Chapter 2
“You have cream on your ear, Your Grace,” the butler said.
Hugo continued down the corridor, dragging a linen cloth across his jaw with one hand and buttoning his waistcoat with the other.
The evening had been a pleasant one. Lady Delphine Cartwell, a widow of considerable imagination and even more considerable flexibility, had proven herself an excellent companion for the better part of two hours.
Hugo had been in the process of escorting her to the servants’ entrance when Simms, his butler, had appeared at the top of the back staircase with an expression that suggested the house was either on fire or entertaining an uninvited guest.
The guest, apparently, was worse than fire.
“Lady Lily Readthorpe is in the parlor, Your Grace,” Simms had said, his voice pitched to that tone of studied calm that meant he disapproved of everything currently happening beneath this roof.
“She arrived unaccompanied. She declined to wait in the entrance hall. She has, I believe, seated herself.”
Hugo had blinked.
Readthorpe. Edward’s sister-in-law.
The sharp one, with the green eyes and the freckles and the habit of looking at him as though he were a species of insect she had not yet decided was worth classifying.
He had sent Delphine out through the back, and now he stood in the doorway of his own parlor, wiping whipped cream from his knuckles, staring at a woman who had no business being in his house at half-past eleven at night.
She sat in the chair nearest the fire, her back straight, her gloved hands folded in her lap, her ball gown a pale shimmer of blue silk against the dark leather.
Her honey-blonde hair was pinned up in an arrangement that had likely begun the evening elegantly and was now beginning to rebel, loose curls escaping at her temples. Her green eyes locked onto him with an intensity that would have been flattering under different circumstances.
These were not those circumstances.
“I was not expecting company.” Hugo leaned against the doorframe and offered his most disarming grin, the one that had opened bedchamber doors from Mayfair to Milan.
It bounced off her like a stone off glass.
“Were you having dessert?” Her gaze dropped to the cream still clinging to his fingers.
Hugo glanced at his hand. The grin widened.
“In a manner of speaking.” He drew the cloth across each finger slowly. “Though the dessert in question was rather more… cooperative than anything one might find on a pastry tray.”
Her jaw tightened. A flush crept up her neck, and he watched it climb with the idle appreciation of a man who noticed such things by habit. She was not amused. She was not charmed. She was, if he read her correctly, approximately three seconds from fleeing.
Interesting.
“How charming.” She rose from the chair, reached into her reticule, and handed him a crumpled piece of paper. “Have a look at this.”
Hugo caught it before it hit the floor. He unfolded it with one hand, still holding the linen cloth in the other, and let his eyes travel across the print.
The layout was familiar. A gossip sheet, styled after the ones that circulated through drawing rooms and gentlemen’s clubs every week. The masthead bore a name he recognized: Lady Fairhart. Edward’s wife’s pen name.
The one that no more than a handful of people in London knew belonged to Sophia Gray, Duchess of Heatherwell.
He read the passage beneath the masthead, and the grin died on his face.
Lady L. R., youngest daughter of the Earl of B., has been observed in clandestine meetings with none other than the Duke of T…
Hugo read it twice. His fingers tightened on the paper.
Someone had used Sophia’s pen name. Someone had fabricated a connection between him and the woman standing in front of him, a woman he had spoken to perhaps a dozen times in two years, and only ever across a dinner table with Edward and Sophia between them.
Someone had printed this and distributed it at a ball, which meant that by morning, every drawing room in London would hum with it.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was distributed at the Fenwick ball. Tonight.” Lady Lily folded her arms across her chest. “To every guest in attendance. Someone has forged my sister’s pen name and published a lie connecting me to you. I came here to ask whether you had anything to do with it.”
The accusation landed with a precision that suggested she had been rehearsing it. Hugo looked up from the paper and studied her face. She was furious. Beneath the fury, she was frightened, but she was doing an admirable job of burying it beneath that rigid spine and those sharp green eyes.
