And then she did.

The anger didn"t creep up on her slowly, it burst instantly from inside her where it had been hidden away, just waiting for the sight of him again to spark it to life. Even after all these years he could still provoke her. This couldn"t be happening. He couldn"t show up when she"d just petitioned to have him declared dead and out of her life for good!

 “Dieu, what"s wrong, chérie?”

Her relief was tremendous when she heard his French accent. He was French, not English.

This wasn"t her fiancé. But, good God, it had been frightening to think he was, however briefly. And of course, it wasn"t. Jean Paul only bore a minimal resemblance to the fifteen-year-old Manford whelp she"d last seen eleven years ago, and it wouldn"t be the first time someone had shared a trait or look with him that had brought that skinny, arrogant boy so clearly to mind again.

She was still shaken, though. She"d had no idea that such rage had been lying dormant inside her all these years.

She had to take a few deep breaths before she could trust her voice to sound normal. “Sorry, it was an old, horrid memory that snuck up on me.” Then she grinned to make light of it.

“Your cuts are mostly superficial, but there"s an obvious dent in your nose. Will it go away once your nose mends?”

“My nose is fine. The bump is from an old break when I was young that wasn"t treated.”

“Broken when you were twelve?”

What was she doing? Did she still have doubts? She’d broken her fiancé„s nose when he was twelve and she"d been so glad that she"d done so.

But he was frowning over her question, then his green eyes flared wide with the same memory she was having. “If you tell me you"re Julia Miller, I"m going to wring your bloody neck,” he said in a snarl.

She shot out of her chair so fast, she almost tripped. “You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch!

How dare you come back when I"m almost rid of you for good?!”

“How dare you not be married so I can come home? My God, I can"t believe I"ve been trying to seduce you!”

The way he shuddered, or pretended to so as to insult her, made her see red. She almost flew at him. It was so close! But just enough of a sense of self-preservation remained that she quickly walked away before they picked up where they"d left off and tried to kill each other.

Chapter Thirteen

WHAT HAPPENED DOWNSTAIRS?” Ohr asked Richard from the doorway when Ohr returned to the room. “Gabby and I got back to the table and found you and the young lady gone. Gabby was still in high dudgeon after chewing my ear off and thought you two might have gone off somewhere more private. I"m thankful she just huffed off without another word.”

“Sorry about the ear-chewing.”

Ohr shrugged. “Since I was pretty much tasked with keeping you out of trouble, I deserved it. I finished lunch, though, to give you a little time in case you did manage to get the lady to come up here.”

“If you thought that was a possibility, you were dead wrong.” Ohr finally noticed that Richard was stuffing clothes in his travel bag. “Did Gabby send up a message that we"re leaving early because of this?”

“No, but I am.” Richard didn"t look up to say it. The panic he was feeling was similar to what he"d felt nine years ago while waiting for his ship to sail away from England, afraid his father"s henchmen would find him and drag him back to Willow Woods, his home outside Manchester, Lancashire—his personal hell.

His fear had been very real that night because he"d known the search for him had already begun. He had a little more leeway now. Unless his father was currently in London, which was unlikely since he rarely traveled so far from home, it would take a day or two for a message to reach him, depending on the messenger"s mode of travel. Richard didn"t trust Julia not to send that message. But as long as he vacated this hotel, he could still control the situation.

“Let me guess,” Ohr said next. “The young miss wanted a ring on her finger instead of a nice tumble.”

“Exactly.”

“Er, I was joking. You haven"t been here long enough for a woman to insist on marriage.”

“Time is irrelevant if the woman has been engaged to you nearly since she was born.”

“That would actually make time more than relevant,” Ohr pointed out. “This sounds more like an arranged marriage from my culture, not yours.”

“My people are half yours, or rather the Americans are, but it"s still archaic no matter how you look at it, and I didn"t escape from this horrid situation all those years ago to end up getting trapped by it again. Bloody hell, I really thought she"d be married by now to someone else whom she could torment for eternity.”

“Why didn"t you marry her if you were obligated to?” Ohr asked carefully.

“Obligated because my father signed a contract, thereby signing away my life? Not bloody likely.”

“Still—”

“No, by God, don"t try to make me feel guilty for not honoring the word of my tyrant father, who thinks he can live my life for me. Besides, there"s no polite way of saying this, Ohr. The girl and I hate each other. If I had asked her to marry me, then I might feel obligated, but I didn"t. I never wanted any part of her or her bloody fortune that my father covets.”

“I begin—to understand.”

Richard snapped his bag together before he glanced at Ohr and, with a nod, said, “Thought you might. Not every culture instills in children the importance of honoring their parents above all else. Which isn"t to say I wouldn"t honor mine out of love, if I had a parent left who was worth loving. I don"t. But I"m not catching a ship out of here until I break all my old ties to this place for good, and I can"t do that until I"ve seen my brother one last time.”

“The brother you mentioned a few years back when you were so drunk you couldn"t stand up?”

“I actually told you about him? Why didn"t you ever mention it?” Ohr shrugged. “Figured it was something you didn"t want to talk about since you never did—unless you were drunk beyond remembering.”

“You have an amazing lack of curiosity, my friend.”

“It"s called patience. If I"m meant to know, then eventually I will know.” Richard chuckled. “You miss out on knowing a lot of things with that attitude.”

“Would you like some help in locating your brother?”

Richard"s instinct was to say no. He didn"t really want his friend to know how pathetic his life here had been. But he couldn"t go anywhere near Willow Woods himself. Time hadn"t changed his appearance as much as he"d thought it would. His body might have changed, but apparently his face hadn"t altered drastically in nine years, or in eleven years in Julia"s case.

