Winning a Lady's Heart (Danby #1)(10)

And there was still the Duke of Danby to deal with. “Is he furious?” Alexandra’s frightened tone left little question as to which he she referenced.

Emma chewed her lip and peered around the room in a vain attempt at nonchalance. “What?” Alexandra pressed. “What?”

Emma opened her mouth to speak but there was a rap on the door.

“Enter,” Olivia called.

A maid popped in. “His Grace is ready for you now.”

“Lady Alexandra will be down momentarily,” Olivia informed the maid who dipped a curtsey and closed the door.

Alexandra wanted to wail. “That was hardly thirty minutes.”

Emma laughed gaily. “Don’t you know Grandpapa controls time as well?”

Alexandra thought about the alacrity with which Danby had found out about her scandal at the Williams’s ball and the short amount of time it had taken him to send round a note requesting her presence.

She sighed. Danby controlled more than time. He controlled everything and everyone.





“You!”

Nathan set his steaming cup of black coffee down and opened his mouth to speak—

“You foul, despicable cad. Whatever are you doing here?”

Even being only guest seated at the Duke of Danby’s dining room table, Nathan still glanced around to verify he was in fact the intended recipient of such vitriol.

“Good morning, Lady Olivia.”

If looks could kill, well then Nathan would be sitting in a pile of ash at the bottom of his half-drunk cup of black coffee.

“Good morning? It was a splendid morning until, until…this!”

Olivia had always been a warm and teasing towards him. He’d come to view her as a younger sister. The loathing in her young gaze struck him with an aching sense of loss. Could he blame her? She was fiercely loyal to Alexandra.

He gestured to the sideboard loaded with breakfast meats and flaky pastries. “Perhaps you might like to join me for breakfast.” His pointed look at the servant whose eyes were downcast was a subtle reminder. Servants talked.

Which apparently Lady Olivia cared not one bit about.

“I’d sooner join you in Hades.”

Well, she hadn’t said she’d never join him, so perhaps all was not lost with little Olivia.

“Nay,” she bit off. “I would never, ever join you anywhere. Why if I were a man, I’d call you out for how you hurt Alex.”

He sighed and took a distracted sip of his coffee. It hardly boded well for his cause if Alexandra’s sister wanted to call him out. Nathan could only imagine what Alexandra wished to do to him. Have him drawn and quartered?

Regardless of Olivia’s glaring fury, she moved further in the room, closer to Nathan’s seat. Clearly, for all her fury, she had reasons for not quitting his presence.

He took another sip and then set his cup down, holding it between his hands while he looked at her expectantly.

“Why did you do it?” she asked angrily. “How could you hurt her? She loved you. Even though Father warned her you were a blackguard, she trusted you.”

Nathan’s hand tightened so hard around the cup between his fingers he nearly shattered the glass. Telling his fingers to release the cup, he set them on his lap.

The truth was not for Olivia’s ears. She was a child. And even if she weren’t an innocent girl, Alexandra deserved to hear the words spoken from his lips first.

“I do not have a good enough answer for you, Olivia.”

Olivia’s eyes narrowed to small slits. “That is Lady Olivia.”

He sighed. “My apologies, Lady Olivia.”

Motioning to the seat next to him, he waited with bated breath to see what she would do.

With arms folded across her chest, Olivia stood there glaring at him for the better part of two minutes. When ascertaining that he was not going anywhere, she tugged out her own seat, waving a servant off.

“Aren’t you going to make a plate?” he asked.

It was the wrong thing to say.

“Are you daft? A plate? How could you be so cavalier?”

Well, his intentions had been gentlemanly. Apparently he’d missed the mark. And badly. It would seem her intentions were to sit there and harangue him for his deplorable treatment of Alexandra.

It was no less than he deserved.

“So?”

Nathan arched a brow.

A beleaguered sigh escaped Olivia. “So what do you have to say on it?”

“Nothing that would earn your understanding, Olivia.”

Her jaw set resolutely. “No, you are probably right on that score. Lady Olivia,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

He dipped in head. “Again, my apologies, Lady Olivia.”

An uneasy silence descended, the two of them sitting their eyeing each other warily. Reaching for his cup, Nathan found it empty. He set it aside and drummed his fingertips distractedly on the tabletop.

Olivia eyed them with no small amount of annoyance. “Must you do that?”

Faced with Olivia’s icy displeasure, he brought them to a sudden stop. The palpable tension urged him up and out of the hostile dining room. Yet the alternative, finding a recently wed, blissfully happy relative of Alexandra’s, nauseated him. So he opted to remain there, seated next to his feisty adversary.

An adversary who at the moment was stretching her neck and perusing the elaborate spread on the sideboard, before directing her attention to his untouched dish of baked eggs and toast and gingerbread.