Tavish stood, walked back to the sideboard, and poured himself another drink.
It was like speaking to a scared child.She combated him on every level, not believing that someone could ever be kind to her.
“Has no one ever done anything nice for you?”he asked, wandering back to the sofa and throwing himself down on it, careful not to spill.
“Never,” she whispered so quietly that he almost didn’t hear the admission.“Not even my parents.At times, my father tried, but my mother always thwarted his attempts.”
“And Summerset…was he ever kind to you?”Tavish realized the answer to his question before he asked it.After meeting her, he had hoped every terrible thing he’d heard about the old duke was a lie.Tales created by the same society the old bastard had held in such high esteem.
“Never,” she finally said, her tone indifferent.“He took great joy in trying to shape me into a proper wife for the first six months of our marriage.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off her.This strong, beautiful, misunderstood woman.“What happened after six months.”
She gave him a dazzling smile.“I poisoned him.”
Tavish sat forward, thinking surely he had not heard her correctly.“What?”He stood as if that would correct his hearing.
“I poisoned him.A little arsenic in his evening port, after a cruel beating for smiling too widely at an earl.”Her face was shadowed, like she were still experiencing the horrors.“As I nursed him back to health, I whispered, ‘If you ever touch me again, next time I’ll make sure it kills you.’ And he never did.He was too afraid to even look at me after that,” she said the last part with pride.
Tavish laughed so hard he could barely breathe.“Fecking hell, Princess.”He ran a hand through his hair.
“I couldn’t take it anymore.Months of his cruelty, living in fear that he would touch me.”She shook her head as tears slid down her cheeks.“I thought mother was bad, but the old duke made her look like a nun.”
Tavish went and sat beside her.He didn’t stop to think as he pulled her into his arms.All he wanted to do was to dig Summerset up from the grave and kill him over and over again until the bastard felt the same pain as the strong woman in his arms.
“Stand up,” Tavish commanded as she sat staring up at him.
Florentia had just revealed the worst part of herself to a man she’d barely known a full day, and yet he did not react in the least.
Well, he had laughed loudly, but nothing else.No look of outrage, no judgement, he just gazed at her with those piercing blue eyes of his, and for the first time in her life, someone saw her.Who she really was, not who her mother had created, not the mask she had to wear in society.
“What are we doing?”she asked, enjoying the lightness between them.
Her confession about the horrors she’d faced with her late husband and ultimately how she was finally able to stop him was something she had not even shared with Charity.
It was pure desperation and madness on her part, but one that she would never regret.
After his bout of sickness, her husband had never laid another hand on her.Not physically, nor intimately as a man does his wife.The remainder of their marriage was lived separately, she in London and he in the country with his mistress.
She stood in front of Tavish, waiting for him to instruct her.
“I’m going to teach you how to fight properly so you don’t get hauled to Newgate for poisoning someone.”
Giving him her best scowl, she said, “I assure you I have no need to go to prison.My poisoning days are over.”She inhaled a deep breath before releasing it.
“Good, you’re too pretty for prison.”He tilted her chin up, his touch lighting a fire inside of her abdomen.
After she’d poisoned the old duke, Florentia had been so petrified that she’d actually killed him, a rich wealthy duke, that she didn’t leave his bedside.When it was finally clear that he wasn’t going to die, she saw it as her opportunity to end his cruelty toward her forever.
It worked.
Extremely well.So well in fact, that he completely abandoned her, finding himself a younger mistress.He informed Florentia that when his mistress became with child, Florentia would claim it as her own.She readily agreed, but it never came to pass.
“First, we’ll practice your stance.”Tavish turned and began pushing the furniture out of the way.The small table, sofa, and chairs were all moved aside to give them room to move freely.
Florentia gawked at his physical strength, trying not to reveal how much she actually craved the brute of a man.Not only was he deliciously sinful to look at, but he was also caring and kind.Underneath the bare-knuckle boxer was a real gentleman.
Not the type of gentleman that attended Eton and Oxford, no, he was made of sturdier stock than that.She had never known a man like Tavish O’Brien, but dear God, did she want to know him.
