Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)

“When I was very young,” she said, her voice quiet as the sound of still water running, “I was brought to school. I was distraught and confused as only a four-year-old child can be. The instructor tasked with my care told me if I stopped sniveling and was good, my mother would come for me soon.”


Maybe it was because his hands over her shoulders gave the illusion of closeness. Maybe it was because he hadn’t expected a revelation of that magnitude from her. But he shook with the cruelty of telling a small child a lie of that nature. His hands tightened.

“So I was good.” Her matter-of-fact delivery only drove the ice deeper into his bones.

“It may be hard to believe, but I was quiet and polite and…and honest. At that age, at least. I never wept, not even—well, you can imagine how cruel young girls can be.”

Gareth had seen how the boys at Harrow tormented those not from the oldest of families. How they’d singled out the awkward and the quiet. He could extrapolate.

“I was uncommonly good until I turned nine. Then one of the other girls pushed me down and I skinned my knee and got mud on my dress. Nothing unusual, you understand. And while I was telling myself it would all come right when my mother came for me, I realized it had been years. She wasn’t coming for me. Nobody ever would, no matter how good I was. Mrs. Davenport had lied to me, and I was all alone.”

Gareth swallowed the lump in his throat. “So what did you do?”

Her shoulder blades leapt under his hand in what Gareth supposed was a fatalistic shrug. “I stopped being good. And here I am.”

Here they weren’t. She shifted and smiled at him. Pretending it didn’t matter.

“But all this talk of me is boring. What of you? Twenty-one, was it, when you discovered everyone lied?”

Gareth paused, reluctant. In part, he held his tongue because he wanted to learn more of her than she did of him. But he also didn’t want to air his petty complaints to her. Not now, in the barren aftermath of her revelation.

“The usual,” he eventually said. “Delusions of love.”

“A woman?” He must have made some sign of acknowledgment, because she covered his cold hand with hers. “And another man, I would imagine.”

“And more than one man,” he corrected. “One of whom was my grandfather.”

Her breath hissed in. “Good Lord. How did that—I mean—why?”

“It was a wager. I’d planned to ask her to marry me. My grandfather—he had the training of me after my father died—thought she wasn’t good enough to be the future Marchioness of Blakely. I said she was. He wagered he could prove otherwise.”

“What do you mean, wagered she wasn’t good enough? That sounds horrific.”

No more horrific than sending Gareth’s mother away from her son just because she remarried. Gareth waved his hand. “It was part of his lessons. Learn about the estates. Accept responsibility. Noblesse oblige. He said I had plebeian instincts, and he needed to drive them from me.”

“So he—he—”

“So he shagged the woman I intended to marry, yes.”

“And he called that a lesson? It sounds more like a travesty. How did he dare tell you what he’d done?”

“There was no need. He made sure I overheard them. She called his name, you see.”

Long silence. “At the time,” she finally said, “he would have been Lord Blakely, yes?”

Thank God for intelligent women, who understood the import of his little speech without him having to bare himself any more than he’d already done. Gareth traced his hand down the curve of her spine.

“So since you inherited—” she started.

“It’s been years. And no. Since I became Blakely myself, I haven’t been able to hear that name on a woman’s lips. Not like that.”

At twenty-one, he’d had as much perspective on life as an ant had of the horizon. He felt rather like that ant now—as if he were utterly trivial. A pimple on the face of an enormous mountain situated in a massive range.

She’d had nothing. By all rights, Jenny should have followed the path of doomed women everywhere. Increasing desperation. Sexual immorality. It should have culminated in her dramatic death in some snow-filled alley, as if she were some desperate female in one of those gothic serializations. But Jenny had not made a serial of herself.

Instead, it was her arm that fell comfortingly over his chest, her head that rested against his shoulder. She gave succor to him, and he, selfish creature that he was, sucked in all her heat, hoarding it as selfishly as he’d taken her body.

Years ago, he’d traded the uncertain comfort of companionship for the surety of superiority. It had been his grandfather’s last gift—or perhaps his curse. If this was what he’d given up all those years ago, could he justify those years of loneliness?

Gareth shook his head and sent the dark thoughts back from whence they came.

Twilight had passed, and now he could make out nothing of her features in the thick darkness. He pulled her against him. She was limp and no doubt weary. She hadn’t slept much the previous evening. Neither, for that matter, had he.

The last of the light faded as he held her close.