Page 20 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
“And the parrot?”
“Tempting. I’d teach it to insult people in Turkish.”
“Why Turkish?”
“Saves me the trouble of doing it myself.”
“When I was twelve,” she said, “John dared me to climb the big oak. I got stuck at the top. The stable boy had to bring a ladder. My father stood at the bottom and said,I am not angry, I am disappointed,and John shouted down,You are both, Father, and so is the tree.”
She was smiling before she knew it.
“Three men cornered me in a port city once,” he admitted. “Alley. Middle of the night.”
“What did you do?”
“Pretended to be a priest.”
“That worked?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I looked very disappointed in them. And I quoted scripture. Badly, but they didn’t know that.”
“What scripture?”
“Made it up on the spot. Something about the wrath of the lamb. They bought it.”
“The wrath of the lamb?”
“Revelation, more or less.”
“That is not from Revelation.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I read the Bible cover to cover during my second winter at Thornhill. There was nothing else in the house Gordon hadn’t locked up.”
He looked at her sideways. “Did you like it?”
“Some parts. Ecclesiastes. The bit about there being a time for everything.”
“A time to kill, a time to heal.”
“A time to keep silence,” she said, “and a time to speak.”
The rain drummed on the roof. Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was not an uncomfortable silence this time. Itwas the kind that ensued when two people had accidentally said something true and needed a moment to recover from it.
Valeria laughed. Real. Too loud. She covered her mouth.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Don’t be.” He was looking at the rain. His ears were red.
The rain was thinning. She could see the hedges again.
“Your turn,” she prompted. “You owe me an honest answer.”
“Ask,” he said, leaning back.
“Why are you doing this? The auction. You could have any lady in England. Why come here and play games for the hand of a widow you have never met?”
