Provoked (Enlightenment, #1)

by Joanna Chambers

Was this all there was? A few brief moments of connection—the grasp of another’s hand on the scaffold—and then you were cast out, alone, into the great universe?

He was always embarrassed by social niceties. He’d been taught at his father’s knee to look past all that; taught that the substance of a man’s character mattered more than the polish of his manners.

“Nonsense. It’ll be no trouble to lay another place for you, and it always does to have more than one eligible gentleman at the table when there are four young ladies.” “I’m hardly eligible,” David scoffed. “You’re alive, aren’t you?” Chalmers said drily.

“But I could not love her.” Balfour regarded him thoughtfully. “Are you a romantic, I wonder,” he said. “Or an idealist?” He canted his head to one side, as though debating the point, then seemed to reach a decision. “Both, possibly.”

“Yes, you are. You think I’m an ungodly villain, when the truth is I’m a slave to reason.” “A slave to reason?” David scoffed. “Quite so. I’ve never been able to accept that things are a certain way just because someone tells me they are. I don’t believe that fucking a man is a mortal sin. It harms no one, and it brings a great deal of pleasure to me.”

I’m not pretty,” he gritted out. “Or a boy, for that matter. I’m four and twenty.” Balfour gave him a long look. “You’re a boy all right,” he sneered. “An idealistic, romantic, pretty boy. It’s why your Miss Chalmers is so enamoured with you. Because you’re beautiful, virtuous and utterly unthreatening.”

David straddled those worlds now. Poised at the top of Blair Street, perched on the edge of the Old Town’s squalor, ready to fly. Desperate to fly. Even as guilt made him look over his shoulder and wonder what he’d lose when he flew, and if he’d ever regret its loss or just be glad to have left it all behind him.

The dancing was elegantly restrained. And yet the purpose of the evening—to snare a marital prospect—was, if anything, more obvious. Almost offensively so. Something businesslike about the way the dances were transacted, the young ladies’ time doled out in small measures. As though they were goods in a grocer’s shop to be sampled. Two ounces here and four ounces there.

Balfour stared back with dark, glittering eyes. “I played the game wrong with you before,” he murmured. “I thought I should appeal to your reason—but I needed to appeal to your body, didn’t I? If you think about things too much, you get tied up in knots.

The grate glowed with the embers of an earlier blaze and the wasted luxury of a fire burning in an unoccupied room shocked David somewhere in the depths of his Presbyterian soul.

Heh

Euan smiled grimly. “And here we are. Confronting one another in the simplest way possible.” A flickering glance at David. “Your trouble is you judge everyone else by your own standards, Davy. Most people aren’t as good or honourable as you imagine.”

“You value your family, then, at least.” Balfour laughed. “Don’t try to find a virtue in me, Lauriston. You won’t. Family is just another kind of privilege. Little groups of people, sticking together to further their shared interests. I’m not averse to making such allegiances to advance myself.”