Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)(39)

He said the dreaded word. “White.”

At the sound of his name, his man of business looked up obligingly. “My lord?”

There was a cool draft in the room. It didn’t stop Gareth’s palms from moistening with a hint of cowardice. He fixed his gaze on the velvet curtains behind White. Conversation was easier if he didn’t have to look into the man’s eyes. The fabric rippled in the breeze, and Gareth found courage as best he could.

“It occurs to me that we have—” Gareth took a deep breath, and the rest of the words spilled out all in rush “—a number of things in common.”

“We do?”

From the corner of his eye, Gareth saw faint puzzled lines furrow White’s forehead.

Gareth clenched his hand and resisted the urge to punch his leg in frustration.

“Yes,” Gareth said. “We do.” And damn it, there he was again, using that quelling tone. One couldn’t have a conversation if one quelled the person one was attempting to converse with.

“Perhaps my lord would care to enumerate?”

Gareth didn’t care to enumerate, damn it. But he was going to have to try if he ever expected to get anywhere. Gareth shuffled through the dismally tiny selection of facts that he knew about the man.

“Well,” he suggested, “we are both men.”

White put his head to one side. The motion drew Gareth’s eyes from the drapes and forced him to look his employee in the face. Gareth swallowed.

“Yes,” said White. “We are.”

“And,” Gareth plunged forward, “we are of a similar age.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

Gareth tapped his closed fist against his hip. There the known similarities ended. Gareth felt like ten kinds of an idiot—as Madame Esmerelda had no doubt intended. White waited, that curious expression on his face. He reminded Gareth of a pigeon considering a crust of bread held in the hands of a small child. Apparently, he expected something additional. But what could Gareth say?

We are both literate.

We both have fewer than five children.

“And we both enjoy the company of women.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. He knew it was stupid as soon as the words left his mouth. There was an extremely befuddled pause from White’s side of the room. As if the child had lobbed the entire loaf of bread at the pigeon, and White didn’t know whether to fly away or tear at the bounty.

“Shocking similarities, my lord,” said White. That straight, unblinking gaze seemed subtly mocking in Gareth’s mind.

The tips of Gareth’s ears heated. He grabbed the edge of the desk and squeezed, as if to throttle that damned fortune-teller by proxy. There was a good reason Gareth didn’t attempt to make friends. He wasn’t any good at it. And he hated not being good at things.

He was making a scapegoat of her again.

If she ever found out about this, she’d mock him, and she would be right. He knew he used his social status as a shield to prevent this awkwardness. It had worked. It had worked ever since he was twelve.

It was only now that it failed. The import of that failure hit him directly in the chest. If he couldn’t even talk to a man who depended upon him for his livelihood, who would he ever connect with? He would be isolated all his life. Gareth fumbled for a topic of conversation.

“What’s it like, then? Marriage.”

White leaned back. Puzzled lines crinkled the corners of his eyes. “It’s a marvelous state.”

“But doesn’t Mrs. White ever lie to you?”

White was no fool. Those lines relaxed and smoothed away, as if he’d finally understood the reason for the inquiry. “All the time. The benefit of marriage is that it becomes so easy to recognize when one’s spouse lies.”

Gareth frowned. That state of hypocrisy seemed unbearable. It reinforced all his reasons for avoiding lengthy relationships. “What sort of lies does Mrs. White tell?”

White put his hands to the side of his head and batted his eyes in a manner Gareth supposed was intended to be femininely flirtatious. On the man’s sharp, masculine features, the expression was closer to frightening. “Oh, no, William. The shawl was quite inexpensive.”

The high falsetto proceeding from his normally baritone man of business made Gareth sit back in surprise.

“Of course,” White added in his normal voice, “I lie to her, too.”

“Oh?”

“Just this morning, I told her, ‘Nonsense, my dear, you haven’t aged a day.’”

Gareth shoved at the papers on his desk morosely. He had no experience with this sort of interaction. It sounded mundane and comforting. How could it seem both foolish and enviable at the same time?

White laid a piece of blotting paper over the letter he had been working on. “This may be an impertinent question, my lord—but hypothetically speaking, is there a particular woman that you are thinking about?”

“Hypothetically speaking?” Gareth sighed. It was not as if he could possibly lower himself any further in White’s estimation at this point. “Yes.”

“And has this, uh, hypothetical woman perhaps told you lies?”

“Hypothetically, everything out of her mouth has been a lie,” Gareth complained, much aggrieved. “Everything except her kisses. She meant them.”