Too Wicked to Tame (The Derrings #2)(43)

A quick survey of the dining room revealed that Lady Moreton had departed. Wise woman. No doubt she would reappear once the smoke cleared…ready to mount another campaign in the war to see her grandson wed. Yet this time Portia would not be so unsuspecting. The old lady would not get the upper hand again.

Only Mina remained, face flushed with guilt as she fiddled with the handle of her teacup.

“Portia,” she greeted. “Where have you been?”

Inhaling deeply, Portia asked as calmly as she could, “Why did you not tell me your brother had already gone to the cellar?”



“Grandmother wouldn’t permit me to speak.” Mina shrugged, smiling weakly.

Portia pursed her lips, refraining from pointing out that Mina was not the most obedient of souls.

“You are aware that she locked me down there with your brother?”

Mina gave a guilty nod.

Betrayal stung Portia’s heart. Absurd, she knew. Mina owed her no loyalty. Still, she thought they had forged a friendship, thought them kindred souls, two spirits searching for their own sense of freedom and happiness.

Portia shook her head, struggling over Mina’s role in the scheme to rob her of that freedom.

“Why would you—”

“Would it be such a terrible thing for you to marry my brother?” Mina blurted, her eyes bright and alive as she set her teacup down.

Portia blinked, a resounding yes reverberating through her head. Terrible to marry a man who made her feel totally powerless, who turned her blood to molten lava, who reduced her to an incoherent, quivering mass?

He would run over her with frightening ease, trample her will until nothing but ashes of her old self remained. Her dream of standing free and independent before the Parthenon would be forever lost. She would exist as a ghost, like her mother when Portia’s father had lived, drifting through life more dead than alive.

But his hands on your body night after night would make you feel alive. Portia shook her head, driving out the insidious voice that would have her seeking out the wicked earl and casting aside her inhibitions…and her dreams for freedom.

“Do you not find him attractive?” Mina asked, her gaze searching Portia’s face.

Portia opened her mouth to reply, but Mina rushed ahead, her voice insistent, “Do not deny it. I have seen the way you look at him, and he does his share of watching you, too. Perhaps Grandmother is right and Heath simply needs his hand forced.”

Portia snapped her mouth shut, recognizing the fervent gleam in the young woman’s eyes. Portia knew that look. Had seen it countless times on the faces of those who presumed to know what was best for her.

Mina had clearly joined ranks with Lady Moreton to see that Portia and Heath wed. Contrary to their wishes. Like everyone else, Mina had become someone to guard against. Weariness settled in, a weight on her heart.

“A terrible thing?” she asked in a paper-thin voice. “No, to you I suppose it wouldn’t be.”



Turning, she walked from the room.

“Portia! Portia, wait!”

Ignoring Mina, she continued walking, wondering if the day would come when someone took her wishes into account.





Chapter 16


Portia stepped into the stables, grateful to leave the biting wind behind. Her gaze swept the rows of gleaming wood stalls as she loosened her shawl around her shoulders. Not a soul in sight. Yet she had seen Mina enter the stables from her upstairs window.

After two days of avoiding her, Portia decided it was time to face her. Surely Mina now realized how misguided her efforts? Besides, Portia couldn’t very well ignore every Moreton family member. Not while she resided under their roof. If that were the case, she might as well go home.

And despite everything, Portia wanted to remain. She loved looking out her window each morning to the windswept moors. She loved losing herself for hours in the Moreton’s inexhaustible library. She felt more alive here than anywhere else. And not, she told herself, because her blood burned in the presence of a certain man.

“Hello?” she called out, her voice tinny and small in the cavernous heart of the stables. No groom rushed forth, so she walked deeper into the shadowed interior, thinking perhaps they couldn’t hear her if they worked somewhere toward the back of the enormous building. Perhaps Mina was fetching her mount in one of the stalls. Heath’s sister didn’t strike her as the sort to wait for her horse to be fetched for her.

A horse stuck his head over a nearby stall door, whinnying for her attention.

“Hello, lovely,” she greeted, stroking her gloved hand over his velvety nose.

The beast snorted his warm breath into her palm.

“Looking for a treat, are you?” she crooned. “Perhaps next time, hmm?”

A whimper—or rather, a moan—diverted her attention. Angling her head, she listened. And heard it again. Definitely a moan. Dropping her hand, she walked ahead, peering over each stall door.

Finally, she arrived at the last stall. Rising on her tiptoes, she peered over the door.

Her gaze fell on Mina. Atop a pile of hay and buried beneath a young, virile-looking groom. The strapping fellow had wedged his body between her legs and was fondling her breasts through her bodice with the industriousness of a cook kneading dough.

Portia’s mouth dropped. The impulse to flee and pretend she never saw anything—never saw Heath’s sister rolling in the hay like a common crofter’s daughter—battled her urge to march into the stall, yank the groom off Mina, and give both a stern lecture. She shifted her weight back and forth between her feet, indecision twisting her stomach into knots.