Rowan understood practicality better than most men, but there was something in Foxdale’s tone that reduced the whole affair to the exchange of livestock. Once more, Rowan found himself thinking of Emmeline as the woman who had sat across from him in the carriage and spoken of love as though she had buried it alive and still heard it moving.
“What do you mean,” Rowan said, his voice turning colder, “that her father needed help?”
Foxdale smirked faintly. “You did not know? Weston’s finances have been in poor condition for years. The old man never recovered his footing after his wife died. I was to smooth the matter and help with the estate. Keep them above disgrace. In return, I received a respectable wife from a decent name and avoided the bother of hunting one out in a drawing room.”
Something unpleasant twisted through Rowan’s chest.
So that was it. Emmeline had not merely accepted convenience. She had accepted sacrifice. Had stood ready to bind herself to a man like this because her father’s future depended upon it.
A flicker of admiration moved through him before he could stamp it out.
Foxdale drained his glass and set it aside.
“But now,” he went on, “it has grown tiresome. Messy. Public. I am leaving England for a while. By the time I return, another scandal will have replaced this one and everyone will have forgotten all about Lady Emmeline Greene and her father’s embarrassing little scramble for security.”
Rowan felt his jaw tighten. “I made her a promise.”
Foxdale laughed once, short and ugly. “And she made me one. She promised she would be on time for our wedding, and she was not. The arrangement is void.”
“It was not her fault.”
“It is her misfortune,” Foxdale corrected. “Which, I assure you, is not the same thing.”
Rowan reached into his coat and laid a folded note of credit on the desk. “Take this, then. Compensation for the inconvenience, and restore the match.”
Foxdale glanced at it, then looked back up with open mockery. “I do not want your money.”
“Then name another condition.”
“I have named it. I want no further part in the affair.”
Rowan’s patience was thinning into something harder.
Foxdale rose at last, strolling around the desk with his glass still in hand.
“Besides,” he said, “it no longer interests me. The whole point was convenience. A clean arrangement with a quiet woman who knew her place. Now she comes with talk attached, and I have no wish to spend the next season soothing a wife everyone pities.”
He stopped close enough that Rowan could smell the brandy on his breath.
“She struck me as a bore anyway,” Foxdale added carelessly. “Pleasant enough to look at, of course, but one suspects she would be very dull in bed.”
Something in Rowan went white-hot and still.
“Watch your tongue,” he said.
Foxdale rolled his eyes. “Oh, do not begin. It is only the two of us. You need not posture like some knight in a ballad.”
He kept going, too pleased with himself to notice the shift in the room.
“A woman like that,” he said, “all soft looks and earnest duty, is usually a disappointment once the door closes. You can almost tell?—”
Rowan hit him.
The blow landed clean across Foxdale’s mouth and sent him stumbling into the edge of the desk hard enough to rattle the decanter. Glass sloshed.
Foxdale stared at him in disbelief, one hand flying to his face. “What the hell?—”
“You will not speak of her that way,” Rowan said.
