Rescued By a Lady's Love (Lords of Honor #3)(3)

His scowl.

Unease churned in her belly.

Why is he scowling...at me?

He peered down at her and his blue-eyed stare ran through her; a man who saw, but did not see. That was, at least, see rain-soaked urchins on the floor with their skirts rucked up above their ankles. She gasped and quickly shoved them down.

George looked again to his butler. “What in blazes is the meaning of this, Sutton?” he bit out, ignoring Lily’s prone form at his feet.

“Your Grace, I am sorry,” the butler said, rushing forward. “This...cretin...entered through the front entrance.”

A healthy rage filled her. How dare he speak of her with those tones of icy derision? She was no lady born, but she was a vicar’s daughter, and a woman who even for that had earned the heart of this powerful lord. “How dare you?” A man who, in the moment, simply could not see past her ragged garments and bedraggled appearance.

“I pay you good wages to see that these persons,” these persons? “do not—”

“George,” she whispered, cutting across shameful words she’d believed this man incapable of. She may as well have fired a pistol into the quiet.

A charge of shock ricocheted about the portrait-lined corridor.

Using that distraction, Lily scrambled to her feet and stretched a hand out. “George, it is me,” she said softly. She continued forward and then stopped before him.

But an inch or so taller than her own five feet seven inches, their eyes nearly met. In an eternal moment that stretched on forever, he stared at her. He narrowed his eyes. “Who are you to enter this home and use my Christian name?”

She froze; her body immobile and eyes unblinking, she braced for his teasing laughter, for him to fold her in his arms and hold her close...in a moment—that did not come.

Unease skittered along her spine. He did not recognize her. That was all. There was nothing else to account for this icy disdain seeping from his cold eyes. She turned her palms up. “George, it is I,” she tried again. How could eyes that had twinkled with warmth now ice her worse than the late autumn cold raging outside? “Lily Bennett,” she said, pleadingly. She turned her palms up, praying he played an unfunny jest, one that she would take him to task for the remainder of their days when he did right by her.

He frowned and peered at her through blond lashes. He took in her now limp curls and as his stare lingered on her painfully modest cloak, shame spiraled through her. “Deal with this, Sutton,” he ordered and turned on his heel.

“Surely you remember me!” Her cry echoed about the hall, freezing him, and earning gasps from the butler and footman. “I-I wrote you letters,” she said, her voice catching, as he turned around. Mayhap with his mother’s interception of those missives he’d believed Lily a faithless, fickle girl who’d forgotten him. “Y-Your mother came to my parents’ cottage with them.”

He opened his mouth and closed it several times. “What manner of jest is this?” he asked, so coolly detached that a sliver of her heart broke.

Oh, God. He does not remember me. She reeled. How could she have given her virtue to a man who did not even recognize her from Eve? Her fingers scrabbled at her throat and she searched for words. Any words. A sound. A plea. A cry. Something to prove that she was still breathing. Lily managed words. “I am—”

“George,” a curt voice sounded from down the corridor. A hated voice. A hateful voice. The one to have issued warnings, that in being inside this hallowed home, Lily ignored. “Wherever are you? Sir Henry is to arrive shortly with the gift for tonight’s b—” The Duchess of Blackthorne gasped. “What is the meaning of this?” she hissed.

Lily looked blankly past George’s shoulder as the elegant, silver-haired Duchess of Blackthorne swept over in a flurry of silk skirts.

“I am handling this, Mother,” he bit out.

“Are you?” With a pointed look for the hovering footman, she snapped. “The same way you handled her in Carlisle?” Then the Duchess returned her attention to Lily. “You,” she seethed. “You were warned...”

“By you,” she bit out. Where did she find the courage to toss those words at this unfeeling duchess?

The woman flared her eyes and then as swift as it had come, all hint of emotion was gone. “This is the girl who is writing you notes.”

This time, when George looked to Lily there was a bored curiosity. “Ah.”

Ah. That was what he would say? Nothing more than a single, affirmative utterance that was not even a word?

“She is your vicar’s daughter,” his mother snapped, impatience adding a frosty bite to the revelation.

Hope stirred in her breast. Hope he would remember. That he would see past her downtrodden appearance and his mother’s disapproval to the woman who had given her virtue on the pledge of his love.

He flicked a detached gaze over her and brushed an imagined speck off his sleeve. “I thought you said you would deal with her.” I am that dust. I am that insignificant to him. She struggled to hear past the blood rushing in her ears. His mother’s words came as if down a long, empty hall.

“...do you see why you do not make village girls your whores? They get ideas beyond their station...”

Her heart cracked and with her throat working, she looked from mother to son. “George,” she pleaded again, taking a step closer.