Page 21 of A Baron's Scandalous Quill
“Now, please, enjoy the tea. I’ll admit I invited you here so we could begin this commission, but now that we have come to the details, I do not know where to start. How do you know, as a writer, where to begin your piece?”
“It’s not always easy,” she admitted with a nod, reaching into her reticule and pulling out her notebook and a pencil. “If I may, I’d like to ask you some questions. You can answer them as freely as you wish to, and from there, I’ll build a picture and decide where to start.”
“Oh, good. I don’t have the tricky bit then,” he jested, warmed when she, too, smiled.
He poured out the tea for the two of them as she flicked open her notebook and found a series of questions.
“What was your earliest memory of your father?”
“Ah.” He paused, hesitating with the teapot. “Not a good one.”
“That is fine. Remember, my lord, you want the truth to come out in this writing.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” His voice grew quiet as he looked at her. There was something strange about confessing his deepest secrets to a woman he was becoming obsessed with thinking about at night.
What would she think of me if she knew all that I thought of her?
He busied himself with the milk, then sat back, buying himself some time before he had to answer.
“My first memory is of riding with my mother. She was in the saddle and had me in front of her, teaching me how to hold the reins. I must have been very young, but she kept me safe in her arms,” he began slowly.
“I remember my father marching out of the house, practically kicking the gravel away from him as he walked, and he shouted at her. He shouted that she had to bring me inside at once, that I should not be outside, in case something happened to me. She asked, what would happen to me while she was keeping me safe?He just hinted that maybe some people would want to come onto the land.
They’d want…revenge for something, though he didn’t say what. Nowadays, I, of course, think it was the result of some deception he had pulled at the time. Someone wanted vengeance on him and his family.”
Rather than saying what an awful memory it was, Becca merely wrote down the story in her notebook.
“My lord—”
“William.”
“What?” She nearly dropped the teacup she had just picked up as she looked at him. He smiled, nodding down at what she had done. “I will not drop it this time,” she assured him.
“Do I have a habit of surprising you enough to drop cups?”
“You could say that,” she murmured wryly. “My lord—”
“William,” he said again. She playfully narrowed her eyes at him.
“I cannot call you that.”
“Why not? It is my name.”
“And you are a baron. I must address you properly.”
“Yet you are also writing a personal story about me. Could you really do that, know all my secrets, and still address me as ‘my lord?’”
“Yes!” she said with passion and humor. “For I must.”
“I wish you would not.” He shook his head. A wild image entered his head. He and Miss Thornton were tangled in his bedsheets together, and as he made love to her, entering her, pleasuring her and lifting her legs around his hips, watching as she was flushed with the pleasure, she didn’t moan his name but said ‘my lord.’ It ruined the illusion at once. “It is my name. Please, call me William.”
“Perhaps someday,” she said in a quiet voice, glancing over to Henry and the housekeeper, clearly wary of what they would think of such a thing. “But for now, I shall stick to your title.”
“Very well,” he said with some reluctance. “What was it you were going to say to me?”
“I think that in order to tell the story of you and your father properly, the more we can find out about the men your father conned, how he went about such tricks, the better. It would be a thing that would take London by storm, to read an honest account of all the tricks. Those who had been wronged would know you were not afraid to speak of it, to acknowledge what was done to them.”
The passion with which she spoke had an effect on him, and he leaned forward across the table, nodding with her.
