“And are you … enjoying it?” she ventured. “The read?”
He gave a shrug. “I suppose.”
“So you do.”
“I do, yes. And turns out you’re wrong. About everything.”
“What? I am not,” she said. “What do you mean, everything?”
“To start with, the villain of this book isn’t Heathcliff, but Nelly—”
“Nelly!”
“Someone should stick a boot up her meddling old arse.”
“I can’t believe you are singling out poor Nelly—why, Hindley would be a far more obvious villain than her.”
He scoffed. “Hindley, sniveling bastard, needs a good beating, but he’s not who kept interfering between Cathy and Heathcliff with such great effect.”
“Nelly did what she thought was right to protect her mistress.”
“Nah.” He shook his head. “She’s a servant reveling in her ill-gained powers like a hog in the mud. And Cathy didn’t want protection; she wanted Heathcliff. Here—she says …” He settled her deeper into his arms, opened the book, and riffled through the pages until his fingertip found the line he was searching for. “She says, ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.’” He looked up at her with heated eyes. “Necessary. Those are her words.”
She’d never last through a Sunday evening of him reading to her, she realized. As he had drawled those words with his Scottish burr, her heart had fluttered like a butterfly under an unexpected sunbeam.
“And another thing you have wrong,” he said, his gaze boring into hers. “I’m no Heathcliff.”
Her pulse still high, she slid a poignant glance over him. “You’re not?” With his glower and curling black hair, he looked like the Yorkshire winds were still howling around him.
“First,” he said, “I’d have never killed that dog; it hadn’t done a thing.”
“Poor Fanny.”
“Yes, Fanny. Second, Heathcliff was indecisive. Which I’m not.”
“You’re not,” she acknowledged.
“A disloyal creature like Cathy wouldn’t be worth the efforts of a revenge,” he continued. “I’d ne’er return to that place to flaunt my new wealth and position only to torment her. But if I were fool enough to pine so after such a woman—nay, any woman—if I thought the very beating of my heart was compelled by her existence, and knew just a sliver of this sentiment returned, I would take her. No running away in a sulk after hearing things I don’t like, no idly standing by while a whey-faced gent weds and beds her. I’d have crossed the moors with her thrown over my shoulder if need be.”
“No doubt you would,” she breathed, aware of his arm tightening around her waist. “And naturally you would think nothing of forcing her to live in squalor with you.”
“Ah, but there was no squalor—he was clever, and fortune smiled upon him, didn’t it?” He was smiling, too, exposing his chipped tooth and looking like a gleeful wolf.
An agitation crawled beneath her skin. She shook off his arm and stood. “She was compelled to choose Linton by economic realities and propriety—most women would have done the same; it was her one sensible choice.”
Lucian shook his head. “She had too little faith in the man she needed, so he hated himself even more and she chose a puny groom for her bed instead.”
“Puny? You hate the poor man.”
He made a face. “He near faints when Heathcliff glares at him. Faints when he glares. Which woman who says, ‘I am Heathcliff’ could be well pleased with that?”
Her lips parted before she had an answer. Before she realized she had, in fact, nothing to parry this. Her mind was wiped clean. Instinctively, she understood why such a woman couldn’t have been pleased. Her gaze fled to the vast expanse of heather outside the window, then to the low line of hills on the horizon. A woman like Cathy would have pined for passion until the end, beneath whichever glossy veneer of social respectability she had painted over her loss, because the truth was there—down deep where the rocks might be, but it was there. And so hidden in the dark and gradually compacting beneath layers of self-deception and pretenses, truth could turn to rot and eat away at the very roots of one’s existence. That’s why some women went mad and haunted the moors. Some hearts strove for the mellow pleasures of kind and steady things, and some beat for the heat of passion even when they knew they’d burn. I’d choose the blaze, she thought. The clear recognition of her own essence cut at something inside her, sharp like teeth. I could have never loved Clotworthy Skeffington. And he could have never loved all of her. Imagine, the fine-faced lord’s reaction to her wayward thoughts, her desire for more, her gloriously helpless cries when Lucian had slid his fingers into her. She blew out a breath and touched her cheeks. Her hands were icy. Odd, how the truth pounced into plain view after being there all along. She wasn’t lovely. That’s why she had such a strong reaction to the word; there was nothing wrong with lovely, but it was not her. Beneath lace and silk, she was a wild and dangerous creature.