When the Marquess Met His Match by Laura Lee Guhrke - An American Heiress in London 01 - When the Marquess Met His Match Page A

isn’t quite true, is it? Only certain reputations matter to you. It is apparent others do not.”
    For a moment, a shimmer of what might have been guilt crossed her face, but it vanished before he could be sure. “You don’t seem to care about your own reputation,” she said after a moment. “Why should I?”
    “Because not doing so makes you a humbug. You display yourself to all the world as a woman of honor and integrity, yet you do not hesitate to blacken the reputation of a man of whom you do not approve, based on no justification other than your preconceived ideas about his character.”
    “Your reputation was already blackened, and by your own actions. And you seem perfectly willing to blacken a young woman’s reputation along with your own. And,” she added as he started to protest that unfair accusation, “your manner of living since then hardly does you credit. All of that, along with your words of yesterday, make your character quite clear.”
    “You know nothing about me or my character, madam. You—” Nicholas broke off, too frustrated by her reference to that episode with Elizabeth to continue. How ironic that with all the things he had done in his life, she’d chosen one of the things of which he wasn’t guilty to condemn him.
    “And now,” she went on, “you intend to seduce another innocent girl, blacken her reputation, and force her into matrimony, so please do not pretend to take any sort of moral high ground here, sir!”
    “What?” He stared at her in astonishment, but as the implications of her words sank in, his astonishment gave way to an even deeper rage. “Good God, is that what you think?”
    “After you confessed your sordid intentions right to my face, what else was I to think? You said you would not be conducting a proper courtship. That you intended to conduct one that is as improper as possible.”
    “And you took that to mean I would ruin a girl publicly, thereby forcing her to marry me? I—” He stopped, for the notion he would do such a thing was so damned insulting that fury put him at a loss for words.
    He looked down and realized he was crushing his hat. Worse, he could feel his temper giving way, and losing his temper was something no one had been able to make him do for a long, long time. Carefully, he set his mangled hat on the tea table between them, and when he spoke, he worked to keep his tone civil though it took a great deal of effort. “That you believe I would deliberately ruin a girl for money says far more about your mind than it does about my character.”
    “Does it? I wonder if Elizabeth Mayfield would agree.”
    “I doubt it,” he shot back. “She’s probably still cursing me for not being a more compliant potential bridegroom. After being trapped in a compromising situation that was prearranged by her, with the assistance of her mother, and conducted—I might add—under the explicit direction of my father, I was supposed to feel obligated to marry Elizabeth. I did not feel so inclined, much to my father’s annoyance and Elizabeth’s dismay. I realize gossip painted me the villain over it and that my reputation is still in ruins because of it, but as I told you once before, I don’t give a damn what people think of me.”
    “You were the victim of manipulation by your own father?”
    He laughed at the skepticism in her voice. “It’s obvious you don’t know Landsdowne, or you wouldn’t be so surprised by the notion.”
    He leaned forward, bringing his body as close to hers as the table between them would allow, flattening his palms on the polished mahogany surface. “And it’s equally obvious you don’t know Elizabeth. If you did, you might not have been quite so ready to believe the worst about me. You might have paused to consider her character, and her mother’s, too. God knows, I wish I had. I’d never intended to be alone with her at my father’s house party. But when she encountered me in the library, even though it was