She smacked his hand away from her face. “I’d sooner cut it off you than take it,” she snapped, then added, “Your Grace.” After all, there was no reason to let him see he could make her forget her manners.
“If I recall, we had moved past formalities last time I saw ye,” he said with the easy tone only a practiced rogue could affect.
“And if I recall, you are not the sort of man I want to be on intimate terms with ever again, Your Grace.”
He stiffened. She could feel it in the shift of air around him. It was subtle, but nonetheless, she sensed it. And she despised that she sensed it.
With that thought, she scrambled away from him and to her feet. “If you don’t mind,” she said, waving a dismissive hand while turning away from him and focusing on the tree once more. Not only would it be disastrous to be discovered alone with him but she did not like how hard her heart was pounding or the hundreds of questions that now buzzed in her head.
What had he been doing in Scotland all these years? Had he been heartbroken when Elizabeth and his unborn child had died? Why had he stayed away? Had he felt sad when his father had passed, or had he despised him until the bitter end? Did he regret what he had done to her? Had he ever looked back on it all and realized he had been an utter fool to set her aside so callously for Elizabeth? Elizabeth, who had knitted and danced with grace and never spoke of things like politics.
Drat. She clenched her teeth until pain shot across her jawbone. She would never allow herself to ask these questions. If only she could stop herself from even thinking them!
“I mind,” he said in that same overly confident tone, his voice growing louder as he approached her. “It’s not safe for ye to be climbing a tree alone in the dark. Ye could break yer neck.”
The nearness of him warmed her skin. He was impossibly, unacceptably too close to her. Asher never had cared a whit about the rules of Society that governed proper decorum. Possibly because he had not grown up in Society, and yet, she had been raised surrounded by Society’s rules and she didn’t care, either. She did, at least, try to care, tedious as it was.
His heat enveloped her like a quilt and made it hard to hold on to her thoughts. She concentrated harder. “If one goes by your history with women, a fall from this tree is not the only thing that need concern me.” She forced a steadiness to her voice that was in direct contrast to the way her pulse danced. “You, Your Grace, are just as dangerous to a woman’s well-being as this elm—likely more.”
Without warning, his firm hand gripped her right arm, and she found herself whirled toward Asher before she could even get out a proper outraged gasp. He towered over her, his presence impossibly more commanding than it had been years before. Her stomach clenched, and she became acutely aware of his fingertips touching her bare skin.
His dark, dangerous outline against the pale moon taunted her. When he tilted his head down at her, her pulse spiked, and when he raised his hands and jerked them through his hair, her chest tightened at the frustrated gesture she’d once intimately known. But she’d never really known him, had she? She’d imagined once that he was honorable, that he would do anything to protect her. What a ninny she had been.
“Yer life is not in danger with me, Guin, so ye can hardly compare the two.”
She swallowed. She had never thought she would hear his pet name for her rolling off his tongue again. She wished to God it didn’t cause such a deep ache in her belly, but some things were meant as sharp reminders of treacherous waters.
“Well, my reputation is most certainly in peril.” She strived to sound annoyed and not desperate to get away from him. “So do take your leave. I’m not sure why you are here in the first place.” In England. At my home. In front of me. “The ball is inside.”
“Aye, it is, but if ye recall, I never could stand too much time in the company of the uninteresting, the vain, and the arrogant.”
“Then how do you stand to be around yourself?” She could not resist the barb.
“Are you calling me uninteresting?” The underlying laugher in his voice was unmistakable.
“Certainly not.”
“I thank ye, lass.”
“You should not. I’m calling you vain and arrogant. One with your past could never be considered uninteresting, Your Grace. You provided much fodder for the gossips by ruining Elizabeth and disgracing me.”
She bit her tongue to keep from blurting the rest of her thoughts: Leaving me to bear it all. Leaving me to know you had never wanted me, that you had used me. Allowing everyone to pity me, the poor, pleasantly plump, freckled one with the too frank speech who was cast aside for the Incomparable.
“I did not ruin Elizabeth.”
The warning in his tone both surprised and rankled her. She never had liked that men thought they could silence women with a cool word or harsh look, and she’d never imagined him to be the sort of man to do so. But apparently, she’d been blind to his true nature all along.
“I suppose that’s correct,” she conceded.
It had taken her a month to accept that her best friend had betrayed her. At first, Elizabeth had told Guinevere that Asher had lured her to the library in Guinevere’s home during the busy ball, and as horrible as that had been to hear, it had been even worse to think that her best friend since childhood had been disloyal. But when faced with evidence from her sisters, who’d seen Elizabeth and Asher laughing and talking, and then sneaking to the library together, it had been much harder to deny that Guinevere had been both betrayed and made a fool of.
But she was stubborn, to be certain, and she’d tried to cling to hope until a chance encounter with Asher’s father in front of the milliner’s shop had opened her eyes and shattered her heart. The tips of her ears burned now with the shame his words had brought her when he’d said, “I’m sorry my son pursued you to spite me. It was not well-done of him to use you thusly.”
In the face of that revelation, the truth had to be accepted. What she’d believed to be a real courtship had been a ruse. And somewhere along the way, he and Elizabeth had been drawn to each other. The worst of it all—Well, she still to this day could not decide what was the worst of it. It had all hurt like a mortal wound.
She’d gone around for months muttering, “Et tu, Brute?” under her breath until her mother threatened to send her to Bedlam if she didn’t cease her behavior. She’d stopped, of course, but that didn’t mean she had not felt like Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, betrayed by those he’d trusted.
Guinevere forced herself to shrug as if the past no longer haunted her or shaped her actions, her thoughts, and her future. She longed for the day it would be the absolute truth.
“Fine. Elizabeth was a willing participant in your scandalous liaison,” Guinevere amended.
She could swear she heard him sliding his teeth back and forth. Perhaps, he’d crack one. The thought turned up her lips.
After a moment, silence fell, and then he said, “It’s interesting how ye choose to twist the truth about what happened. I suppose it would be too difficult to face yerself in the looking glass if ye admitted the actual facts.”
Her brows dipped together. Did he mean Elizabeth had pursued him? Even if that was true, it changed nothing. He had used Guinevere in his personal vendetta against his father, a fact he likely did not realize she knew. But she’d eat a mud pie before telling him and allowing him to comprehend the depth of her humiliation.