She had recognized him, or thought he looked familiar enough to pry with her question, which made him realize who she was.

Good God, he hadn"t seen that coming. She bore absolutely no resemblance to the scrawny little savage who had tormented him when they were children. He couldn"t even say what color eyes she"d had back then, they were always so narrowed on him with rage. Her hair had been much lighter, nearly white, when she was a child, not the ash blond it was now. She"d actually turned out pretty! Who would have thought? But he knew the vicious little termagant was still inside her. Look how quickly her rage had sprung forth the moment she"d guessed who he was.

“I know where to find Charles, at least I assume he and his wife, Candice, are still living at Willow Woods with my father,” Richard said. “I just can"t go near the place myself, or I"ll risk being dragged back into the fold.”

“So you do feel you have obligations?”

“No, not a single one. But actually I could use your help.” Ohr nodded and started packing as well. He didn"t ask what Richard feared would happen if his father found him. His restraint really was amazing.

Richard decided to volunteer a little bit about his life anyway. “It"s a complicated story, Ohr.

I might be my own man now, but my father won"t take that into account. He uses—harsh means—to see his will done and employs brutes to enforce that will. He"s Milton Allen, Earl of Manford.”

“That makes you as aristocratic as the Malorys?”

“Yes, but I"m the second son. I won"t be inheriting the title. My father, while not poor, is by no means rich either. Comfortable in the pocket barely describes his lot. So uncaring tyrant that he is, he decided to barter his sons to improve his circumstances.”

“That"s not an uncommon practice, to plump up the coffers through marriage.”

“Agreed, but in this day and age, parents take their children"s preferences into account. My brother and I should have been allowed to choose our own wives, keeping our father"s criteria in mind. But we weren"t even consulted, we were simply told who we were going to marry, and before we even came of age.

“Charles, with the title coming to him, was logically used to marry up the social ladder, and you can"t ascend much higher than marrying a duke"s daughter. That"s so lofty, it wouldn"t be conceivable for an earl"s son under normal circumstances. But Candice, the girl to whom Charles became engaged, was so unappealing in appearance and disposition that her father, the Duke of Chelter, couldn"t get rid of her after three Seasons of trying. She"s what you might call a screecher. She"s also a habitual complainer. All of which made her suitors, and there were plenty of them who sought the connection to the duke by marrying his daughter, go running in the opposite direction long before they got to the altar. It was becoming something of a joke, the number of engagements broken off with her. So the duke jumped at my father"s offer of his eldest son, despite that the girl was four years his senior. They were married two years before I left home, and his marriage became the nightmare Charles and I guessed it would be.”

“You apparently left to avoid the marriage your father arranged for you. Why didn"t he?”

“As the eldest son, he had much more to lose. And he"s not the rebel that I turned into. He might have raged and bemoaned his fate, but in the end he always did whatever Father told him to do. He wants to become an earl someday. God, I used to get so furious at him, for always buckling under. And look where he is now because of it, married to a woman who makes his life a living hell. She drove him to drink, you know. I don"t think I ever saw him sober after the day he married her.”

“You thought the same thing would happen to you, didn"t you?” Ohr guessed.

“Are you joking? I knew it would be exactly like that. Actually, I was afraid I"d end up killing my intended, if she didn"t kill me first. We hated each other on sight.”

“Why?”

Chapter Fourteen

RICHARD HAD TO THINK about Ohr"s question for a moment. From the day they were born, he and his brother had never been allowed to make their own choices about anything. Their toys, their pets, their friends, their clothes, even the way they wore their hair, everything had been decided by the earl, not them. He wasn"t just a hard taskmaster, he was a tyrant in his domain, and an overzealous disciplinarian. Richard couldn"t remember ever loving his father. So it would be easy to say that Richard"s arranged marriage had been the clincher, the worst instance of his father"s controlling every single aspect of his life. That was why he"d resented Julia Miller before he even met her.

He tried to remember that first meeting, which wasn"t easy. All the angry, rambunctious ones after that stood out in his mind.

He hadn"t even known about her for the first four years of their engagement. When his father finally told him a month prior to their meeting that he was going to be marrying down for money, he"d told his father he wouldn"t do it. A rather bold statement for a ten-year-old, and he"d been severely punished for that insolence. The stick his father used to discipline him and his brother had actually broken on Richard that day, and the welts hadn"t completely healed by the time he met his intended. Perhaps he"d transferred some of the hate he felt for his father to Julia without even realizing it.

But the true rebellion against his situation had begun when he was fifteen and he and his bratty fiancée had promised to kill each other. He"d told his father about that and had asked him to break the engagement contract. Milton had laughed and told him, “If you can"t get along with the chit, ignore her after you get an heir or two. How simple is that, eh? It"s bloody well what I did with your mother, may she rest in peace, the witch.” Richard had no memory of his mother. She"d died the year after he was born. But Charles had told him how bitterly their parents used to fight. Apparently, they"d had no choice in their marriage either.

So knowing there was no way out of that horrid match unless his father disowned him, Richard had actually started a campaign to accomplish that very thing by running up high gambling losses that could break the earl financially. But that campaign never bore fruit. It hadn"t been the least bit easy to find men who would gamble with him at that young age, and when he"d succeeded in finding a few dissolute bucks he could lose to, none of them had been willing to go to his father for payment of those debts because his father was a peer of the realm. Instead, they"d politely hounded Richard and had been too bloody congenial about it, willing to wait for however long it took him to pay up. Two years later he knew he"d have to leave England. That was his only way out.

But his memory of that long-ago day at Willow Woods, when Julia"s parents had brought her to meet him for the first time, was so vague all he could remember was the pain she"d caused him. Hard to forget that. And she"d only been five years old!