One Unashamed Night by Sophia James Page B

asked her for this walk and now he regretted it? Her intent to help had become intrusive and he wished he might have never given her the chance to take the experiment further?
    She hardly knew him, hardly understood a thing about him; this morning, with the patch across his eye, he looked not only wildly handsome, but also unbearably distant.
    A lord and a man who walked his world in the very highest echelons of society and one who could hardly be relishing her busy-bodying ways and her plain, plain looks.
    Her strident lecture on the ills of strong drink suddenly looked inadvisable and naïve. What did she truly know of him, after all, that a whore in one of the establishments off Covent Garden might not? An affair of the flesh and nothing of the heart.
    ‘If you would prefer to leave our outing to another day, my lord, I would quite understand.’
    She did not dare to chance the use of his Christian name, even given his directive of a few moments prior.
    As if he suddenly remembered she was there, he turned.
    ‘No, I should like to walk.’ Again he did not look directly at her, his face guarded today and distant.
    ‘Your horses are beautiful. I saw you once in Regent Street tooling greys.’
    ‘Greys?’ He looked puzzled.
    ‘With a woman. A young woman with light hair.’
    ‘Lucy. My sister. She insisted that she learn the art of managing a team.’
    Relief turned inside Bea. Not a paramour, then, but a sibling. ‘Indeed, she did look competent.’
    ‘Where were you?’
    ‘Buying a hat, my lord, and in awe of such a display as everyone else on the street most surely was.’
    ‘I am sorry I did not see you.’
    She could not let him off the hook so easily. ‘Even though your glance brushed directly across mine…?’
    He leaned forwards at her reprimand, his movements strangely careful. No clumsiness in them or extra exertion.
    ‘Were you married long, Beatrice-Maude?’
    The question was so personal that Bea wondered if she should have made certain that Sarah, her maid, had accompanied her. She shook her head, knowing that Taris Wellingham could not be interested in another dalliance three long months after so decidedly ending the first one.
    ‘I was, my lord.’
    ‘And he drank?’
    Hot shame filled her and confusion. ‘Occasionally.’
    Nightly. Daily. Every moment by the end of it.
    ‘But you showed him the error of his ways and led him into abstinence?’
    ‘No, my lord, God in his wisdom showed him that.’
    A malady to take away any choice.
    He nodded, but did not reply. The sweat that had built upon his forehead worried her, the sheen of it mirrored by the heavy lines on his forehead.
    Pain!
    He was in pain, she thought, and was doing his level best not to let her see it. His knuckles showed white where he clutched on to the silver ball of his cane and the scar that trailed from his hairline into the soft leather of his patch twitched. She wondered how he had received it. A bullet when he had served in the army? Or was it a duelling scar?
    The shout of the footman stopped any further thoughts, however, and Beatrice saw that they were now at the park.
    On alighting she noticed that the pathway in this particular section of the park was ringed with a fence, markings carved into the railings. Taris Wellingham’s fingers ran across the nicks in the wood. He seldom wore gloves, she noted, as was more customary for gentlemen of the ton, and often ran his open palm along objects. As in the carriage outside Maldon when his touch had run along the line of her cheek. As in the barn where they had ventured further and she had turned into his loving…
    Taris felt the directions carved into the railings, something he had had Bates take care of to ensure the continuation of a sense of independence that was being constantly threatened. He always used this place, always walked in exactly the same arc, down to the lake and then back again, the lack of any steps or rough areas a boon when he was alone. Or in