter has offended, my lord.”
“She didn’t offend so much as sheshotme,” Luke said. “I could have had her hanged. Do you now understand the jeopardy in which you have placed your family?” His hands hand clenched again so severely that he heard the pop of his knuckles. “Your son ought to be in school, your daughter is with child—”
“Lizzie?”
“Imogen.” Luke bit off a sound of aggravation and shoved himself back from the desk. “My God, man. Do you care about your children atall?”
“What would you have me do?” The question was so bland, so dead in its delivery that it took Luke aback. And the truth was, he’d have the man reform himself into a model father, the sort of man who would tend to his responsibilities with care, and relieve the burden beneath which Lizzie had suffered since he’d abandoned his family years ago.
But it would never happen. He might have promised Lizzie that he would handle her father, but there was only one way to do it—and it would not result in the man becoming the father his children needed him to be. The only solution would leave them perhaps marginally better off, and then only if Talbot had more honor than Luke suspected him of.
And Lizzie was downstairs even now, awaiting an answer.Christ.
Luke sank back into his chair, defeated. Within moments, he came to his decision…and it surprised him that it hadn’t even been a difficult one to make. He was going to keep them. It would be more of a responsibility than he had wanted, perhaps, but—there was a part of him, somewhere, that reveled in the thought. That this close-knit family would belong to him. That the warmth they shared would follow him back to London, and perhaps, from time to time, he could avail himself of it.
“How much?” he asked, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“My lord?”
“Howmuch?” Luke inquired again, sharply. “How much for you to leave—right now, this moment—and never return?”
