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“I know your kind, Wright, but the fact that you would aim so high is incomprehensible to me.”
“I’m not a fortune hunter. I don’t care about her dowry.”
“Of course you’d say that. To think that my son trusted you, and your father, and this is how you repay him?”
The mention of his father chilled his blood. The dowager and her son held all of the cards here. “It was only a waltz.”
“What else has happened? Is she ruined?” Her cheeks were mottled with pink. “If she’s compromised, the duke will have to call you out.”
“She’s not ruined. I give you my word.”
His mind had gone numb. His heart was breaking.
What had he been thinking? Poetry and sunsets. Fairy tales and happy endings.
Weathering storms.
This was a blast of Arctic wind so deadly that it might freeze his bollocks off.
Beatrice’s mother didn’t just disapprove of him, she loathed him, and all his fortune-hunting kind, as she was happy to inform him over and over again.
“She was supposed to marry an earl,” she wailed. “Mayhew left in a fury. Said a man dressed as a highwayman had gravely insulted him. I wonder that he didn’t call you out.”
She definitely wanted to see him at the wrongend of a pistol. Ford was beginning to wonder if she’d pull a firearm on him herself.
“Your Grace, there are things you don’t know about the Earl of Mayhew. He has a cruel and heartless past.”
“Heartless, you say. Do you know what is heartless? Attempting to steal away my only daughter under my very nose. I’ve been so blind. I knew she was acting differently, but I thought she’d finally decided to see reason. When all the while she was with you at that bookshop, being seduced. You are the cruel one, Wright.”
“I haven’t coerced her in any way. We didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“We. There is no we, Wright. Lady Beatrice is the daughter of a duke. You are a nobody. And your kind always has a price.”
She stalked to a writing desk. “How much? Will twenty thousand be enough?”
His heart hardened to ice and broke off inside his chest.
Beatrice’s mother was attempting to pay him to leave. “I would never take your money.”
“Don’t be stupid, Wright. You’ll never have her fortune. This is the best you’ll do. Take the money and leave. Never attempt to contact Lady Beatrice again.”
Take the money and leave London. Never contact me again.
His stomach heaved. The exact words his grandfather had said to his mother when she’d taken Ford to London with her when he was eight.
The harsh, remembered shame of it.
He wasn’t going to stay here and listen to any more of this vitriol. “I will never take your money.”
He left the duke’s townhouse without once looking back.
The waltz he and Beatrice had shared this evening had only been a lie they were telling themselves. They could never find a way to be together.
If she left the comfortable bosom of her family, if she lost her mother’s respect and affection, she’d regret it for the rest of her life and she would grow to resent him.
And the duke could ruin Ford’s family so easily. Take away his father’s livelihood, his home.
No matter how much he cared for Beatrice or how he’d begun picturing a life with her, he’d always be the fortune hunter in her mother’s eyes.
