Page 31 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
“Sit,” John said. “Have a drink. I insist.”
Edward considered refusing. He could simply walk past him. John would not physically stop him. The man was half his size and did not have the training or the temperament for a confrontation.
But there was an edge to his voice that said this was not a casual invitation. This was a man who had been waiting.
Edward decided not to offend him. He sat down on the cold stone step. John handed him the glass. Edward took a sip. Good whiskey. Better than anything he had tasted outside of Scotland.
“I admire you, you know,” John began, taking the glass back. He drank while looking down the dark stairwell. “Not many men with a reputation like yours would walk into a room full of strangers and ask a woman for her hand.”
“Thank ye,” Edward returned.
“Drink,” John urged, handing the glass back. “You look like a man who has been rained on and kissed in the same afternoon. I recognize the symptoms. Richard had the same look after his first conversation with Caroline. Took him three days to form a coherent sentence.”
“I am perfectly coherent.”
“You are sitting on a stone step at midnight, drinking whiskey with a man you met yesterday. That is not coherent behavior, Your Grace. That is the behavior of a man who has been undone.” John took the glass back and drank again. “I should know. I watched Richard go through it. He walked into walls for a week.”
“I do not walk into walls.”
“Give it time.”
John’s expression shifted.
“I heard her laughing tonight.” His voice had changed. The humor was still there, but it was thinning, like fabric that hadbeen washed too many times. “From the corridor. When she came in from the storm. Caroline was with her, and they were laughing. I stood outside the door and listened because I had not heard my sister laugh since Gordon took her.”
He paused and took the glass for a swig.
“Three years,” he continued. “Three years I tried to get her out. I went to the magistrate. I went to the bishop. I wrote to every influential person I knew. Nobody listened. A husband’s authority was absolute, they said. There was nothing to be done. And I stood outside her locked door during a visit and listened to the silence on the other side and knew that my sister was in there, not speaking, not laughing, barely eating, and there was nothing I could do.”
He looked at Edward. “So when I say I am grateful that you made her laugh, I mean it. I am grateful in a way that I cannot fully express without doing something embarrassing like crying, which I am trying very hard not to do because I have a reputation as the funny one and crying would ruin it.”
“But…?” Edward prompted.
“But I am not sure you are the man my sister needs at the moment.”
Edward looked at him. “What do ye mean?”
“This is the first time in years that she is free to remember who she is.”
John was not smiling anymore. Underneath the humor was a man who had spent three years watching his sister disappear behind a locked door and could do nothing about it.
“I am worried that a man like you would overwhelm her.”
“I appreciate the warning,” Edward said. “But I have no intention of overwhelming her. I have no intention of controlling her. I have spent twelve years being told where to go, what to do, and who to kill. I know what it feels like to have no choice. I would not do that to another person.”
John looked at him,reallylooked. It was not the casual assessment of a brother sizing up a suitor. It was deeper than that. Searching.
“Why do ye say that anyway? Why is everyone worried about her, as if she might break?” Edward’s voice had gone flat.
The anger in his chest, the low, constant heat that he had carried since the first time he heard how Gordon had treated Valeria, pushed against his ribs.
“I have only ever seen fire from her.”
John looked taken aback. He stared at Edward for a long moment. The whiskey glass froze halfway to his mouth. Hisexpression changed. Surprise, maybe. Or relief. The kind of relief that comes after hearing someone say out loud the thing you have been hoping is true, but have been afraid to believe.
“Then you might consider yourself lucky,” he said slowly. “Because that fire has been out for three years. If you can see it, then you are seeing more than the rest of us.”
“But why did ye say that? What did her previous husband do to her?” Edward asked.
