Free Taming Beauty by Lynne Barron Page B

I like to think he cannot be bribed,” he replied without looking up from the headstone in front of which he’d stopped.
    Lilith followed his gaze.
    Edward Cornelius Grimley, Eighth Baron Malleville, 1750 – 1801
    Edith Anne Lennox Grimley, Baroness Malleville, 1748 – 1800
    “Your parents passed away only a year apart?” she asked, not certain why the knowledge left her feeling hollow.
    “Father took Mother’s passing hard.” Linking his hands behind his back, he rocked on his heels. “They’d known one another all their lives, loved one another for most of that time.”
    “Your mother was raised nearby, then?”
    “On the estate just to the north of Breckenridge,” he answered, his voice clipped and quiet. “I lost Northridge to Morrissey along with the fortune I’d inherited from my father not six month previously.”
    “Who owns Northridge now?” Even as Lilith asked the question, the answer came to her. So obvious, it was.
    “Sir John Parkhurst.”
    “And as his eldest daughter, Rose will one day inherit the estate,” she murmured, unsettled by all Malleville had lost. “Your union would have returned Northridge to your family, along with your honor and reputation and all the rest of it.”
    The ninth Baron Malleville gave a sharp nod in reply.
    “I suppose Rose was raised with the knowledge she would one day be your baroness?” Lilith asked, though, again, there was no need to pose the question.
    “I first proposed the match to Sir John the day he took up residence at Northridge,” Malleville replied after a slight pause in which she imagined he considered how much to tell a woman who hadn’t any compunction about airing her family’s dirty linen. “Rose was eight to my four and twenty. I’d been the baron only two years, long enough to lose most of what my forebears had built up over hundreds of years, but not long enough to rebuild even a fraction of it.”
    “How long did Sir John make you wait?”
    “He agreed to the match three years later, when I’d begun to see a profit on the land and put away a meager sum for the future.”
    “And you waited seven more years for Rose to reach her majority only to lose both your bride and your mother’s birthright.”
    “Sir John is a fair man and has agreed to allow me to buy Northridge.”
    “Never say the price is thirty thousand pounds,” Lilith whispered.
    “At three percent per annum over five years.”
    Lilith wanted to turn and walk away, run even. As fast and as far away as she possibly could, until she reached London and the life she’d been quietly leading before she’d allowed Dunaway to embroil her in his schemes.
    Instead, she drew in a stuttering breath and straightened her spine. “Sissy wasn’t raised to be your wife, to live this sort of life. She was raised to throw balls and host musicales. To donate her time to worthy charitable causes, dress in the latest fashions, attend the theater on opening night, to be an asset on the arm of a gentleman of wealth and privilege.”
    “And what sort of life were you raised for?” He turned to face Lilith, his hands fisting at his sides and his chest heaving.
    “This has nothing to do with me and my life,” Lilith replied, waving away his words with one trembling hand while the other twisted in her skirts. “Sissy will be miserable tucked away in the country, with no society to speak of and only a mercantile in which to shop for dresses and trinkets.”
    “Do you think I don’t know I cannot make her happy?” Malleville’s voice was a terrible rumble of sound, crackling with fury.
    “Never mind making Sissy happy,” Lilith snapped, her temper unraveling around the edges. “You will not be happy. Sissy will see to that, not out of malice or spite but because misery breeds misery. You deserve better than a life of unending sorrow and bitterness and regret.”
    Malleville reached for Lilith, his hands closing around her upper arms, lifting her up on her toes and dragging