“What happened today, Clara?”
She sighed in frustration. “I already told you. Gordon walked into my coach, uninvited. I never met him here in our home. Quintina is lying.”
“Why would she lie? She told me today that she wanted our marriage to be a success.”
Clara spread her hands wide. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s lying about that, too.”
He remembered the day Quintina had explained that Daphne had gotten on a ship bound for America. Quintina had spoken in sympathetic tones and tried to explain and defend her husband’s actions. She had held Seger’s hand as she delivered the news, but he had known she harbored triumph on the inside.
Today, he didn’t know who to believe.
He watched his wife wipe tears from her eyes. Something inside him throbbed with empathy. He hated to see her cry and he did not want to feel this pain that was cutting him from the inside out. He wanted to crush it, like he’d learned to crush all feelings for other people years ago.
He didn’t want to face the possibility that Clara had been dishonest with him, or that she was somehow involved with another man and was lying about it, as Quintina was suggesting.
He didn’t want to face the possibility that she had married him for his title, like so many of her fellow countrywomen did these days, because he could not deny that he’d always felt certain there was something more than that between them. He’d always known Clara desired him in a basic, elemental way, and that pleased him. It had been his justification for marrying her. Desire was something he understood and could handle. Now, everything was falling into question.
He wanted to leave this room, to shut himself off.
He also felt the urge to protect what was his.
Seger walked to the door.
“Where are you going?” Clara asked.
He did not look back. “Out.”
Seger went to five hotels before he found the one that had Gordon Tucker listed as a registered guest. It was an expensive hotel. Too expensive for an ex-prison convict.
He tapped the ivory handle of his walking stick on the man’s door.
A few seconds later, the door opened and Seger found himself standing face to face with his wife’s one-time fiancé, a man who had recognized her passion and had taken advantage of it in the worst possible way.
He was a good-looking man, tall with brown hair and blue eyes.
Seger wanted to strangle him.
“Lord Rawdon,” Tucker said with a vile grin. “I was expecting you. Eventually.”
He opened the door the rest of the way. Seger walked in and glanced around the room. It was familiar. He had been in this hotel—and every other decent one in the city—a number of times, but he didn’t want to think about that. He was a husband now, and the sheer, rock-hard density of that role seemed to fill his entire being.
“I presume you have come to ask me to stay away from your wife,” Tucker said.
“I am not here toaskyou anything. I’m here to tell you that she doesn’t want to see you, and that you should leave England today.”
Tucker pulled a cigarette box out of his breast pocket, removed one and lit it. He took a deep drag and blew the smoke off to one side. “I don’t think so.”
Seger moved forward. “Clara belongs tome,and you will be back in prison by nightfall if you choose to ignore that fact.”
“She belongs to you, does she? American women are not little lambs, Rawdon. You should have learned that by now. Clara is a bold and daring woman, and one should not try to put her in a cage.”
“My reason for coming here is not to cage my wife. It is to get rid ofyou.”
Tucker raised an eyebrow. He sat down on the bed, leaned back on an elbow and crossed one leg over the other. “If you send me back to America, you will make Clara very unhappy. Is that what you want?”
“She won’t be unhappy.”
“Yes, she will.”
