Charlotte Featherstone - Temptation & Twilight

He wanted another drink, and to tell the pompous Black to go to hell, but he sneered instead. “No, in fact, I will not. I don’t have a soul, ergo there is no other half wandering about, waiting for me to get into bed. No arms waiting to hold me when I arrive home.”

“And whose fault is that?” his friend demanded.

“I’m done with this conversation. Why are you here, and not Sussex?”

Folding his arms across his chest, Black watched him through the dim shadows of the carriage’s interior. “Sussex sent a missive around. It was terse and to the point. He stated he couldn’t make it, and requested that I come to be your second.”

With Lucy Ashton. That’s where His Grace was tonight. Trying to get a hand up the beauty’s skirt. Thrown over for a woman and a toss, Iain thought, and grunted in amusement. Although he couldn’t reasonably think such a thing. Sussex wanted the lovely Lucy Ashton with a blind, consuming need. It left a bad taste in Iain’s mouth, knowing the determined duke would one day have her, and he himself would be forced to sit amongst those two couples and watch them, their sickening love cloying the air with an unfashionable and most disagreeable completeness. Especially when he knew he’d still be tupping whores, and longing for Elizabeth in the darkest, loneliest hours of the night.

“As your second,” Black continued, allowing his gaze to rove across Iain’s drunken form, “I must make it clear that you are in no shape whatsoever to meet Lord Larabie on the field of honour.”

“Honour?” he snorted, aware how disgust dripped like venom in his voice. “There is no honour in this match. I slept with his wife in the attempt to find out information about our enemy. There is no honour in bedding another man’s wife.”

“And yet you do it with alarming frequency.”

“I never pursue them,” Iain growled, focusing his gaze outside the window. “They come to me.”

“And that makes it all right?”

He shrugged. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

Leaning back, Black settled himself on the bench, stretching his long legs out before him. “I know why you do it.”

That caught Iain’s attention, as did the conviction he heard. “Like hell,” he growled, but Black only shrugged, then met his gaze through the moonlit shadows.

“You want to punish them. The wives, for pursuing you, for so readily forsaking their vows. And you want to hurt the cuckolded husbands by showing them how poor their choice in wife was. In a way, it’s a sense of honour for you, an absolution, if you will. Those that participate with you in the carnal act, in your opinion, deserve what they get, because they have been so dishonourable as to break their marriage vows in the first place. In your own way, you have a code of honour, and while you would never admit to it, you hold the vows of marriage as something sacred. I am correct, aren’t I?”

“You just said I would never admit it, so why bother to ask?” he grunted.

His friend grinned, making Alynwick want to plant his fist in his face.

“This bargain you have with Larabie’s wife is eating at your soul.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“I don’t doubt it, but I do doubt that you realize what the cost of this endeavour will be.”

“I suppose my mortal soul and all that rot. God, Black, you’ve become an irritating pontificate since your short marriage. Sod off, and pass me my Scotch and the pistol.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“If you don’t hand me that blasted duelling pistol, I’ll put the bullet in you!”

With a sigh of reluctance, Black reached for the wooden case. Iain couldn’t help but notice his friend had not agreed to the other request. The decanter remained out of reach, unless Iain was inclined to spring from the bench and sprawl overtop Black to reach for it. He’d rather be hung naked in the middle of Piccadilly than lower himself before his friend and fellow Brethren Guardian.

Grunting, he accepted the pistol. “It’s not loaded.”

“I know. I have visions of you tripping down the carriage steps, falling to the ground and triggering the blasted thing before we can get you to walk your paces.”

Iain glared at him. “I do believe I would have done better with some scoundrel from the East End as a second.”

“Then you should have procured one. As it’s one minute before the designated meeting time, I will have to do.”

“Bloody hell,” he growled as he stood to leave the coach, “what could make this night worse?”

The carriage door suddenly flew open, to reveal the glinting end of a pistol and a set of dark eyes blazing with hatred. Both were aimed at him.

“Oh, good evening, Larabie,” Iain drawled. “I see your wife is correct. You do have a habit of firing off early.”

Behind him, Black groaned. Alynwick grinned. If he was going to die, then damn it, he was going out with a bang, not as a self-pitying weakling.

“You think you are so amusing, Alynwick,” Larabie snarled, “but I will make you regret what you have done to me. I will take great delight in blowing you away.”

Alynwick flashed a wicked smile. “Now you really do sound like your wife. She said the very same thing to me last night.”

“NOW, THEN, YOU’VE GOT wind in those sails.”

Elizabeth paused on the landing of the curved staircase, her hand on her companion’s arm. Her fingers were trembling, and Lizzie knew it was not from exertion—she was bloody quaking with fury. “And what does that mean, Maggie?” she enquired coolly, which only made her longtime friend laugh.

“Oh, you’ve got his bluster, all right. Your father used to storm around like a ship in a hurricane. You look just like him, I vow.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t meant to be in such a foul mood upon entering the house. She thought she’d rid herself of the insolence and anger that had ruled her on the carriage ride home. Poor Lucy had been forced to sit in the carriage in complete silence while Lizzy brooded and her brother tackled his own thoughts.

And they both had the Marquis of Alynwick to thank for that.

“Come now, let’s go on up and you can tell me all about it. It can’t be that bad.”

Yes, it could. And it would only get worse, because Elizabeth knew she could not confide in Maggie. This was her secret. Her own scandal to bear.

All those years ago she could have confided in her companion, but hadn’t; she’d been too embarrassed at being so easily taken in by the marquis. So she had chosen to hide her shame, and to not think of how foolish she’d been.

In the ensuing years, she had been rather successful at forgetting her stupidity, her gullibility. But that had changed tonight, when Alynwick had cornered her, towered over her and turned her into a melting pot of heated flesh.

So much for the mature, controlled woman she had always believed herself to be!

“Now, then, what’s got you blustering?”

“Nothing,” she murmured as Maggie ushered her into her bedchamber. “I am just not used to Society, that is all.”

“Was it a trial, then?”

“That would be too banal a description. I felt …” Elizabeth struggled for the right word. “An outsider, I guess.”

“It will come,” Maggie said as she pulled the pins from Elizabeth’s heavy hair. “You’ve been gone from it too long, is all.”

“Apparently not long enough,” she found herself muttering, thinking of her run-in with the marquis.

“Perhaps if you shared your worries, that might help soothe them.”

Lizzy laughed despite herself. “Believe me, Maggie, there is nothing anyone could say to make me feel better. I never want to think on the matter again.”

“Well, then, there is no sense brooding over something you don’t wish to share. I can’t help you if you don’t want it. Now step out of that gown if you please, the buttons are already undone.”