“From Scotland,” Nash replied, but he sounded rather evasive.
Heat burned her cheeks as a realization set in. “Am I to assume you already had an invitation to his ball?”
A nod confirmed her worst fear.
Oh, the devil.
She lifted her chin, refusing to shrink like a violet. She was no flower. She was a rapier of a woman, and one day the loss of her would cut him to the quick, just as his loss cut her. She swore it in this moment, even as humiliation burned her. “You let me stand there and lie.” Another nod. How mortifying. He’d likely stood there pitying her.
She clenched her teeth so hard, she thought she heard one crack. She would not bother to try to explain away the lie. He could not truly know she’d come to see him, but he likely had guessed. “Good day, Your Grace,” she said with as much civility and pride as she could muster.
“Good day, Lady Lilias.” His tone now matched her formalness, which infuriated her for no good reason other than anything he did in this moment would anger her because she was so embarrassed.
She turned, raised the brass knocker, and muttered under her breath as his footsteps faded behind her. “May you fall on the way home and break that too perfect nose.”
Chapter Two
It was painful how much he still desired the proud woman who muttered wishes for him to break his nose. How was it possible to still want her so much after so long? Nash paused on his trek home. He ached. His damn body physically ached from the restraint he had shown not to touch her. God, how he had wanted to…
Everything about her whispered to him to hold her, to make her his. Her flaxen hair was still in wild waves, her eyes still a shade of brilliant blue that did not exist on this earth. Her eyes made a cloudless summer day seem dull. They filled him with ridiculous happiness and hope. He had not seen her since last Christmas when he’d gone home to the Cotswolds and watched her from afar, as he did every time he returned there, but he had not been truly in her presence in seven years. He’d forgotten just how alive he felt when she was so near he could reach out and touch her. She still smelled divinely of lilies, too.
He stepped to the side as two young ladies passed him, each smiling and sending him inviting looks. He nodded cordially but did not engage them. Their feverish giggles trailed after them as they walked away, silk skirts swishing.
Nothing. He felt nothing. Not even desire in the moment. They certainly did not awaken that inner instinct to protect and possess, make his chest tight, cause yearning to put an ache in the pit of his gut. No woman had ever made him feel that way but Lilias, and damn, but she still did. He’d recognized just how much after the first words she’d said to him:You came back to the Cotswolds, and you avoided me.
Lilias had always spoken so bluntly. It was as if someone had forgotten to relay the cardinal rule of being English to her—say what you are supposed to, not what you truly feel.
His father had lived by that rule until he’d drawn his last breath, and his mother still did. Neither of them had ever actually said his actions had killed Thomas. They’d offered nothing but silence and an almost total withdrawal of emotions. And they’d not asked him to return home more than the requisite once a year for his father to update him on the affairs of the dukedom. Even the letter his mother had sent about his father’s death had been as cold as the frigid air of the Highlands in winter. She had advised him to come home to take up his duties or people would gossip. There was no mention of love, forgiveness, or sadness over her husband’s loss, just worry about what people might say.
So here he was. He’d known he would come face-to-face with Lilias, but after his talk with Owen yesterday, he’d planned to do all in his power to avoid her for as long as possible as Owen had asked. He owed Owen that.
It was his fault Owen walked with a limp. He had let Owen challenge him to that horse race all those years ago, and he’d told himself he’d let Owen win so that Owen would look good in Lilias’s eyes. He could and would do for Owen what he should have done for Thomas—that’s what he’d told himself. But then they’d been racing and Nash’s thoughts had gone to impressing Lilias himself, not putting Owen first. It was the second most shameful memory of his life.
He tugged a hand through his hair as he entered his house and brushed past the butler. He made his way to his study, poured a drink, and sat down. Lilias’s image immediately filled his mind in blinding vividness. The craving he’d long had for her had not diminished one damn whit. It was a dark and dangerous thing that threatened to consume him.
She should not have come to his house. He gripped his glass, his thoughts crashing into each other. Why had she come? To see Adaline? That’s what Lilias had said, but what was the nonsense about the invitation to the ball? No, she’d come to see him. Had she waited seven long years to confront him? A bark of desperate laughter escaped him. He somehow was not surprised. He’d hurt her. She’d thought them real friends, and he’d betrayed her. His glorious girl.
Perhaps she’d felt a small bit of the emotion that he’d felt, still did, for her, and she had simply wanted the closure he’d never given her? Perhaps she’d wanted to set things straight between them for Owen’s sake, as she likely knew she’d wed Owen. Most likely, she wanted him to understand that if he still felt anything for her, it could not be. He didn’t know. His mind wasn’t working properly.
He felt haunted, and he was—by her. She was the ghost that would not die in his mind or heart. He poured another drink and prayed for no dreams of her tonight.
“No.”
Nash’s mother sat across from him in his study the next day and arched her dark eyebrows at him. “Nay?” She repeated the answer he’d just given her with definite incredulity. “I never ask anything of ye.”
That was not quite true. She frequently asked for more pin money for new gowns and baubles, but he gladly gave it. She did not, however, ask for his company. Ever.
“Ye live yer life as ye wish. Ye cling to heathen ways.” She flicked her hand at the kilt he wore.
He resisted the urge to laugh. There was nothing heathen about wearing the kilt of his mother’s clan. She just didn’t like it because her stuffy friends would not like it. They thought themselves better than the Scots, so his mother liked to conveniently forget that shewasa Scot. Just as she’d conveniently forgotten his existence until it had become inconvenient.
“I need ye to go to the ball,” she said.
“No.” He could not go to Carrington’s ball. Lilias would be there. He didn’t trust himself around her. Yesterday, when he’d realized she had walked to his house alone, he’d dashed out the door to see her safely to where she wanted to go. That was not his duty.Shewas not his duty. At the very least, he could have had his footman accompany her or his coachman take her, but that would have required forethought, and Lilias stole that ability from him simply by being near. He needed to keep a good distance between them until she was wed, and he could finally put her on the shelf where she belonged, the high one where precious things went so some fool didn’t come along and break them.
His mother scowled, opened and closed her mouth several times, and then said, “I have not wanted to ask this of ye, but—”
She paused, and damn it if he did not find himself leaning forward as an eager boy of seventeen would have instead of the man of five and twenty he now was. He knew better. She was not going to offer a chance to finally be forgiven, a way to redeem himself, and yet…
