Page 87 of The Duke Undone
“My father was always looking for signs she’d passed her weakness on to her children.”
He raised the glass to his lips before remembering he’d emptied it.
“There were plenty.” He laughed, laughter as bitter as his smile. “I’m sure he thought mixing with her relations would exacerbate the condition.”
“You see them anyway,” she said softly. “Or correspond with them.”
He shrugged. “When I can. Compliance would save me a world of trouble. But I cannot—I will not—accept his authority, even temporarily.”
He pushed off the wall, claimed the whiskey bottle, and refilled his glass.
She opened her mouth.
Don’t, she told herself.
“You reject his authority,” she said. “You choose blind disobedience instead of blind obedience.”
Too late to stop now.
“Which means he still controls you.”
He froze, half-turned away. When he finally looked at her, he saw something in her face that made him relax his stance.
“You’re right, of course. I could handle it all much better,” he said wryly. “When I last paid a visit to my aunt, my cousin Sofia used a crystal ball to peer into my soul. What she saw dismayed her.”
He laughed, relaxing further, easing into the recollection. “Sofia possesses a distinctive flair for the dramatic. She has Greek blood on both sides, which goes a ways toward explaining it.”
“Greeks are dramatic?”
“Greeks invented drama.” He gave a wry tug with his mouth and she couldn’t help but grin in response.
“Sofia’s father, he’s from Greece?”
“No. My aunt Helen married Peter Metaxas.”
He registered her blank expression.
“You don’t keep up with shipping dynasties? Peter Metaxas is the London-born son of Costa Metaxas. Costa started the firm Rodis & Metaxas with my maternal grandfather. They run it together, Peter and Helen. Don’t quiz my aunt on rates of freight for competing steamer lines. She has a formidable head for business. She and my mother were opposites.”
He fell silent and she found that she wanted him to go on. When he slipped into this mood—earnest, unguarded—and they talked together, fell into rhythm with each other, she felt an exquisite rightness. Felt as though they showed each other the selves most portraits, even portrait photographs, couldn’t capture. Something beneath the skin.
These moments they shared were soap-bubble moments. Perfect, impossibly colored, brief. She wanted to stay inside with him longer. Before he drank a third glass and a fourth. Before they retreated into their separate, unbridgeable lives.
“What did she say to you about your soul?” she asked. “Sofia, I mean.”
He set down his whiskey glass.
“You dare to ask?” He paused for effect. “She told me I was cold, sick, and silly—a strong indictment from the other world.”
Her laughter rang out.
“But that’s Jane Eyre!”
His brows had drawn together but his lips twitched in response to her amusement.
“Your Grecian oracle,” she said. “She’s a good English girl who reads her Brontë. Cold, sick, and silly—it’s what Mr. Rochester says to Jane when he’s dressed as a fortune-teller.”
Now he laughed outright.
