“Is that finally my son?” Lady Wennington suddenly rushed into thehallway, and like a stampede behind her, so too came all the impatient guests. The young ladies pushing each other out of the way in their eagerness to make that all-important first impression.
He looked to Lottie. Either stunned from the intensity of their kiss or stunned by the crowd coming toward them. “What’s happening?” He sounded panicked. Looked panicked.
“What’s happening?” Unaware of the intense, passionate moment that had just been interrupted, his mother enveloped him in a hug. “Why it’s the party I’ve been planning for you for your birthday of course, darling! Surprise!”
Lottie got pushed by the wayside as the guests swarmed him and he was dragged into the drawing room. He glanced back, only briefly, the panic in his expression replaced by one of pleading. As if he was expecting her to somehow save him. Which of course she couldn’t, not now, despite being desperate to. Someone closed the door, trapping him inside, and the bile rose in her mouth.
Alone in the hallway, she stumbled to the staircase and groped for a step to sit on. Her head spinning, both from the residual power of their kiss and from the overwhelming realization that what was happening in that room was all wrong and she had helped fling him to the wolves. There was a cacophony of noise from behind the door and she just knew he would hate that. Hate the intrusion into his privacy and being blindsided by so many strangers.
She had no clue how long she sat there wondering how to rescue him. She was so lost in conflicting thoughts it could have been one minute and it could have been a hundred. But the muffled voices suddenly increased momentarily in volume, so her head whipped to the door and there he was. As white as a sheet and so furious she could feel the intensity of his anger coming off him in waves.
Anger that seemed wholly focused on her.
“Guy, I—”
“Howcouldyou!” He spat the words, his stormy, dark eyes a world of pain. “How could you do that to me?”
She jumped to her feet and rushed to him, arms outstretched because she needed to comfort him. “I didn’t have a choice. I—”
He swerved away from her a touch before he swiveled to face her, arms raised in frustration before slamming both fists to his sides. “You have a bloody tongue in your head! One you use often enough, madam, and for lesser crimes than this!”
“I wanted to tell you.” She reached out to touch him and he stared at her hand as if it were a cobra before he pivoted to stalk up the stairs, forcing her to follow. “Please, Guy… Hear me out. I wanted to tell you but—” He stopped dead as she caught his arm and she almost slammed into him as he twisted.
“But you didn’t, did you?” For a moment, he allowed all his vulnerabilities to show in his expression, until he yanked his sleeve from her grip. “When you knew I would loathe that…” He grimaced as he flapped his hand toward the noisy houseguests. “With every fiber of my being. I let you in and this—” He couldn’t even finish that sentence, his emotions were so raw.
“I wanted to tell you but… you have to understand… it wasn’t my place to. Your mother wanted to surprise you and I had no choice—”
“Don’t you dare try to excuse this!” He wagged an accusatory finger at her. “Do not dare attempt to deny your part in this when you were one of the perpetrators of this vile… cruel… humiliating…Urgggh!” On that guttural grunt, he was off again. “You are a liar,Miss Travers.” Somehow the pointed use of her surname again cut more deeply than him calling her a liar. “According to my mother and my aunt, you weren’t just complicit—you were the linchpin. They apparently couldn’t have pulled any of this off without you.” His tone was laced with bitterness now. Betrayal.
Hurt.
That shamed her the most.
“That’s not entirely—”
He spun around again and regarded her with complete disgust. “Then you deny sending out all the invitations, do you? Riding practically every single day to Maidstone to collect the replies? Of hiding every single oneof those awful people down there in bedrooms inmyhouse?” He shook his head and backed up the stairs. “And I thought you were…” He growled and his features hardened. “Just get out of my sight, Miss Travers. For I cannot bear to look at you.”
“But—”
“And stay out of it until you leave, or I’ll have you removed from my house.”
ChapterSEVENTEEN
The door to the dimly lit tack room swung open to reveal his aunt sporting an expression so sour it would curdle milk. “So this is where you are hiding?” Aunt Almeria leaned against the frame rather than her walking cane and skewered him with her glare. “Now that the mystery has been solved, the only question that needs answering is whether you are hiding out here like a pathetic coward or sulking in here like a petulant child?”
The jury was out on that one, as Guy wasn’t sure himself quite why he was still sequestered here at ten o’clock at night, but he maintained an air of unruffled aloofness regardless. Instead of replying, he focused on the ledger he hadn’t managed to focus on in the two hours since he had been pretending to focus on it, jotting a random number in one of the columns to make it look as if he had been. “As you can plainly see, I am working.” He said that without lifting his head. “I had to relocate to a temporary study after the world and his wife laid siege to my house and rendered it impossible to concentrate.” Which was sort of the truth and the excuse he had made to his poor footman, who had been sent to surreptitiously retrieve everything that he’d left on his desk there while everyone else was having dinner. In truth, he couldn’t imagine the forty-odd people currently encamped in the house were quiet, but he hadn’t ventured back there to check since he had stormed out of it at the crack of dawn this morning.
God, how he hated birthdays!
This one would certainly go down in history as one of the worst. What the blazes had his mother been thinking to invite fifteen blasted debutantes and their matchmaking mamas for a week? Did she seriously think he would just roll over and pick one? That he was either that shallow or that desperate in his dotage that just any woman would do? When most of those twittering, fawning, fluff-for-brains, spoiled daughters of the ton weren’t his sort of woman at all! What precisely would he spend eternity talking about with a woman who only knew about ballrooms and Mayfair? The two biggest things he detested!
And as for the sort who was his type… he couldn’t bear to think about Lottie’s betrayal without wanting to punch the wall. Or wanting to flagellate himself with brambles for how close he had come to throwing all caution to the wind and leaping into the murky waters of romance with both feet again with a virtual stranger. So much for once bitten and twice shy! Or of lightning not striking in the same place twice. Thanks to Lottie, he had endured the second most awful public humiliation of his life! Clearly hadn’t learned his lesson well enough the last time he’d donned the rose-tinted spectacles of besottedness and been made a fool of!
Last night, like the absolute blithering rose-tinted, spectacle-wearing idiot he obviously still was, he had foolishly thought he had known enough about her to take the plunge. Then she’d gone and stabbed him in the back.Et tu, bloody Brutus!
Thank goodness their kiss had been interrupted before he’d lost his head completely and bared his heart to the duplicitous witch. He owed Longbottom a debt of gratitude for saving him from that catastrophic mistake in the nick of time.
Except he didn’t feel particularly grateful yet. Instead, after an entire day of licking his wounds, he felt stupid and foolish. Disappointed and hurt.
