Page 185 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“I watched the two of you.” His voice rose as years of suspicion seemed to spill out with it. “Dinner after dinner. Conversation after conversation. William seeking your advice, sitting together at the club, trusting you more every year while you carried the one secret that could destroy everything I had spent my entire life trying to deserve.”

Edmund gripped the bars. “And still I said nothing.”

“Because I stopped you.”

Rosalind’s stomach turned. “My father did not betray you. He protected you.”

Algernon looked at her with open contempt. “He pitied me.”

“He loved you.”

For an instant, the fury disappeared from his face, and what replaced it made Rosalind’s chest ache. He looked devastated, almost like the little boy she had been imagining only moments before.

Then a bitter laugh escaped him. “No. Augusta loves me. She has never looked at me and seen a pathetic boy who needed saving. She is the only person who has ever chosen me knowing exactly what I am.”

Something in William’s expression changed. “What does Augusta have to do with this?”

Algernon regarded him almost pityingly. “You truly have no idea.”

“Algernon.”

“She warned me you were coming.”

A chill passed through Rosalind.

Augusta.

Her thoughts returned immediately to the conversation that had troubled her ever since Nelly reported what she had learned.

Augusta had been the one to tell Rosalind that her father had supposedly been seen elsewhere in London with another woman. She had presented it as rumor, another possibility worth investigating, yet no one Nelly questioned had heard so much as a whisper of it.

It had never been a rumor at all.

Augusta had wanted Rosalind looking somewhere else.

“When?” William demanded.

“The message reached me shortly before you arrived.” Algernon glanced toward the stairs. “Barely enough time to prepare.”

Rosalind followed his gaze, and every thought of Augusta disappeared beneath a sudden rush of fear.

Isabella was still somewhere upstairs.

“Where is she?” Rosalind demanded.

Algernon frowned. “Who?”

“Isabella. She was outside the house. Where is she?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

Rosalind searched his face, trying to decide whether he was lying, but there was no time to stand here questioning him while Isabella remained somewhere above them.

“Then let my father out.”

“Rosalind,” Edmund said sharply.

She barely heard him. Weeks of fear and uncertainty had brought her to this cellar, and her father was finally within reach, separated from her by nothing more than iron bars and the refusal of the man standing before them.