“You think I arranged this?”
“I think someone did, and your name is on it.”
He held her gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Not because he was trying to intimidate her, though that might have been a useful side effect, but because something about her directness caught him off guard.
Most women who found themselves in his parlor at this hour wanted something from him, and they approached the wanting sideways, with flattery and suggestion and the careful deployment of décolletage. Lady Lily had marched into his house, handed him a paper, and not once fawned around him.
He found that unsettling in a way he could not immediately name.
“Give me a moment.”
He left the parlor and moved through the back corridor to ensure Delphine had departed without incident. The servants’ entrance was closed, the alley empty, and the faint trace of her perfume was already fading from the stairwell.
Good.
The last thing he needed was Edward’s sister-in-law encountering a disheveled widow in his back hallway.
When he returned, Lady Lily stood by the window, her posture stiff, and her expression several degrees colder than when he had left. She had seen something. He did not ask what.
“I had nothing to do with this.” He crossed to the mantel and picked up his brandy. “I have never spoken to a gossip columnist in my life, and I have no interest in manufacturing scandals. I generate enough of my own without assistance.”
“How reassuring.”
Hugo nearly smiled. Nearly. The situation did not warrant it, but the speed of her retort was something to admire.
“You are rather sharp for a woman standing uninvited in a bachelor’s parlor at midnight.”
“And you are rather calm for a man whose name was just printed alongside mine in a scandal sheet.”
“My name appears in scandal sheets with some regularity, Lady Lily. I have learned not to panic.” He took a sip and studied her over the rim.
She held herself like a woman preparing for a blow, every muscle braced, every nerve drawn tight.
“Yours, however, does not. Which means this was aimed at you, not at me.”
Something shifted in her expression. The fury dimmed, and what replaced it was a weariness that sat poorly on a face so young. She pressed her lips together and looked away.
“My sister believes the same. Someone wants to damage my reputation.”
“And they chose me as the weapon.” Hugo set the glass down. “Clever, actually. My reputation makes the accusation plausible without requiring a shred of evidence. Any woman linked to me is assumed to have been compromised.”
He paused. The truth of it tasted sour. He had built that reputation on purpose, had cultivated it like armor, and now someone was using it to hurt a woman who had done nothing to deserve it.
“The question is not whether this will damage you,” he continued. “It already has. The question is what you intend to do about it.”
“I intend to find out who printed it and make them answer for it.”
“Noble, but impractical, I’m afraid.” He pushed away from the mantel and took a step toward her. “The damage is done, and hunting down a printer will not undo what every guest at that ball now believes.” He watched her fingers curl at her sides. “How about you tell me with whom you danced tonight?”
“Well… Lord Wilfrey.”
He took another step. “Wilfrey is a careful man. Methodical. He does not attach himself to anything that carries risk. After tonight, you present a risk.”
The words hit their mark. He saw it in the way her shoulders dropped half an inch, in the quick, involuntary press of her lips. She knew. She had already arrived at the same conclusion, and hearing him say it aloud was simply the confirmation she had been dreading.
Hugo did not enjoy causing her pain. That surprised him.
He caused people discomfort regularly and rarely lost sleep over it, but there was something about the way Lady Lily absorbed a blow, straight on, without flinching, without looking away, that made him want to hand her a solution rather than another problem.
“What are you suggesting?”
He closed the remaining distance between them. She smelled of rosewater and the faint, sharp tang of night air. Standing so close, he could see the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, the flecks of gold in her green irises, and the rapid pulse beating at the base of her throat.
She was aware of him. He could see that, too, in the way her breath shortened, and her weight shifted backward until her heel met the edge of the side table.
“A temporary arrangement.” He kept his voice low. “We announce our betrothal. The scandal becomes a courtship. Society accepts it, your reputation recovers, and when the fuss has died down, and you have secured a suitable match, we dissolve the engagement quietly.”
