Page 28 of His Wicked Secret
Jonathan frowned. He liked Charles, but if he kept smiling over his distress he was going to punch him in the jaw.
“Yes, well, at some point during these delays, she gathered the wrong impression of me.”
Charles raised brow. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“Every time I am around her, she makes me so bloodyawareof her…as a woman. I could barely behave myself, wanting to fall into old habits. So I kept running off, avoiding her. Now she’s convinced I’m a coldhearted bastard whose only interest is to toy with her.”
“Reminds me of Lucien and Horatia.” Charles chuckled. “And we all remember howthatturned out. Assassins on the loose, fires in the garden, terrible accidents and blindness—and let’s not forget the duel on Christmas Day. Things weren’t dull for a moment, were they?”
Jonathan covered his face in his hands and groaned. Then he looked up at the ceiling, wishing for some kind of divine intervention.
“So you mucked it up, and now she’s convinced you’re a villain? Is that about it?”
Jonathan tugged at his cravat. It was suddenly too tight around his throat. “Yes. I did my best to talk to her, but it seems that was my other mistake. I only made things worse.”
Charles’s gray eyes lit with amusement. “Oh dear,twomistakes. We might need a bit of liquid courage for this.” He rose and walked over the small cabinet by one of the bookshelves and retrieved a bottle of brandy that was tucked behind some dusty old tomes. “I hid a few of these around for just such an emergency, behind the books about sheepherding in Renaissance France. Nobody ever reads those.”
“No glasses?” Jonathan asked.
“Not here, good man. This is a library, not a drawing room.” He put the bottle into Jonathan’s hands. He uncorked it and took a long drink, then coughed. The brandy burned like fire.
“What is this?” He noticed the bottle was unlabeled, and he shoved it back to Charles. His friend took a long drink followed by a heavenly sigh, and his eyes twinkled with mischief.
“A little homebrew. Lucien’s cook makes it for me on the sly.” He pointed at the cabinet conspiratorially. “Good for a quick nip when you need it.”
Jonathan gave a hoarse chuckle before he continued. “Mythirdmistake was just last week. I went off your advice and decided to play the Tutor Gambit.”
“The Tutor Gambit? Well played. Wait… You said it was a mistake?” Charles asked.
“I took your strategy a bit further. I offered to teach Audrey to defend herself. In exchange for my lessons, I extracted a promise from her that she would sleep in my bed- with me- once a week.”
Charles had the bottle to his lips when Jonathan delivered this, and Charles spewed out a fine mist of homemade brandy. Jonathan snatched the bottle away before he could spill more of it and set it a safe distance away on the table.
Charles wiped his mouth and looked ready to double over laughing. “Teach her to defend herself so she will sleep with you? How does that even…?” Charles dissolved into boyish giggles.
“She wants to learn how to fight. I had to rescue her from that hellfire club last week, and—”
“I’m still furious with her for that. She told my lad Linley that she changed her mind.” Charles’s humor evaporated instantly.
“Lucky for us, your man didn’t believe her.”
“Well, perhaps some lessons in pugilism would do her good. She seems to get into all sorts of trouble.”
“I agree,” Jonathan said. “Though I think you’ll agree that she will need to learn less gentlemanly techniques than those employed by Mr. Hughes in his bookThe Art and Practice of Boxing. After that experience, being around those devils, I think it gave her quite a scare. She told me she needed to learn to fight, to protect herself. I agreed to teach her, but on the condition that she share my bed once a week.”
He could still picture her in the dining room of the club, firelight illuminating her as she fought like an Amazon, carrying a cat under one arm the entire time.
Charles his lips twitched. “Are we discussing sleep? Orsleep?”
“The former. My motivations were not entirely self-serving. She needs to learn how to be near to me so that she will not be distracted while I teach her. You know as I do that sparring brings the bodies close, especially the kind of lessons she would need to learn to protect herself.”
Charles’s brow took on a mocking level of seriousness. “Oh yes, of course.”
Yes, it sounded foolish now, but he had been desperate to find a way to be close to her. Since she’d made it clear she thought him a coldhearted bastard, he had to prove otherwise.
Charles leaned back on the edge of the reading table. “So you intend to use these lessons in self-defense to seduce? How is that a mistake?”
“Well, I think she might change her mind. I thought for sure she would reach out to me in the last week since we made the bargain, but she hasn’t. When I saw her in the garden just now, she bolted like a doe in the woods. I fear these lessons are my last chance to connect with her, to show her that I do in fact want her. But I fear talking with her won’t make a difference. She closes up on me whenever I start discussing matters of the heart.”
