Page 7 of A Match Made in Heather

“Please.” She held Garrick’s gaze as she dismissed Ewan and Mr. Davidson. “There’s no need to worry. Lord Townsend won’t hurt me. Will you, my lord?”

His dark gaze never wavered from her. “I would never dream of it.”

Casting uncertain glances at the peculiar turn of conversation, Ewan and Mr. Davidson reluctantly left. The door closed.

“You,” she whispered to keep from being overheard by the two men outside, her voice little more than a furious rasp. “You have no right—”

“Me,” he interrupted with all the impudence of a man born to the peerage rather than one who had achieved it. “And I have every right.”

Brushing past her, he arrogantly walked away. He reached toward a decanter set sitting on the side table.

“StillMissRowland, is it?” he drawled, his back toward her. “I’m surprised. Thought for certain you’d be Lady Ian Campbell by now.”

“Ian and I did not marry,” she answered tersely.

He examined the scotch, then splashed two fingers’ worth into a glass. “So Campbell refused to buy used goods, did he?”

He turned toward her just in time to see the flash of hurt his words shot through her, and he froze, the glass raised halfway to his lips. As if he couldn’t quite believe he’d insulted her so viciously. Then his gaze dropped to his glass as he swirled the whisky, untasted.

Arabel flinched at the cruelty of his attack, but her heart kept pounding away furiously—the same as it used to whenever he’d kissed her or told her how beautiful she was. The same as it had the last time she’d seen him, even as it shattered when she’d watched him walk away.

She pulled back her shoulders. He wouldn’t wound her so easily again.

“Ian was always a gentleman.” She refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing that the Campbells had rejected the overture for marriage that her parents made to them, after the duke had learned what her brother had done. “Which was more than can be said of you.” The hurt she still carried inside her made her bold enough to let fly her own arrow—“How many lasses did you seduce in that patch of heather?”

She saw the moment her barb struck him, with the flicker in his eyes so deep, so dark that she shuddered at the intensity of it. And instantly regretted it.

Without moving his gaze from hers, he lifted the glass in a mock toast and answered, “One too many.”

Her eyes stung as the long-buried pain flooded back, and she blinked hard. Once. The only outward sign she’d allow of how much he’d hurt her ten years ago.Hurt her?Laughable. She nearly died from all the grief she’d suffered that summer.

He gestured toward the door. “Your fiancé, is he?”

“Yes.”

“Not at all who I’d expected.”

His contemptuous tone made her jump to Ewan’s defense. “He’s a very successful banker in Edinburgh.”

“A banker,” he repeated dully. “How . . . respectable.”

Her eyes raked a scathing glance over him. “An earl,” she drawled, meeting his sarcasm tone-for-tone. “How . . . impossible.”

He laughed at that, or perhaps he was laughing ather.She couldn’t tell, neither did she care as long as he handed over his half of Highburn and left her alone.

“Not these days,” he replied. “Prinny’s tossing out peerages like coins to the poor. A man just has to be in the right spot at the right time to scoop one up off the ground.”

“Baronies, perhaps, but not earldoms.” She tilted her head with exaggerated curiosity. “Whom did you have to kill?”

He froze for a beat, then lifted his eyes from his glass to solemnly meet hers. The haunted look in their depths tore her breath away. “About five thousand Frenchmen.”

Then he tossed back the rest of the whisky with a gasping swallow and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before setting the glass away.

Arabel went numb as his words settled over her. “You killed . . . How?” Her voice was little more than a breath. “Why?”

“The battle atMaubeuge,” he explained quietly, placing both palms on the sideboard and resting there for a moment, his back toward her. “I placed and set off the explosives to destroy the bridge that the French were using to advance. Their soldiers panicked. Half of them rushed headlong into the British infantry, and the rest fled back to trap themselves inside the city, which by then was in range of our artillery. It was a slaughter. The French forces were left too wrecked to win at Waterloo.”

She stared at him, barely comprehending what he was saying. Garrick had served in the British Army, on the continent against Napoleon? Setting explosives? Her whirling mind couldn’t wrap itself around that, or that he had been awarded a title for his heroism.