Page 11 of His Brazen Tart
“Shall we?”
He intercepted the footman approaching with her shawl, and draped it over her bared shoulders himself, then offered his arm and guided her through the door. Neither of them spoke again until they were nestled inside the carriage and on their way.
“I’m sorry—” Joan blurted at the exact moment that Piers said, “I owe you an apology.”
They lapsed into silence, and the moonlight beaming through the carriage window revealed Piers’ sheepish expression.
“Let me say this,” he went on, resting his forearms against his thighs and leaning toward her. “I behaved abominably during our dinner, and I’m sorry. I wish I could assure you that such conduct is unlike me, but I don’t want to lie to you.”
At the chagrined twist of his mouth, Joan smiled. “It was a misunderstanding, and there is nothing to forgive. It occurred to me after that my comments were misconstrued. You couldn’t have known that there was no ill intent behind them when we are so newly acquainted.”
“It was entirely my fault,” Piers argued.
Joan’s lips twitched with another sly grin. “Very well, it was entirely your fault, but I forgive you.”
Piers stretched one leg out so that the toe of his shoe brushed the tip of hers. “Minx.”
“Guilty as charged,” Joan replied, folding her hands in her lap. “I have decided that such misunderstandings can be mitigated by us coming to know one another better.”
“That is hardly a requirement for our arrangement.”
Piers’ words were delivered with a casual air, but Joan sensed the resistance behind them. She should respect his boundaries as she would wish him to respect hers. His place as her courtesan only required him to pleasure her and escort her about whenever she asked. Familiarity wasn’t part of the contract.
Still, as Joan studied the angles of his face in the shadows of his side of the carriage, she couldn’t deny a surge of curiosity. Piers intrigued her, and having always been seized with an insatiable curiosity Joan found it impossible to keep from prodding.
“Perhaps not,” she said lightly. “Still, it will give us something to talk about during the carriage ride. “I’ll even go first, and make it interesting for you by revealing one of my closely guarded secrets.”
“How can I resist such an offer?” he asked with a low chuckle. “Very well, I will humor you. What is this secret of yours, Joan?”
All humor fled her voice as she sat up straight and allowed the words to spill out.
“I hated my husband.”
Joan hadn’t realized how badly she’d needed to say them to someone until they had fallen from her lips. The relief it brought to utter them was unmatched.
Piers wasat a loss for words. It didn’t surprise him to learn that Joan’s marriage hadn’t been a happy one—most marriages between people of means were more like business arrangements than anything else. What had stolen the words off the edge of Piers’ tongue was the casual surety with which Joan had uttered her declaration. She hadn’t whispered the words as if ashamed, nor had she broken eye contact while making such a damning admission.
Shoulders squared, chin high, and gaze unwavering, she had divulged her secret with the same gravity she might employ when speaking of the weather. At that moment, a dart of admiration shot through him.
Joan saved him from having to come up with a response. “I didn’t want to marry him, you know,” she went on, glancing through the parted curtains at the passing city. “But my options were few.”
This time, Piers couldn’t keep quiet. “Would you truly have me believe that?”
Her lips twitched with a smile that never fully developed. “During my first season, I had my pick of bachelors. By my nineteenth birthday I had refused six proposals.”
“Now,thatI can believe.”
She huffed a sarcastic laugh and shook her head. “I have never approved of the way our society treats young girls. We are deprived of so much joy for the sake of being beaten into shape like metal and polished to a gleaming finish—all for the sake of finding a husband. It is our only lot in life.”
“It hardly seems fair,” Piers agreed. But then, he had always disapproved of just about every practice of theton. “If you were always as mischievous as you seem now, I wonder how you survived it.”
“The only way I could,” she said with a shrug. “My mother was a hard, uncompromising woman. She was the granddaughter of a baron, who always had higher aspirations for herself. But … she didn’t have the goods. Mother was lovely in her own way, but there was nothing to make her stand out among the other ladies with their dowries and titled fathers.”
Piers bobbed his head in a slow nod as he began to understand where her story was going. It wasn’t difficult to guess what Joan’s mother had been like based on such a background. “It was up to you, then.”
“Yes. She told me countless times how fortunate I could be if I were smart. ‘You have been blessed with uncommon beauty,’ she would say. ‘With the right training and opportunities, you could go so far, my dear. Why, you could even become a duchess.’”
The breathy imitation of her mother’s voice ought to have made him laugh, but Piers remained stone-faced. There was nothing funny about the bitter edge to the voice she used in her mimicking. There was a subtle note of something there that Piers couldn’t quite name. Sadness, or perhaps anger. It called to a deep part of himself that had known such misery. His own father had seen Piers as a stepping-stone for the next generation of Lovelace men. Everything he’d done had been scrutinized over how it would affect their family’s social standing. It had been exhausting.
