The hour was nearing two o’clock in the afternoon.
Each tick of the arms on the ormolu mocked her. Like everything else in this newly decorated room, she had chosen the ornate bronze clock with a warrior as its focal point. The pictures on the walls, including one of Moreau’s, filled her with bitter sadness. In the last month, she had made changes upon this home. It had begun, gradually, to feel like a place where she belonged.
As had Sin.
Where was he? And why? Had he decided that, having secured the possibility of an heir, he no longer needed to share her bed? Had he gone to his club? To another lover? To the ethereally beautiful Duchess of Longleigh?
At long last, she detected a flurry of motion in the hall. Footsteps. Voices. A door opening and closing. Callie knew what those sounds meant. Sin was back.
She rose to her feet and made her way through the door adjoining their apartments with all haste. When she saw him, she wished she had not, for the evidence of what he had spent the night doing was all over his handsome, dissolute form.
He was wearing yesterday’s clothes. His hair was disheveled, his eyes bloodshot. His neck tie was missing, and his trousers were rumpled.
“Callie,” he said, scrubbing a hand over his jaw.
She did not have the capacity to exchange greetings. A rush of raw fury made her tremble. “Where were you?”
“At my club,” he said, moving toward her. “And after that, I bedded down at my friend’s house.”
She flinched away from his touch when he reached for her. “Afriend’shouse?”
“Yes.” His jaw hardened as his gaze searched hers. “A friend. Forgive me for not sending word. Yesterday’s news left me surprised. I am afraid I did not handle it well.”
“Were you with a paramour?” she asked, hating herself for the need to ask.
Fearing the answer and what it would mean even more.
“No.” He shook his head. “Christ, no, Callie. I drank too much bloody whisky. My friend Decker took me to his townhome to sleep it off. That is all.”
Fear had already sunk its talons into her heart. So, too, had doubt. Yesterday, he had been the one with doubts. Today, it was her turn.
She wanted to believe him. But part of her said she would be a fool if she did.
“Yesterday, I took tea with my friend, and when I returned, you all but accused me of plotting an affair with Dunlop,” she reminded him.
“Forgive me, Callie.” He raked his long, elegant fingers—those fingers that knew every inch of her skin so well—through his hair. “There is no excuse for my behavior, save that I am hopelessly flawed. I am trying to be better, for you.”
Another swift rush of outrage surged over her.
She gestured toward him, encompassing his disheveled state. “This does not look like trying, Sin. This looks like surrendering.”
“I should have come home to you last night,” he said on a sigh. “Forgive me, please.”
She was not ready to forgive him with such ease. “Why did you go? Why get yourself so thoroughly inebriated that you could not return home until the next afternoon? Imagine how you would feel, had I been gone all night without word.”
“I am an arse.” He reached for her again, capturing her hand and tangling their fingers together. “And I am sorry.”
How easy it would be to fall into his arms, into his bed. But that was what she had been doing for the last month, and look where it had landed her: she had fallen in love with a man she scarcely knew. She was carrying his child in her womb. And on the day she made the discovery, he had run off to drown himself in drink.
Benny’s words of warning returned to her, then, and the doubts she had been entertaining yesterday, all last night, and every minute of his absence, blossomed.
You scarcely even know him.
He is the last sort of man I would ever wish to see married to my beloved sister.
I wonder what else your new husband is keeping from you.
She withdrew her hand from Sin’s grasp. “I am going to pay a call to my brother and sister-in-law at Westmorland House. I do not like the manner in which we left things yesterday.”
