Never Courted, Suddenly Wed (Scandalous Seasons #2)(36)

Christopher groaned. It was going to be a long, long night.





Lady Ackerly’s Tattle Sheet





Miss S.W. was observed entering the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly to view Mr. Bullock’s Great Serpent exhibit.


11

The door bounced open, and slammed hard against the plaster wall of the breakfast room. Christopher looked up, bored by his father’s constant temper.

Christopher picked up his fork and knife and began to slice the ham on his plate.

“What is the meaning of this?” his father bellowed.

A newspaper landed on top of Christopher’s plate of ham and bread. He glanced at his father, whose hawk-like nose flared. Fire glinted in the marquess’s icy blue eyes.

Christopher looked back down at the paper in front of him and swallowed around the last bite he’d taken. The ham threatened to come back up. “Father,” he greeted, and removed the newspaper from his plate. He made to hand it back to his father.

Father swatted at Christopher’s fingers. “Go on, read it.”

Just like that; with those four jeering words, Christopher was transported back to his childhood when his sire’s approval had meant so much, to a time when he’d cared what Father thought about his only son and heir. Then, Christopher had poured every last bit of his energy into excelling at his studies.

Christopher balled his hands in his lap. He was no longer a child. He met his father’s hard stare. “Why don’t you tell me what it says, Father?”

The marquess guffawed. “Ahh, that’s right. Why don’t you give it a try, Christopher? Read it.”

Christopher’s eyes fixed on the page in front of him. The words shifted in and out of focus. He squinted and tried to make them clearer.

Miss S.W. …

And…

A dull throbbing pressure built behind Christopher’s eyes. For all the tutors he’d had, for all the personal instruction, Christopher had never overcome his difficulties reading. Taxing situations had always made it that much more challenging. He shoved the paper aside. “Go to hell.”

His father’s thin lips flattened into a hard line and a vein throbbed in the corner of the older man’s eye, indicating that Christopher’s response grated on the older man whose rank and status had protected him from any outward shows of insolence. “I’ll tell you what it says! It says the Duke of Mallen is courting Miss Sophie Winters. That’s what it says.”

Not for the first time in Christopher’s miserable life, he cursed his inability to make clear sense of the written word. The desire to know what the newspaper said about Sophie, and not have to hear it from the lips of salacious gossips, nearly consumed him. He picked up the paper and attempted to read Ackerly’s reporting on Sophie and Mallen.

Father ripped it from his hands. “Do you take me for a fool, Christopher?” He tossed the paper to the floor.

“Never a fool, Father.” A cold-hearted, ruthless bastard, yes. A fool, no. That moniker had been reserved for Christopher.

His father slammed his fists down upon the table, rattling the plates. Liquid sloshed over the rim of Christopher’s coffee cup. “This is all your doing. I know it.”

He never ceased to be amazed by his father’s devious, but precise thinking. Christopher should have known he couldn’t outwit his sire.

Christopher met and held his father’s hard stare. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bahh, come now. Would you have me believe that of a sudden the Duke of Mallen decides to court that spinsterish cow?”

Christopher rose so quickly, his knees knocked the back of the chair and sent the piece of furniture tumbling backward. “Watch your tongue,” he snapped, gripping the edges of the table. For all the cruelties he’d suffered at his father’s hands over the years, none of them had roused this icy-rage the way it did hearing the marquess disparage Sophie.

Perhaps it was that of late he’d come to appreciate her as more than the hoyden of his past. With her penchant for finding out trouble and the endearing way she spoke to herself when she thought no one was listening, she became more than the amorphous figure of his youth. She was a young woman, who no more wanted to be controlled by Society’s expectations than he did.

The marquess folded his arms across his chest and studied Christopher before speaking. “I expect you to make this right or else her dowry will slip through your fingers into Mallen’s already plentiful coffers.”

Christopher’s gut clenched. That is what his father would make him—a fortune-hunter. “I don’t want to court the lady for her fortune.”

His father snorted. “So now you’ve developed a set of principles? Where was all that moral integrity when you cheated your way through Eton and Oxford?” He closed the distance between them until he stood toe to toe with Christopher. Though several inches shorter than his son, the marquess managed to somehow peer down his hawk-like nose at Christopher. “If you don’t secure her fortune, we are ruined. We’ll have nothing. But I, I’ll have my reputation. You, however, well, it is only a matter of time before the world learns the truth about you.”

Christopher sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “That threat is growing tedious, Father.”

“It is no longer a threat.” The marquess meandered over to the sideboard; the stiff set to his shoulders belied the casualness of his actions. He piled kidneys, bacon, and sardines with mustard sauce upon a plate and then carried it over to his seat at the head of the table.