Relief came, hot and overpowering. She whirled to face the man she’d loved. The man who had betrayed her. “Where is it?”
Teeth flashed, blinding white. “It is in a safe space,” he replied, his voice booming, placing them both on show as he turned back to the room. “Look at her, London! Witness her passion! Her emotion! Her beauty! And return here, in one month’s time, on the final day of the exhibition, to witness all that into something more beautiful. More passionate. I shall set grown men to weeping with my work. As though they have seen the face of God.”
A collective gasp of delight thundered through the room. They thought it a play. Her a performer.
They did not realize her life was ruined. Her heart crushed beneath his perfectly shined boot.
They did not realize she was cleaved in two before them.
Or perhaps they did.
And perhaps it was the realization that gave them such glee.
Chapter 2
SCOT SUMMONED SOUTH BY WILD WARD
Two weeks & four days later
Berkeley Square
A ward. Worse, an English ward.
One would think Settlesworth would have told him about that bit.
One would think that among the dozens of homes and scores of vehicles and hundreds of staff and thousands of tenants and tens of thousands of livestock, Settlesworth would have thought it valuable to mention the existence of a single young female.
A young female who, despite her utter lack of propriety on paper, would no doubt swoon when she came face-to-face with her Scottish guardian.
Englishwomen were consummate swooners.
In four and thirty years, he’d never met one who didn’t widely, loudly, and ridiculously threaten the behavior.
But Settlesworth hadn’t mentioned the girl, not even in passing, with a “By the way, there’s a ward, and a significantly troublesome one at that.” At least, he hadn’t mentioned it until she’d been so troublesome as to require Alec’s presence in London. And then, it was Your Grace this, and scandal that, and you must come as quickly as possible to repair her reputation in conclusion.
So much for Settlesworth being the best solicitor in history. If Alec had any interest in aiding the peerage, he’d take out an advertisement in the News of London to alert them to the man’s complete ineptitude.
A ward seemed the kind of thing a man should know about from the start of his guardianship, rather than the moment the damn woman did something supremely stupid and ended up in desperate need of rescue.
If he had any sense, he’d have ignored the summons.
But apparently he lacked sense, all told, and Alec Stuart, proud Scotsman and unwilling twenty-first Duke of Warnick, was here—on the steps of number 45 Berkeley Square, waiting for someone to answer the damn door.
He considered his watch for the third time in as many minutes before he set to knocking once more, letting all his irritation fall against the great slab of mahogany. When he completed the action, he turned his back to the door and surveyed the square, perfectly manicured, gated and just blooming green, designed for the residents of this impeccable part of London and no one else. The place was so damn British, it made his skin crawl.
Curse his sister.
“A ward!” Catherine had crowed when she’d heard. “How exciting! Do you think she is very glamorous and beautiful?”
When he’d told Catherine that, in his experience, beauty was the reason for most scandals, and he wasn’t interested in dealing with this particular one, his sister had insisted he immediately pack his bags, playing him like a fine fiddle, the baggage. “But what if she’s been greatly maligned? What if she’s all alone? What if she requires a friend? Or a champion?” She’d paused, blinking her enormous blue eyes up at him, and added, “What if I were in her place?”
Younger sisters were clearly a punishment for ill deeds in former lives.
And current ones.
He crossed his arms over his chest, the wool of his jacket pulling tight across his shoulders, constricting him just as the architecture did, all ironwork and stone façade. He hated it here.
England will be your ruin.
Next door, a gaggle of women exited number 44 Berkeley Square, making their way down the steps to a waiting carriage. A young lady saw him, her eyes going wide before she recoiled in shock and snapped her gaze away to hiss a whisper at the rest of the group, which instantly turned in unison to gawk at him.
He felt their stares like a blazing heat, made hotter when the oldest of the group—mother or aunt, if he had to guess—said loudly, “Of course she would have such a man waiting for an audience.”
“He looks veritably animalistic.”
Alec went instantly cold as the group tittered its amusement. Ignoring the wash of fury that came over him at the assessment, he returned his attention to the door.
Where in hell were the servants?
“She’s probably renting rooms in there,” one of the girls said.
“And other things as well,” came a snide reply. “She’s outrageous enough for it.”
What on earth kind of scandal had the girl gotten herself into?
Settlesworth’s letter had been perfunctory in the extreme, apologizing for not apprising him of the existence of the ward and laying the girl at Alec’s feet. She is at the heart of a scandal. A quite unsurvivable one, if you do not arrive. Posthaste.
He might hate all things English, but Alec wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t about to leave the girl to the damn wolves. And, if the she-wolves next door were any indication, it was a good thing he was here, as the poor girl was already their meal.
He knew what it was to be at the hands of Englishwomen.
Resisting the urge to tell the women they could pile into their carriage and drive straight to hell, he raised his fist to pound once more.
The door opened in an instant and, after impressively recovering from his shock, Alec glowered down at the woman standing before him, wearing the drabbest grey dress he’d ever seen.
He imagined she was no more than five and twenty, with high cheekbones and porcelain skin and full lips and red hair that somehow gleamed like gold despite the fact that she was inside a dimly lit foyer. It was as though the woman traveled with her own sun.
Drab frock or no, it was not beyond hyperbole to say she was easily the most beautiful woman in Britain.
Of course she was.
Nothing made a bad day worse like a beautiful Englishwoman.
“It’s about bloody time,” he growled.