Sophia pressed Lily’s hand once, then climbed into the Brimsey carriage beside her parents. The door closed. The driver clicked his tongue, and the horses lurched forward.
Lily and Edward walked to the end of the street, where a line of hackneys waited for fares. They climbed into the first one, and Lily settled against the worn leather seat.
“Thornwaite House,” she told the driver. “Quickly, please.”
The hackney pulled into the street, and the ballroom, the whispers, the pitying looks, and the smudged paper with its poisonous little words all fell away behind her.
Ahead of her lay the townhouse of a man she barely knew, a man whose name had just been shackled to hers by a stranger’s malice.
She would get answers tonight if she had to drag them out of the Duke of Thornwaite herself.
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.
