A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles

Author:KJ Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Thirteen

Rufus was not in a particularly sociable mood as he rode back from his visit to Sir Anthony Topgood. The elderly Squire was as bluff, gouty, and tedious as before; his daughter was flirtatious in an overt, almost hungry way. It couldn’t be much of a life in this isolated place for a woman who craved marriage, especially if her pool of suitors was limited by her desire to maintain her status. He wondered if he ought to offer Berengaria another chance to go to London and meet men, and decided she’d laugh in his face. Maybe she’d want to meet artists, though, people who’d understand her in a way nobody in the family did.

It was important to be understood. That wasn’t something Rufus had ever considered before—he was himself, and other people were themselves, and one just got on with it. Whereas Luke thought about whys and wherefores, and what people wanted, not in the way one might find in a novel of sentiment, but like a man taking a clock apart to see how it worked.

Maybe other people would have looked at his cousins and seen people desperate to be valued. Rufus hadn’t, but Luke had, and the results were magical.

Luke made things clear. That was what he did. When he’d compared Rufus’s incapability to his scar, a thing that simply existed and that everyone had to get used to, and which Rufus would happily punch anyone for using as an insult—that had helped immeasurably. It’s not going away, so live with it. That was Rufus’s natural tendency with most problems, but the reading had stuck in his craw. Somehow the acceptance felt easier with Luke on his side, making it work.

Although, he couldn’t but notice that Luke wasn’t as matter-of-fact as all that about the scar. Hadn’t said how he got it. Didn’t want it touched, or mentioned.

Well, it was his right to shy away from any subject he chose. As it was his right sometimes to sit with his eyes on Berengaria’s Marsh picture for long stretches of the evening, sometimes to shift position so he couldn’t see it at all. Rufus had noticed that and hadn’t commented, and felt vaguely proud of himself for both.

One might think a man who made things so clear might be easy to understand. Luke wasn’t, quite. Or, mostly he was. Mostly he was the cocksure, clever, outrageously competent man who was Rufus’s friend and ally and lover, and that was marvellous. There were just those other moments, when something twitched behind his eyes, when the confidence slipped and he looked almost furtive. Almost afraid.

Rufus wasn’t sure of any of that: he wasn’t used to considering finer feelings. He just knew that sometimes he didn’t understand, and it was those moments when he most wanted to pull Luke to him and tell him—

Tell him what?

Rufus was thirty-three, and not prone to whims or enthusiasms. He’d cared for previous partners, naturally, but he’d never been what the poets called ‘in love’. Not for lack of wanting to: it just hadn’t happened.

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