Page 45 of Duke in Darkness

“Ha!” She lifted her own glass of champagne and took several sips of the tart, fizzy beverage, just for something to do. Good heavens, her husband was an attractive man. Not handsome as such, he would always be far too dark and uncompromising, and with his scar, entirely too forbidding for that. But she’d come to think of handsome as bland, anyway.

Far more concerning, it had become much harder to picture her late fiancé in her mind. Every time she tried to remember his voice, his proper conversation, or the way he had pressed a cool kiss to her cheek or forehead, thoughts of her husband accosted her instead. Exton in her bedchamber, instructing her to unbind her hair and remove her nightgown. Pleasuring her to orgasm. Comforting her, and patiently answering questions on scandalous topics.

“Would you like another?”

Startled at the question, Lilian looked down at her glass. Empty! How on earth had that happened? Usually she nursed a drink for over an hour; Grandmother said a moment less was vulgar drunkenness. “Er, yes,” she said quickly. They couldn’t very well return from the refreshment table empty handed.

Exton handed her a full glass. “I suppose we must go back.”

“Yes. You are doing splendidly, though. Oh, look. There is Lord and Lady Castlereagh. I think they are looking for us. You could talk to them, and I will divert the rest.”

“Careful,” said Exton, leaning down to whisper directly in her ear. “For that service…I might kiss you. Publicly.”

Heat darted straight to her core, and she almost tilted her head so he might brush his lips against that sensitive spot where her neck met her shoulders. Since discarding her cape at the front door, the skin above her collarbone was bare apart from the necklace. It would be so easy…

No!

Good heavens. Apparently too much champagne made her reckless. She most definitely did not want him kissing her in front of others. The news would get straight back to Grandmother, who would never forgive such a tawdry display. The only permissible public touch was resting her arm on his sleeve, or perhaps him placing a light hand at the small of her back. “Don’t even think about it.”

“Pity,” he replied, and they made their way back across the ballroom to the group they had been speaking with.

“Ah, Exton,” said Lord Castlereagh. “Here you are. Ready to leave the ladies to their gossip and have a brandy with me? With your vast experience and success in fighting the French, I should dearly like to hear your views on what is happening in Paris right now. A general mobilization!”

Pride filled her at the Foreign Secretary’s words. Exton was indeed a hero—

“Are you intoxicated, my lord?” asked the dandy in jonquil breeches from earlier, and Lilian stilled as a frisson of foreboding slithered down her spine.

“Beg pardon, sir?” growled Lord Castlereagh, his cheeks reddening.

Naturally, that well-honed ability of a Londoner to sense impending dramatics had ears pricking like a passel of blasted rabbits, the group surrounding them both moved closer and quieted. And this man, this drawling, lace-encrusted fool, had a nasty gleam in his eye that said he quite reveled in having an audience.

“His Grace, or the former Colonel Jordan-Ives, allowed himself to be captured and tortured by the French. I heard of cuts and chains and flesh burning, like what they do to paupers who owe money in Whitechapel. And he didn’t escape, he had to be rescued. Hardly a mark of experience or success, now is it?”

IT FELT like he’d been sucker-punched from two different directions.

Castlereagh’s blow was entirely unintentional. The viscount couldn’t know that Napoleon ordering a general mobilization, that is, official preparation for war, would never be a topic that Gabriel wished to discuss. Not anymore. But that opium-eating sewer rat claiming that a long-serving British Army colonel had allowed himself to be captured and tortured, as if he had surrendered immediately and trotted meekly into that prison to be cut and burned and beaten? The words wouldn’t even settle in his mind to be weighed and measured. They were too sickening. Too shocking.

Too shameful.

Far worse, they’d been said in front of Lilian, who stood frozen, her eyes wide, her color pale, and her lips pressed tightly together. Clearly, no one around him knew what to say, either. For a large group of people, they were astonishingly quiet. Several of the ladies had begun to discreetly move away from the group as soon as Castlereagh mentioned the word fighting, but had been replaced by twice as many men. A few were muttering under their breath about upstarts in lace. Some were startled, as though an actor had spoken the wrong lines in a play. Others looked like they were trying to stifle amusement. But worst of all…some were nodding.

Bloody goddamned nodding.

Rage surged through him, twisting and clawing together with a burning humiliation and guilt, and he actually started to rock on his heels. As if to remind him of his greatest failure, all his sword and dagger-inflicted scars abruptly tightened and itched unbearably, his foot, the one the French soldiers had crushed between two bits of wood and applied a hot poker to underneath to try and make him talk of the army’s plans, throbbed to the point of agony. His throat had become so dry he couldn’t form words, but his hands were curling into fists. The dandy might not realize it, but he stood seconds away from dismemberment.

After swallowing hard, Gabriel’s tongue finally loosened and he fixed a deadly glare on the man in green and yellow. “You know nothing.”

“Damned right!” burst out Castlereagh, his red face the portrait of a man holding onto his temper by the shortest of threads. “How dare you say such a thing to Exton? The man’s a hero! Commended many times by Wellington. Decorated by His Majesty!”

“Perhaps,” said the dandy, languidly smoothing one of his lacy sleeves. “Doesn’t change what happened at Bayonne, though. Utter disaster. Major-General Hay killed. Another lackluster leader, Lieutenant-General Hope captured, how that man could be elevated to a baron, I’m sure I don’t know. And so many good British men killed or wounded under your collective watch. Over 800, wasn’t it, just in the one sortie?”

Every poisoned arrow found its mark. How could they not, when it was all true? Albeit without critical context like the French General Thouvenot of the Bayonne garrison had attacked in the dead of night, proceeding despite knowing that Napoleon had abdicated. Nor that the French had lost the battle and suffered over 900 dead or wounded. Or Thouvenot’s reckless and spiteful actions had been strongly condemned by both the allied forces and his own superiors.

“The French,” Gabriel bit out, “were defeated.”

“Indeed they were,” said Emily Castlereagh, her gaze frigid as she looked on the guest she obviously regretted inviting. “And the aftermath in Vienna included some of the greatest diplomacy the world has ever seen, Sir Roger.”

Envy flashed through him. Castlereagh was a fortunate man to have a wife who cared enough to publicly leap to his defense and extol his greatest victory. But thanks to Emily, he now had a name for the face he wanted to rearrange.