“You said that already,” Matilda muttered, finally seeing the trap, a moment too late to escape the snare of it.
This ‘ruffian’ must have been here for the matter that James had insisted he was going to take care of, sooner rather than later. The matter of Matilda’s marriage and freeing himself of her presence in ‘his’ house.
If he thought it was going to be as simple as ambushing her and everything falling into place for him as she meekly bowed down and accepted the fate that he had decided for her, he was about to be very sorely mistaken.
Indeed, if anything, he should have known better.
CHAPTERTHREE
“Do you make a habit of frightening young ladies at their front door?” Matilda asked coolly as she walked through the gardens with the Duke, who was supposedly her betrothed.
She was careful to keep a pointed distance between them, veering off to wander adjoining pathways wherever she could before meeting up with him again. He frowned the entire time, his mouth permanently fixed in a thin, displeased line. A shame, in truth, for he had full lips that did not suit being squashed together.
“I was expected,” he replied, just as coolly.
“We have discussed this. You were not expected. If you were expected, you would have been welcomed,” she said. “If the party you are supposed to be meeting is not aware of the meeting, then you cannot be ‘expected.’ It is impossible. Youbelievedyou were. That is very different, and your unwillingness to see that does not reflect well on your character.”
The Duke’s lip curled. “You do not know me.”
“I am very perceptive,” she said. “It does not take me long to decipher someone’s nature.”
“In that, we are the same,” he remarked. “You’ve also shown an unwillingness to accept that you were mistaken which rather shows a flaw inyourcharacter. You haven’t attempted to apologize.”
She sniffed. “Nor have you.”
“I did apologize. Twice. Once to you, once to your cousin,” he replied.
“You did not mean it though, and an apology that is not meant is no apology at all.”
He took a measured breath and for a second, she wondered what it would take to get a more impassioned reaction from this stern, stoic, stony statue of a man. She was trying her best to antagonize him, and he was giving her nothing in return.
“I didn’t realize that my supposed betrothed was a fountain of proverbs,” he said.
“Oh,weare not betrothed,” she hurried to correct. “This is all my cousin’s scheming, and I want no part in it. Indeed, I should have no part in it, considering it is nothing at all to do with me. If he wants to aid you in your pursuit of marriage so badly, then he ought to wed you himself.”
“Nor is it anything to do with me what your quarrel is with your cousin,” the Duke replied, rather sharper of mind than his appearance suggested.
The trouble was he said it all with such a matter-of-fact voice that it took her a while to realize that he had made a clever retort. She certainly would not laugh, lest it encourage his pursuit.
This is why one must never judge a person by their exterior.She kept that to herself in case he accused her of being a fountain of proverbs again. What he called proverbs, she called wisdom, but she would not waste the exertion trying to explain that to him. After all, he had not yet understood that hewasat fault.
“Are they not beautiful orchards, Your Grace?” James sidled up to involve himself, a terrible chaperone.
Ever since the Duke had arrived, James had been desperate to woo the man into conversation, as if he was more interested in finding a powerful, wealthy friend, and the Duke becoming Matilda’s husband was merely a secondary prize.
“They would be,” the Duke replied, snatching Matilda’s intrigue for a moment.
“Would be, Your Grace?” James said, visibly panicking.
The Duke waved a hand, also covered with silvery scars, toward the distant trees. “No one has picked any fruit. If the fruit isn’t picked, there’s no use in having extensive orchards. The fruits are mature; they should be picked.”
“That is what I have been saying!” Matilda cried, swiftly reining in her enthusiasm. “But no one ever listens to me.”
The Duke glanced down at her with those intense, dark blue eyes. “Perhaps, that’s because you say a great deal yet not very much at all. One might be less inclined to listen if one has to sift through a tide of self-important blather first to find the important bits.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. It was the meanest, cleverest thing anyone had said to her since her father passed, and she did not know how to process it, whether to applaud his wit or spit at him.
A well-aimed spit might be enough to get him to leave,she mused, but that remark had just made her so damnably curious.
