Lord Sebastian's Wife. Katy Cooper
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Название: Lord Sebastian's Wife
Автор: Katy Cooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
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“I misspoke when I told you I despise you,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
She looked away. “Why should you not despise me, Sebastian? I did not lie to you when I said I despise myself.” If she could not tell him about Thomas, she could confess this much.
Silence answered her. She looked up to find Sebastian staring down at her through narrowed eyes. She waited for him to speak or to look away. He did neither, watching her as if trying to value what he saw.
Goaded by his silence and the pressure of his stare, she cried, “Do you not believe me?”
He looked at her for a moment longer and shook his head. “No. I believe you. But I do not know why.”
“How should I not scorn myself?” she cried. “I have done things that shame me.”
“You said yourself you have done penance for your sins,” he said irritably, unfolding his arms and planting fists on hips. He was tall and strong, his shoulders broad against the sunny summer sky.
Longing stirred again, making her aware of her body, her skin suddenly alive to the brush of sleeves and skirts, the constraint of her pair-of-bodies, the breeze lifting the lappets of her hood to tickle the back of her neck. And her distress, the moil of emotion churning in her heart, only heightened her awareness, made its tooth sharper. If he had not held her, would she feel this now? It did not matter.
“I am still ashamed,” she said. The more shamed now because she had not let George Conyers handle and caress and kiss her out of desire for him. No, wearying of Thomas’s accusations of infidelity, she had finally given in to the impulse to be as black as her husband painted her, to taste the pleasure of sin since she got no pleasure from goodness. In the end, she had not found pleasure anywhere.
“I cannot help you,” Sebastian said.
“I do not ask it of you.”
“My lady Manners!” An usher trotted along the path toward her, a square of white in his hand. Joining them, he bowed and offered her the square. “This arrived for you.”
Beatrice took it and turned it over, revealing the crest pressed into the wax sealing it closed. The Manners arms. The last time she had seen the ring that made this mark, it had been on Thomas’s hand. She shivered. Oh, for the day when she would be shut of the whole house of Manners.
“What is it?” Sebastian asked.
“A letter from my stepson by the look of it,” she said, and broke the seal.
Unlike her sister, she did not read easily, so it took her a few minutes to understand what the letter said. Even after reading it a second time, she could not believe the contents. The strutting lickspittle thought to deny her right to her own things. Anger, banked but not dead, flared up. Surely he would not dare.
She held the letter out to Sebastian. “Please, if you will, read this and tell me what it says.” Her voice was milder than she had thought it would be. So all the hard lessons Thomas had taught her were not lost; she could sound placid as a milch cow while resentment and annoyance curdled beneath her breastbone.
He took the letter and quickly scanned it. “It says the jewels you demand belong to the Manners family. You have no valid claim on them.”
I will flay him for this.
She took a deep, calming breath. “That is what I feared it said.”
I will crush his bones to powder.
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