Chapter Twenty-One #2
“It’s too late for that, Leo.” To add insult to injury, his mother tossed today’s Bath Chronicle onto his desk. The headline Doting Duke Makes Seditious Chaperone His Duchess glaring up at him in cruel mockery. “Somebody at the prison must have leaked it because your wedding made the front page.”
Of course it had! What fabulous gossip the whole sorry tale made for everyone else. Never mind that he had ended up heartbroken!
“But if I send her away at least I shall be free of her!” What a joke this all was, albeit an unfunny one.
What a bloody joke he was now too. “She is nothing but a lying, scheming, backstabbing radical who used me abominably to serve her own ends!” One he had as good as plighted his troth to after just one kiss because she had tied him in so many blasted knots.
Probably on purpose.
Because nothing was as blind or as stupid as a besotted man, and he had certainly been all of those things.
“It can hardly be viewed as a coincidence that she came to work here. What better way to keep one step ahead of the authorities than being a spy in a magistrate’s bloody house!
And do not get me started on how she conspired with Abigail.
I paid that damned woman to protect my sister, not to provide her with every clandestine opportunity to meet with that scoundrel Digby while they all plotted the downfall of society behind my back!
” He could picture how funny she must have found that.
How laughably pathetic she must have found him.
“In fact, the more I think on it, the more I realize that it was no coincidence that she was arrested alongside my sister at that protest. It was Portia who encouraged Abigail to go! Portia who gave her that damn placard, and then the scheming witch shamelessly used her connections to my title to get herself released!”
“Abigail swears that isn’t the truth, Leo. You would know that if you deigned to talk to her rather than shoot silent daggers at her each time you stomp away.”
“Of course she does!” His fist erupted with pain as he slammed it onto his desk.
“And I’ve got nothing to say to bloody Abigail either while she’s still under Digby and his fellow conspirators’ toxic bloody spell!
She’s obviously been coerced and conditioned by the radicals who have their claws in her.
” He tapped his forehead. “She’s been turned.
Twisted to their way of thinking and doesn’t recognize the truth anymore! ”
“Your sister is too clever and too headstrong for that, and you know it. She’s too stubborn herself, just like her supercilious, I-know-best older brother. Just as you also know, when you aren’t being irrational, that a coincidence is sometimes just a coincidence.”
“All I know is that I brought a Trojan horse into this house and in a moment of sheer madness, I married it!” In case his mother needed any proof of the full extent of Portia’s betrayal, he slid over the damning article that had been found at the offices of Equitas.
Written in her unmistakable hand. An article that she had personally insulted him in too!
And to think he had found the constant ink stains on her fingers charming!
What an absolute besotted buffoon he had been!
“Can I make an observation, Leo?”
“Will anything I say or do stop you?”
“You could have left her to face the music by herself last night.” She slipped into the seat opposite him, a sure sign this unwelcome lecture was destined to be long.
“Nobody would have judged you for it when there was so much evidence of her guilt—none of it that you were aware of until yesterday. But you didn’t.
You still wanted to save her. Even with all that damning proof. ”
“I felt beholden!”
“You didn’t look beholden to me, my darling. You looked terrified. As if you couldn’t face the prospect of never seeing her again. So you moved heaven and earth to keep her with you.”
He loathed that his mother was right, but denied it anyway. “Actually, I could not care less if I never see her again.”
“Why? Because just looking at her hurts?” His mother’s expression was one of pity. “It is impossible to feel as betrayed as you so obviously do and not to have invested your heart.”
“My heart has never been attached to her!” Perhaps if he said that often enough, the dratted organ would stop bleeding.
“I’ve seen how you look at her, Leo. From the first moment I witnessed the pair of you on the pavement, it was obvious to me that you wanted her.”
“She is an attractive woman and I am not blind, Mother, but I have certainly never been stupid either.” Which was why the constant ache in his chest was so acute. “She is dead to me!”
“That’s not how love works, Leo.” She reached over and squeezed his hand.
“I am sure you will figure that out eventually once you’ve calmed down, put aside your pride, and realized that all this love you feel for her is worth fighting for.
In the meantime, there is a grateful but terrified young woman upstairs who desperately needs to hear you tell her that everything is going to be all right—even if it isn’t.
One pretty much covered from head to toe in bruises that were given to her by that horrid constable of yours.
Given, no doubt, as punishment because you punched him. ”
That cancerous dollop of fresh guilt delivered, his mother sailed out and left him to fester. Except it was Portia’s bruises now and not her treachery that filled his mind.
With a frustrated growl at his own misguided sense of moral obligation, he took the stairs two at a time and stalked to the bedchamber next to his where his interfering mother had put the duplicitous witch. He went to knock, but when he saw the door was open, just marched on in, then stopped dead.
Because his new wife was standing naked in the bath.