Oh, good God! Poor Lottie!
And he hadn’t been here to defend her.
“How could you be so callous?” Emotion choked his throat as he struggled to understand it all. His mother was a lot of exasperating things, but cruel wasn’t usually one of them. “How could you be so unfair? And how bloody dare you!”
She bristled at that. “There are impressionable young ladies here!” She pointed a finger back at the drawing room. “From some of the best families in society and one of us had to think about this family’s reputation!”
“And the best way you could think to do that was to publicly humiliate her?”
His aunt prodded him again. “Travers wasn’t publicly humiliated! It was all done on the quiet, so kindly keep your voice down or everyone in there will know! Thankfully, only Miss Maybury and Lady Lynette are aware of your scandalous and inappropriate indiscretion, and they came straight to us with it, which was jolly decent of them. They even promised to take the secret to their graves so long as that temptress was removed from these premises with all haste.”
Instantly, things slotted into place. Because of course only those two, of all the young ladies present, were despicable enough and desperate enough to sink so low.
“Theyinsisted she be removed?”
His mother and aunt nodded in unison.
Jaws set. Noses in the air.
Unrepentant.
“You put the demands of two sycophantic, thwarted, scheming, abhorrent social climbers over Lottie’s feelings?”
“Of course we did,” said his aunt. “Lady Lynette’s father is an earl, after all, and bloodlines matter.”
“We did it for your own good, Guy.” His mother had the gall to stroke his arm as if she loved him. “Once you’ve calmed down, you will realize that and thank us.”
That was when the red mist descended.
The exact moment that nothing else mattered one damn over his perfect, beautiful, wronged soulmate.
Guy barged back into the drawing room and, oblivious to the wide eyes and gasps from his mother’s awful houseguests, marched through the throng to the two worst who had wronged his woman. “How dare you!”
While Miss Maybury acted all innocent, the pompous Lady Lynette shrugged and stuck out her arrogant chin. “I dared because that brazen upstart needed to be put back in her place!”
“Lottie’s place is next to me, damn it!” He pointed to the empty space beside him, sick to his stomach at how humiliated she must be feeling right now. “Whereas yours is as far away from me as is humanly possible!” He was aware that he was shouting. Aware that his arms were waving uncontrollably in the air, but he couldn’t stop. “Pack your bags, the pair of you, and get out of my house!” Then as an addendum, he bellowed, “And if anyone is brazen here, it is you two, who, for the record, are not worthy enough to lick her boots!”
He spun on his heel and stalked back through the crowd and, with a visceral growl, straight past his mother in the hallway.
She grabbed his sleeve as he reached the front door. “Where are you going?”
He snatched it away. “To fetch back the woman that I love! And if you don’t like that, Mother, then you can pack your bloody bags too!”
He then took great pleasure in slamming the door in her face.
ChapterTHIRTY-TWO
Lady Frinton’s carriage had dropped her back at Miss Prentice’s School for Young Ladies just before supper and Lottie had collapsed into the older woman’s arms the second the front door had closed.
After the longest and most painful journey of her life, she had been too devastated and too humiliated to hold back the tears or to make up a more palatable story as to why she had been sent back in disgrace. Absolutely everything had spilled out in Miss P’s little parlor. With Miss P on one side of her and Kitty and Portia on the other, none of them quite knowing what to say to make the awful situation better.
She had been exhausted by the time the tears finally stopped. Wrung out like an old dishcloth and in total despair, so they tucked her into bed with a hot toddy and a batch of fresh handkerchiefs and told her that things would all look better in the morning.
Except they hadn’t and Lottie only felt worse.
For all her inherent sunny outlook, she had maintained realistic expectations of what she actually had with Guy. She had expected the imminent end of their romantic liaison. Had braced herself for the inevitable but natural conclusion to their relationship to come in just one more day after she left with her employer, because he was him and she was her and in the normal course of things, like oil and water, a viscount and a servantnever mixed. He had said as much yesterday when he had awkwardly, almost apologetically, informed her that they urgently needed to talk. Never mind that not once during the many times they had made love had any actual words of love been uttered. But the abrupt, unexpected termination of everything without the closure of a goodbye had hit her like a speeding post coach. Leaving her battered, bruised, and grieving.
“I cannot bear to think what he has been told.” That one thing had haunted her the most all night. That he had been lied to about her sudden exit as a way to turn him against her. “I cannot bear to think that he might have been convinced into believing that I actually always had a plan to seduce him into wedlock and now hates me for using him.” Especially after a woman had used him with such cruel, selfish calculation before.
