Page 45 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
“Isn’t that what we do?” I said. “Say awful things to one another to annoy?”
“You, perhaps,” Crispin answered. “I, on the other hand…”
“Oh, spare me.”
He grinned, a quick flash of white teeth, and I added, “Every time you say anything to me, you intend for it to grate. Why else do you insist on calling me Darling every time you open your mouth?”
He opened his mouth, and I continued before he could say anything. “Yes, yes. I know it’s my name. Or approximately my name.” An anglicization of my German surname of Schatz, if you want to be precise. “But that isn’t the reason you use it.”
He smirked. “No, Darling. It isn’t.”
“You do it because you know it irritates me. And in return, I do what I know irritates you.”
“It’s hardly on the same level,” Crispin said. “You seem to actively despise me. I don’t despise you. I don’t even particularly dislike you, except when you do something that reminds me that you loathe me.”
I opened my mouth. And closed it again. “I don’t loathe you,” finally fell out.
He arched a brow.
“I don’t! I’ll admit that I have, at times, disliked you. You were a horrid little boy. You used to take me into the garden maze at Sutherland Hall and leave me there.”
He sniggered. “Only until you figured out how to get yourself out. And it didn’t take very long, as I recall.”
Well, no. It hadn’t. But— “It happened more than once. And you also took me into the cellars and implied you’d shut me in the dungeon, and you threw mud at me, and snowballs in the winter, and you put spiders and caterpillars down the back of my dress...”
“I’m sure I did, Darling. I’m sure I did worse than that, too. But I haven’t been a horrible little boy in quite a long time, and I haven’t done anything like that to you in years. You should have gotten over it by now.”
Perhaps that was true. However— “You’re still exceedingly annoying, you know.”
“It’s hardly my fault that everything about me bothers you, Darling. Unlike you, I don’t go out of my way to annoy you.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” I said. “So in May, when you told me I looked like a Bramley?—”
He held up a finger. “I did not tell you that you looked like a Bramley, Darling. I said that you looked edible.”
“But what you meant was that I looked like a Bramley. Because my dress was green.”
He smirked, and I added, “Fine. Last month, when you decided to treat me to a sampling of your charms…”
“I was proving a point,” Crispin said. “Unlike you, when you went out of your way to embarrass me in front of my entire family yesterday. Not to mention in front of the woman my father wants me to marry, plusherentire family. Thanks a lot, Darling.”
I shook my head. “You can’t, St George.”
“Can’t what?”
“Marry her. What else?”
He tilted his head inquiringly. “And why is that?”
“You don’t love her. We both know it.Sheknows it. You’ve told her. I heard you.”
He nodded. “And she wants me anyway. Unless you think she’s after the title and fortune?”
He quirked a brow. I pressed my lips together in a concerted effort not to take the bait. For years I had been telling him, at every opportunity, that that was all he had to recommend him, that the Sutherland title and Sutherland money are the only reason that women buzz around him like bees around a flower. It’s a lie, of course. I’m neither stupid nor blind. He’s clever, he’s handsome, he can be charming when he wants to be (and vicious when he doesn’t)… but the fact that he’s Crispin Astley, Viscount St George, and first in line for the Sutherland dukedom, isn’t the only reason why a woman might find him attractive.
Naturally I didn’t say so. Not in so many words.
“She has a title and money of her own,” I said instead, crossly. “She doesn’t need yours. We both know she thinks you’d havefuntogether.”
