Lucian. The name meant light. His mother must have had a penchant for irony. Or remarkable foresight … Lucian—Lucifer—Beelzebub. She shivered.
“And how did you damage your tooth, Lucian?”
He absently ran the tip of his tongue over the tooth in question. “There’s no delicate way of putting that.”
“I presently feel rather unshockable.”
“It happened when I took a fist to my face,” he said. “And there was a ring on one of the fingers. A heavy ring.”
She cringed. The scar on his lip would have been a gaping gash. “Are you a violent man, then?”
He considered this a moment. “No,” he then said. “Sometimes the violence finds you.”
“Plenty of gentlemen never find themselves inconvenienced by a fist in their face.”
His features hardened. “I’ve never hurt a woman, nor a bairn,” he said. “And I’d never raise my fists to you—and that’s what you are asking, isn’t it?”
Indeed. “I’d rather my husband not hurt anyone at all,” she told him. “They say you have purposely ruined upstanding gentlemen.”
“Have I?” he said blandly.
“Well,” she said. “How would you phrase it?”
“Perhaps they just lived beyond their means?” he suggested.
“Most gentlemen do,” she said. “It is an unwritten rule to keep granting them credit.”
A tension radiated from his body, and for a beat, it hummed in the silence between them. “I’ve changed my ways in that regard,” he then said.
Her father had said as much at the dinner only a fortnight ago. “And have you any regrets about what you have done?”
The brief flash of contempt in his eyes was icy cold. “No.”
Best not to pursue this particular topic, then. He had probably decided how much he would reveal about himself before entering the Blue Parlor in any case. She was ill-equipped for debating such a man. She was ill-equipped to be anything to this man.
“People say you created your fortune from thin air,” she tried instead. “Is it true?”
“Thin air,” he mocked. “That would be nice. But no. I became wealthy after trading bills of exchange and have become exponentially wealthier since. I had the capital for trading from selling company shares that had done well,” he added. “The funds to purchase those shares I had from renting out and selling property.”
“And who gave you the starting capital?” Her strength was fading. Her palms felt sticky. The sherry was roiling in her stomach. She was kept upright only thanks to the comfortingly snug lacing of her corset, and Blackstone seemed to notice. Perhaps that was why he decided to indulge her. “When I was thirteen years old, an antiques dealer near Leicester Square took me as his apprentice,” he said. “He died several years later and left me the shop. I sold it and invested the money in property with better-value growth potential.”
She had an idea of the sums required for investments her father would call worthwhile, and a shop—even if near Leicester Square—hardly had the potential to enable a man’s ascent to the upper echelons of the financial elite.
“My work with antiques gave me a taste of how the monied lived,” Blackstone said, his tone laced with faint derision. “Must’ve given me grand ambitions above my station early on.”
His ambitions had brought him far, she had to grant him that. Was she to be the jewel in his ruthlessly acquired crown?
She avoided his eyes when she asked her last question: “What of your wedding vows?”
He paused. “What about them?”
“Do you intend to keep them?” Or do you plan to take lovers and risk exposing me to scandal and diseases?
He was silent until she reluctantly met his gaze. Surprisingly, he looked serious. “I always keep my vows, Miss Greenfield,” he said. “I’ll keep my vows to you.”
Regrettable. It left her with no acceptable reason to refuse him. She folded and unfolded her hands, her movements slow and shaky.
“I have conditions,” she muttered.
He tilted his head. “Then, let’s hear them.”
“I wish to finish my studies at Oxford.”
“That would be highly unusual.”
“So are the circumstances of our match.”
He considered it for what seemed an eternity. “All right,” he finally said. “But not five days a week, surely.”
She had expected this; he didn’t strike her as a man who contented himself with less than half. “Four days, then. It’s only eight weeks per term, after all.” She was prepared to go down to three days. Three days was what Annabelle had negotiated with Montgomery, and Blackstone could hardly be more demanding than a duke.