A Wild Pursuit by Eloisa James

with her mother for some three years. Why should she miss her now?
    â€œIs that why you have such a fierce wish to become respectable?” Sebastian inquired. “So that your mother will accept you again?”
    â€œOf course not! It’s only because of Miles, as I told you.”
    â€œHmmm.” But he wasn’t really listening. He was kissing her ear.
    â€œI don’t think my mother likes me very much,” Esme said dolefully.
    To Sebastian’s mind, her mother’s behavior had made that clear for years, but it didn’t seem politic to say so. “I expect she has some affection for you,” he said in as comforting a manner as he could manage, given that he had Esme’s delicious body on his lap. He felt like a starving man at a feast. “I am almost certain that my mother has some affection for me, although she would never acknowledge such a thing.”
    â€œYou were a perfect son to her. And you will be again. Once you return from the Continent, everyone will forget the scandal, and you can return to being the very proper Marquess Bonnington. Snobby old sobersides.”
    â€œNever again. Never .”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI shall never again believe that it matters a bean whether I kiss the woman I love in a garden or my own bedchamber. All that propriety, respectability, it’s nothing but a trap, Esme, don’t you see?”
    â€œNo,” she said. Secretly she was a bit shaken by the vehemence in his voice. “I wish—oh, I do wish—that I hadn’t been unfaithful to Miles in the first year of our marriage. Perhaps if I’d been more respectable, we could have found a way to be married again. To live together and raise a family.”
    She was startled by the look in his eyes. “Why? Why, Esme? Why Miles ?”
    â€œBecause he was my husband,” Esme said earnestly. This was at the heart of all their arguments. “I should have honored our vows,” she explained.
    â€œYou vowed to love him forever. Yet you didn’t even know him when you married him. He was weak, charming but weak. Why on earth are you harboring the idea that the two of you could ever have been happy together?”
    â€œBecause it would have been the right thing to do.” She knew she sounded like a stubborn little girl, but he had to understand.
    â€œAh, the right thing,” he said, and there was a dark tiredness in his voice. “I can’t fight with that. But if you, Esme, were able to fall in love with your husband because it was the right thing to do, you would have been a very unusual woman indeed.”
    â€œI could have tried!” she said with a flare of anger. “Instead I flaunted my affairs before him and the rest of London.”
    Esme was missing the point. The trouble was that Sebastian wasn’t sure how to make himself clear without risking her stamping out of his hut in a rage. He tried to put it delicately. “Your husband, Miles, didn’t seem to take much notice of those affairs.”
    â€œYes, he did.”
    My God, she was a stubborn woman. “You began flirting with other men in an attempt to get Miles’s attention,” Sebastian said. “Fool that he was, he simply concluded that the marriage was not successful. And to be honest, I don’t think he cared very much. He was in love with Lady Childe, these many years before he died.” His voice was calm but merciless.
    Esme was silent for a moment. “We could have tried,” she said finally.
    â€œYou did reconcile just before Miles died,” Sebastian pointed out. “To my knowledge, you had one night together.” He drew her even closer against his chest. “Did it pass in a blaze of passion, then?”
    Esme turned her face into his rough shirt. “Don’t laugh at Miles,” she warned. “He was my husband, and I was very fond of him.”
    â€œI would never laugh at Miles. But I would