Led Astray by a Rake by Sara Bennett

Author:Sara Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Nic didn’t know where his manservant had gone and he told himself he didn’t care. Abbot would only give him one of his disappointed looks, and Nic didn’t need to be reminded of what he’d done. And he certainly didn’t want to think about why he’d done it. He bathed and donned his silk dressing gown and removed himself to the sanctuary of the library. There was much to think about and consider, and he preferred to do it alone and uninterrupted.

The scene on the terrace had been appalling. His mother, white-faced and shocked, and Olivia standing there, seeing it all. He could imagine how it had looked to her. What must she have thought? He admitted to himself now that he’d had an overwhelming impulse to spill everything into her sympathetic ears, all his secrets, all his lies. Olivia was so easy to talk to, so comfortable to be with. But how could he do that to her? How could he begin to explain?

Besides, she would never forgive him.

Suddenly he wanted to see her again. Her cool beauty had drawn him from the first, and when he discovered the hot and passionate woman beneath, Nic knew he’d already been more than half in lust with her. But love…well, that was another matter. He didn’t think he’d ever been in love.

There was a time he’d come close to it, when he was a callow youth at Cambridge. He’d been visiting with friends and set eyes on the sister of one of them. She was called Miriam, and although she was a “lady,” she was already a practiced flirt and more—she’d introduced him to the pleasures to be found in a woman’s body—and he’d dreamed of making an honest woman of her. But Miriam had other plans and soon lost interest in him, moving on to other conquests. It had been painful and for a time he’d been a mess—that was early in the summer when he’d pulled ten-year-old Olivia from the stream.

Nic remembered he’d taken a bottle of his father’s best brandy up to his room and drunk most of it. He was still tipsy when he wandered down to the stepping stones, but luckily not so far gone that he couldn’t play the hero and save Olivia Monteith. That afternoon, as he sat with her, basking in her admiration, Nic had come to the realization that there were more important things in life than Miriam, and he’d determined to be the son and heir his father wanted him to be.

Now he sat, alone, in the chair that was once his father’s, surrounded by the books his father had spent a lifetime collecting, and the past rushed in on him, try though he might to stem the tide.

There was his father, red-faced, furious, his mouth wide as he said things Nic had never heard him say before. It was like looking at a stranger, and the shock and shame Nic felt rendered him a stranger, too. They were father

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