Chapter 14
CHAPTER 14
F or a split second, Helen could see the scene as the intruders were seeing it:
Her skirts rucked up to above her knees.
Xander’s half-done shirt.
Their embrace—on a bed .
It was a damning picture, and that was before she even tried to imagine the state of her coiffure.
She vaulted to her feet, shaking her skirts until they reached the floor. It didn’t really fix anything, but at least she was no longer half-nude in front of what looked like the better part of the ton .
Xander, too, leapt to standing. And then, to Helen’s surprise, he positioned himself in front of her, almost as if he were trying to protect her.
It was a noble impulse, for all that, it was far too late.
“Close the door,” he barked. A few of the more biddable aristocrats stumbled back at the ducal command, mumbling apologies and coughing awkwardly into their fists, but the hungriest of the gossips stayed precisely where they were.
And George.
What was the word Xander had used? Fuck. That was right.
Fuck, this was bad.
“I will not close the door!” George insisted, not even bothering to hide the triumph in his voice. “Get away from her at once! That is my cousin, Miss Helen Fletcher.”
Oh, Helen was going to murder him . He was so transparent. He was going to make sure that everyone knew who, exactly, had been caught with the Duke of Godwin, and then he was going to use that as leverage.
“Shut your mouth,” Xander snapped back. “Show some bloody decorum. Let her at least?—”
“Get away from her!” George insisted again. “Helen! Helen! Has he harmed you? Helen!”
She stepped out from behind Xander, mostly to get her cousin to stop screaming her bloody name. He really didn’t plan to leave any of this to chance, did he? The louse.
“I’m fine,” she said tersely. Her anger combined with the hot burn of embarrassment as various partygoers openly gawked at her.
God, this was horrible.
George surged forward and grabbed her arm in a bruising grip. Xander looked as though he was going to protest, so Helen looked at him.
“I’m fine,” she repeated. And then, as a horrible idea occurred to her, her eyes went wide. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen!” she told him urgently.
His brow furrowed like this hadn’t even occurred to him. “No, I?—”
But anything else he said was lost as George dragged her toward the door, and Helen was plunged into the cacophony of gasps and murmurs and Can you believe it? The Duke of Godwin and her?
In the smallest of miracles, Patricia came running. At least they wouldn’t have to search for her sister, though Helen had no doubt that George would have been delighted to drag Helen through the gossiping crowd while he looked.
“Helen?” Patricia’s eyes were wide, her face pale. “Are you all right?”
“Let’s go,” George snapped. He was still clinging to Helen like she might try to make a break for it. She was going to be able to see his fingerprints on her forearm for weeks . God, she hated him.
“Your sister has made a spectacle of herself, so we must leave.”
Patricia bit her lip worriedly but nodded and followed easily enough. At least George didn’t try to grab her, Helen thought. She might have punched him directly in the nose if he’d tried to manhandle her sister, and they really didn’t need any more scandal at the moment.
She was beginning to enter an almost dreamlike state. Perhaps she was going into shock. Could that happen from mortification? She didn’t know. She hoped it didn’t kill her—that could happen with shock, couldn’t it? She needed to live to protect her sister.
“Are you all right, Patricia?” Helen asked as George dragged her toward the exit.
“Me?” Helen had been aiming for reassurance, but the question seemed to only alarm Patricia more. “Yes, I’m fine, Helen. What on earth happened to you , though? People are saying?—”
“That your sister debauched herself like a common whore?” George interjected sneeringly as he all but threw Helen into the carriage. “Yes. She did. Now, get in the bloody carriage, both of you.”
Patricia’s face was bone white in the darkness. She climbed in after Helen and wrapped her arms around her sister’s shoulders. Helen could feel her shaking.
George sat across from them, rapped on the carriage roof to indicate they were ready, and then smiled like a shark.
“Well, well, well, Helen,” he said, practically gleeful. “You’ve really done it now.”
Patricia’s trembling helped Helen find her voice again.
“It won’t work,” she said. She was starting to feel like she might cry. She missed the dreamlike distance from this horrible fiasco. “Your plan. It won’t work.”
“ My plan?” George pressed a hand to his chest like the innocent damsel in a poorly acted play. “My dear cousin, I did not get caught with my skirts around my waist in the Duke of Godwin’s arms.”
“The Duke of Godwin!” Patricia echoed in a shocked whisper.
“Oh, yes,” George went on. “I will grant your sister this, Patricia: she chose carefully when she decided to cheapen herself. You’re really lucky that I stumbled upon you, Helen. I don’t know what your plan was, otherwise. Claim he’d gotten a bastard on you and pressure him into paying you off? Not a terrible plan, as far as it goes, though you’d still be branded the whore, of course.”
“I wasn’t?—”
To Helen’s absolute shock, it was Patricia who interrupted.
“Don’t speak about my sister that way!” She trembled harder with nerves, though her voice was strong. “I don’t know precisely what happened—but I don’t care! You won’t speak about her that way!”
For a surprised moment, George and Helen were united as they blinked at Patricia. Then George settled back in his seat, and they were enemies once more.
