As the Devil Dares (Capturing the Carlisles #3)(44)



She asked softly, “Were you there when it happened?”

“Yes.” He’d been standing only a few feet away, but he might as well have been on the moon for all the difference it made.

She gently squeezed his fingers. “I’m sorry, Robert,” she whispered. “It must have been so terrible for you.”

He tossed back the rest of the whiskey. Terrible? No. It had been pure hell.

They sat there silently for several long moments. There was nothing to say, but he took an odd comfort in their shared silence. Could it be possible that Mariah Winslow, of all people, might be the only one able to empathize with the grief and guilt he still carried inside him and always would? The one who understood the need he felt to prove himself to his father’s memory? After all, she struggled herself to prove her worth to her own father.

No. He’d trusted her as far as he dared. Sharing any more with her would only make him more vulnerable to wounding when she next decided to bare her claws.

He rolled down his sleeves, then stood and pulled on his jacket. He tugged at his cuffs to bring them into proper place, until there were no visible signs that he’d climbed a tree to appease a nine-year-old. And an ebony-haired minx.

“So what next, then, Carlisle?” As if she sensed the change in him and realized as he did that the tender moment between them had ended, Mariah reached for the bottle to refill his glass. “Where do we go from here?”

He forced a grin at her. “I stay right here in hiding from those women for the rest of the afternoon.”

But the sobriety of her expression didn’t change at his teasing, and she gravely shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” he answered quietly, his grin fading. There were some topics he had no intention of raising this afternoon with her, and settling the terms of surrender on the season and the partnership was one of them. She might have raised the topic of his father in order to share their grief, but that conversation only reminded him of how much he owed to his father’s memory. And how very far he still was from reaching it. He repeated, brooking no argument, “I stay right here in hiding, and you return to your tea.” He snatched the glass out of her hand as she raised it to her lips. “Without the scent of whiskey on your breath, or my mother will never forgive me.”

“Ah!” Her eyes sparkled, and his heart thumped hard against his ribs. He much preferred that unrepentant gleam of mischief in her eyes to grief. “Then you’ve not had tea with Lady Agnes Sinclair.”

He shook his head. “Those stories that she puts whiskey in her tea are apocryphal.”

“They’re true, actually,” his brother-in-law, Thomas Matteson, Marquess of Chesney, corrected as he sauntered into his library. “The woman once put so much whiskey into the tea that she nearly drank two of us under the table.” He fetched himself a glass from the shelf and filled it from their bottle. When they both looked at him disbelievingly, he added, “Why do you think Josie always seats herself next to the woman?”

With a soft laugh, Mariah rose and dropped into a belated curtsy.

Chesney waved off the formality. “Don’t mind me. I’m only here to rescue Robert from the ladies.” Then he pinned him with a no-nonsense look. “And you’ll return the favor at Lady Grenadine’s dinner party next week.”

“Of course.” The dinner party…just one of the many events during the next fortnight to which his mother had insisted Robert escort Mariah. Apparently, his mother hadn’t understood when he said he wanted to be left completely out of her season.

A smile pulled at her red lips as Mariah glanced between the two men. “Do the ladies know how much scheming you gentlemen employ to avoid them?”

“Self-preservation, Miss Winslow,” Chesney replied with exaggerated profundity. “If we didn’t, the males of our species would die out, and then where would England be?”

Another laugh fell from her lips, and this time, Chesney’s eyes lit up as if he found her absolutely charming.

Robert supposed she was, despite the untamed hellcat that lurked within.

“Papa!” Clara ran into the library.

“Walk inside the house,” Chesney ordered patiently.

She slowed to a walk, yet her feet still somehow managed to propel her across the room as fast as one of Jackson Shaw’s racehorses. “Papa, it’s Daisy,” she choked out. She beseechingly wrapped her arms around Chesney’s legs, with a trembling bottom lip and large eyes round with worry. “She’s climbed up a tree again and gotten stuck. You have to get her down!”

“That cat will find its own way down in an hour or so. It always does,” he answered firmly.

Robert slid a sideways glance at Mariah, who wisely kept staring straight ahead, and mumbled, “Always, huh?”

Chesney placed a loving kiss on his daughter’s forehead. “Now stop worrying about that cat and go find Nanny. Tell her I said you could have an extra sweet roll this afternoon.”

Clara beamed, then turned to run from the library without a worry in the world.

“Walk.”

She walked slowly until she reached the hallway where, thinking that she couldn’t be seen, she launched into a bouncing, high-stepping skip as she hurried away.

Robert rolled his eyes. Women would be the death of him yet.

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