“What you’re suggesting…” Her voice climbed, and color flooded her cheeks. “An engagement is the single most consequential event in an unmarried woman’s life, and you are treating it like a game of whist.”
“I am treating it like what it is. A tool. Nothing more.”
“A tool.” She stepped to the side, putting distance between them.
“You have no idea what an engagement means to a woman in my position. You toss the word around as if it costs you nothing, because for you, it means little. You are a Duke. You could announce an engagement, dissolve it a month later, and the ton would pat you on the back and offer you a fresh drink. I would be ruined twice over.”
The words struck something beneath his composure.
She was right. He knew she was right, and he did not like the shape of that knowledge, did not like what it revealed about the ease with which he had made the suggestion.
He had offered an engagement the way he offered everything: as a transaction, clean and detached, stripped of the weight that other people attached to such things.
But the weight was real. He could see it in her eyes.
“You would not be ruined.” He softened his voice. “I would ensure it.”
“And I should trust the word of a man who I believe was licking whipped cream off a woman twenty minutes ago?”
The grin broke through before he could stop it. “She was licking the cream off me, actually, but I take your point.”
Her cheeks blazed. She straightened her spine and lifted her chin. At that moment, with the firelight catching the loose curls at her temples and the defiance burning behind her eyes, Hugo felt something shift in the room. A subtle displacement, like the air before a storm.
“No. I will not bind myself to a man I barely know, even in pretense. My dignity is the only thing I have left tonight, and I will not trade it for the convenience of a Duke who treats scandal like sport.”
Hugo studied her. His grin faded. She meant every word. She would walk out of this house and face whatever came next on her own terms, with nothing but her pride to protect her, and she would not bend.
He respected that.
“Very well.” He inclined his head. “I will not press the matter.”
She released a breath. “Good. Then I will see myself out.”
She turned toward the door. Hugo watched her go. The set of her shoulders, the lift of her chin, the way she moved through his parlor as if it belonged to her and he were the intruder was intriguing.
He did not plan what happened next. The words formed somewhere beneath his ribs and rose to his mouth before the calculating part of his brain could intervene.
“Lady Lily.”
She stopped. He crossed the distance between them in two strides, stopping close enough to catch the scent of rosewater, close enough to see the fine hairs at the nape of her neck rise as his breath reached her skin.
She turned. Her green eyes met his, wide and wary and luminous in the candlelight.
“Whether you like it or not, Lady Lily,” he said, and his voice came from somewhere deeper than charm, somewhere that had nothing to do with performance or practice or the polished persona he wore like a second skin, “you are mine to protect.”
Her breath caught. He watched the shiver move through her, a single tremor that traveled from her shoulders down her spine. Hugo felt an answering pull in his own chest that he had no name for and no intention of examining.
“I am no one’s to protect, Your Grace.”
She left. The front door opened and closed. Hugo moved before the thought had fully formed. A woman alone in a hackney at midnight. He should escort her home. He reached the entrance hall and pulled the door open, the offer already on his tongue.
Edward stood beside the hackney, holding the door for Lily as she climbed inside. He glanced up at Hugo across the lamplit street. Their eyes met. Edward gave a single nod, brief and loaded, and climbed in after her. The hackney pulled away.
Hugo stood in the doorway and watched it go. Edward knew. He had brought her here and waited, which meant the situation was grave enough to draw a duke out at midnight. And the nod had said everything Edward’s voice had not: Fix this.
Hugo stepped back inside and closed the door.
Hugo stood in the empty parlor. The fire crackled. The brandy sat untouched on the mantel. The crumpled pamphlet pressed against his ribs from inside his waistcoat pocket, and the faint scent of rosewater lingered in the air like a question he had not been asked.
He picked up the brandy and drained it in one swallow.
She was going to refuse. She was going to fight this on her own, and she was going to lose, because Society did not reward defiance in women the way it rewarded it in men. The unfairness of that fact settled into his chest like a stone.
He would fix this. Whether she wanted him to or not.