Free Proper Scoundrel by Annette Blair

mean—”
     
    “No. Yes! Yes it does mean. We have to start fresh, as if we’re strangers. I hired you. You work for me. If you can’t follow this necessary course, you’ll be discharged.”
     
    Despair washed over her. A shrew; she sounded like a shrew. Damn it, wasn’t there some sane middle ground between shrew and strumpet?
     
    “I take it you’re wearing those clothes to prove you mean business.” Marcus raked her with his gaze once more, but this time his look revealed scorn—which she would not let bother her. She needed to alter the course of their relationship. She had no choice.
     
    “I’m wearing these clothes because they’re comfortable and easy to work in, because this is who I am. I won’t lose myself to you, or anyone. I won’t, Marcus.”
     
    “I understand, Jade. I do. In a lot of ways, I’m as frightened by the force of this ... familiarity ... as you are.” He flashed his cocky grin, but she fought the pull. He sobered and ran a hand through his hair. “Believe me, no other woman ever came close to rattling me the way you do. If one did, I’d have walked.”
     
    “Walk now, then,” she said, missing him already, hurting, physically as well as emotionally, at the very notion. “It’ll be better for both of us.”
     
    Shaken by the suddenness and stubbornness of Jade’s reversal, Marcus admitted to himself that he would stay, of course. He needed to, and the railroad barely entered into his rationale. He couldn’t leave because something in Jade called to him, as something in him, he believed, called to her. He must be near at hand when she heeded the call.
     
    Pray God it would happen soon.
     
    “I agree to our relationship remaining strictly business for now,” he said, going so far as to sit behind the desk and pull the ledger over to prove it, but he could tell she suspected a trap.
     
    “Promise?”
     
    “Look, Jade—”
     
    Something tapped the door so softly Marcus wasn’t certain he’d heard it.
     
    “Come in?” Jade called, as unsure as him.
     
    The door opened slowly. “Mucks?” Emily saw him and trotted in, incredibly adorable, her pink dotted muslin dress rumpled, a shoe and stocking on one foot, nothing on the other.
     
    Marcus rolled his chair back as she approached, grinning at the small ray of sunshine in the cloudburst his morning had become. “Emily? Does Lacey know you’re here?”
     
    Emily shrugged, raised her leg high and lay her bare foot on his knee.
     
    Marcus wiggled a tiny toe. “This little piggy went to market—”
     
    Emily giggled.
     
    “I thought you came to play piggies. No?”
     
    She shook her head. “No!”
     
    “Did Tweenie steal your sock?”
     
    She shook that little head harder, swinging a profusion of yellow curls to and fro.
     
    “No?” Marcus hauled her onto his lap. “What happened to your shoe and stocking then Emmy-bug?”
     
    “Tweenie piddled on it.”
     
    Marcus looked up to share his amusement with Jade and caught a rather wild look in her eyes. She reminded him of a cornered animal. Panicked. As if she were being ... tortured.
     
    By observing him and Emily?
     
    Tortured ... that’s how she’d been acting all morning. Not sure where to turn, cornered. Why hadn’t he seen it?
     
    Could she be so torn by what she felt for him that she feared something as simple as his gentleness with Emily would break her resolve?
     
    Perhaps she didn’t want a business relationship anymore than he did, but ran from anything deeper.
     
    He needed to remember that she’d been taught, and seen enough horrors to believe, that a gentle man must be an aberration. And when confronted by one ... what?
     
    Her life’s lessons made no sense, that’s what. She’d lost her grounding—trembled on unsure foundations. That, he could comprehend.
     
    At least he had interacted with the opposite sex. Jade held no experience relating to men of her station, except for him. And what had he done but storm the