“Very well,” he said with an exaggerated air of magnanimity. “I shall merely say this, so that you do know precisely what happened. Your sister, of whom we must speak well,” he added sneeringly, “allowed the Duke of Godwin to…take liberties with her person.”
He said all this with such clear disdain that Helen almost preferred the outright insults.
“Yet she clearly had no way to secure his hand in marriage. I provided that opportunity. They’ve been seen. They must marry.”
“It won’t work.” Helen’s voice sounded especially dull in contrast to George’s calculated malice. “Whatever you’re thinking. It won’t work. I wasn’t trying to trap him, and your trap won’t succeed. The duke—The duke won’t come.”
The streetlamps made George’s eyes gleam with feverish malevolence.
“Oh, it had better work, my dear cousin,” he said, voice acidic and full of venom. “For if you have ruined yourself for nothing, let me assure you: there will be hell to pay.”
“Xander?”
Xander’s head jerked up so forcefully that his neck throbbed. He blinked down at his hands, which had been holding his head. How long had he been sitting like this?
He turned to the door, feeling every second of his thirty-one years. He’d expected Catherine to be the one to show up in the midst of this crisis, but it was Ariadne.
A glance at the clock offered an explanation. It was barely half five in the morning. Catherine wouldn’t be up at this hour, but Ariadne wandered in the night.
From the concerned look on her face and the way she was shifting her weight from foot to foot, toes bare beneath the hem of her dressing gown, Ariadne wasn’t here about any of the things that so often plagued her sleep.
No, she somehow already knew that he’d ruined absolutely everything.
“Come in, Ari,” he said, beckoning with a weary hand. “Come sit by the fire. You’ll freeze.”
It was weak, as far as deflections went, and Ariadne shot him a look that reminded him so much of Kitty that it almost made him smile.
“It’s April in London. I’m hardly likely to suffer frostbite.”
Still, though, she crossed to the armchair across from his, which was placed in front of the fire. She curled her feet up beneath her, tucking her dressing gown delicately around her. For a moment, Xander was torn between seeing her as the girl she had been and the woman she was becoming. His little sister, nearly grown.
And he, the bastard who was meant to protect her but who had thrown away the family’s reputation for—what? A half hour’s pleasure?
That was all it had been. That was all it could be.
“Is everything all right, Ariadne?” he asked.
She regarded him, assessing. “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said. “The gossip pages come with the newspapers in the morning—early.”
It was a clear enough explanation, and he felt a wracking pang of guilt that even after he’d been such a fool, his sweet little sister was going out of her way not to embarrass him.
“Ah,” he said. “I see. So it’s all over London already, is it?”
She gave him a sympathetic wince. “I’m afraid so. The column was, ah, detailed enough that I stopped reading in the middle. One doesn’t need to think about one’s brother in such a light.”
Xander wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry—not that he would. He hadn’t even let himself cry the night his family had burned; he wasn’t about to start now.
But God, his sister. Trying to make him feel better. It might as well have been a knife to the chest.
“Well, I appreciate that, Ariadne,” he said, his voice coming out a bit strangled.
There was a pause in which they both sat, thinking.
“Are you going to marry her, then?” Ariadne asked. “This Miss F?—?”
“Fletcher,” he supplied absently. “Miss Helen Fletcher.”
“Miss Fletcher,” she repeated as if tasting the name on her tongue. “Hm. Wait, are those the ladies we met in the park? Which was one was…you know, the one?”
“The elder,” he said. “And yes, that was Helen and her sister, Miss Patricia Fletcher.” Before she could ask again, he sighed and said, “And yes, I’m going to marry her. I have to.”
It was the first time he’d said out loud the conclusion he’d reached at approximately quarter to four that morning. There was no way out of it, no trickery or dealing he could pull out from his hat. He had to marry Helen. There was no other choice.”
“Do you want to?” Ariadne prodded.
He let out a mirthless laugh. “No.”
It was true, painfully so, and it didn’t make a whit of difference.
“Why not?” She looked sweetly baffled.
Xander wondered if this was because his sister couldn’t imagine him doing anything he didn’t want to or if she was romantic enough to think he wouldn’t liaise with a lady he didn’t want to marry. He didn’t dare ask, lest she explain that she had actually thought he wasn’t stupid enough to liaise with an unmarried young lady he did not wish to marry.
Lord only knew he’d said as much to himself a hundred times or more over the long hours of the last night.
Ariadne was waiting for an answer—patient but clearly waiting.
“Helen isn’t right. Not to be a duchess. And she—she shouldn’t be.”
Ariadne looked even more confused, but Xander had no better explanation to give. Anything more would require peeling back layers that he’d carefully structured over the years. And if he did that…
Well, he could not afford to let anything else fall apart.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
He hauled himself to his feet. His bones felt like they were creaking after a long night spent in an armchair instead of in his bed. He felt too old for this.
“I know,” he said. He pressed a kiss to his sister’s head, then turned to leave.
“Where are you going, Xander?” she asked.
He paused and looked over his shoulder. He gave her a sad little smile.
“I’m going to go have a bath and a shave,” he said. “And then I’m going to get dressed, have a bite of breakfast, and go make the biggest mistake of my life.”