Drent gaped up at him. Trem knew he and his friends cut quite a figure among the young lords of London. Still, it didn’t make his mood less brutal.
“How can you let him carry on in this way?” he snapped at Drent. “Anyone might hear him.”
“I…am sorry, Trem, really,” the younger man said, his complexion turning pallid with fear. “When I arrived here, he was in this state.”
“It’s Tremberley to you.” He knew his quarrel wasn’t with Drent yet he needed to vent his anger somehow.
“I told him to have a care,” Drent spluttered. “But I can’t help it. He’s mad with love for her.”
“All the more reason why he should not impugn her honor with these falsehoods.”
“They’re not falsehoods. If Edington knew, he’d give his sister a choice between marriage to Hartley or the convent.”
Tremberley sized up Drent. He had known Drent a long while and had never taken him for a liar. Still he couldn’t believe that Henrietta would do something so foolish as to lose her virtue to a bit of aristocratic tinsel like Hartley. Unless she loved him. Which, to hear Hartley tell it, didn’t seem at all the case.
He knew what he had to do.
Trem kicked Hartley on the shin, hard, but he merely grunted in his sleep.
Good, he thought.
It was better this way.
“Grab his other arm, Drent,” he said, hoisting Hartley up on one side. “We’re going to Breminster House. Now.”
Chapter Two
Lady Henrietta Breminster looked at the letter before her and groaned out loud. In the last two-and-a-half weeks, since the night of the Countess of Whitmore’s ball, the Earl of Hartley had sent her exactly twenty missives. They totted up in a line on her desk, every wax crest shining in the candlelight. Each looked more pathetic—and had been less desired—than the last.
Why, oh why, wouldn’t the man leave her alone?
He was going to ruin her.
Or, worse, succeed in marrying her.
She had managed to keep him from approaching her brother. It had taken several skillful responses from her and one quite unpleasant Hyde Park rendezvous to convince Justin not to go to John directly.
If she had known becoming intimate with Justin would have these consequences, she would have never done it. Never. Even now, she couldn’t believe her stupidity.
Henrietta pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. Damn him. She should have heeded the advice of her best friend, Miss Cassandra Seymour, who insisted that Justin had fallen in love with her. She hadn’t believed her. It had seemed so unlikely. And so inconvenient.
And he had betrayed no signs of loving her. At least, not before. Before a week ago, before the Whitmore ball, she and Justin had just been good friends. When anyone had suggested the prospect of a romance between them, they had both laughed.
Of course, Justin had never hid his interest in bedding her. When they had met at parties or ridden in the park, he had been frank in his admiration, but he never paired his overtures with any serious intentions. He had presented anything that might happen between them as light and fun. Pleasure without consequences. A secret between two friends.
And Justin was handsome, of course. She had been curious what passion would feel like and Justin had offered himself for her experimentation. She had enjoyed herself with him, even if that night hadn’t changed her feelings about the man himself. It was only afterwards, when Justin’s demeanor towards her had so completely altered, that she had realized the calamity of her decision.
It was all the more painful because they had been such good friends. At one point in time, she had felt that Justin was the only person who fully understood her, because he was also plagued by rumors of illegitimacy. When his father had died, his uncle had tried to take the title by alleging that his mother had married the late earl when she was already with child and that therefore Justin wasn’t really his father’s son. The accusations had gotten his uncle nowhere—his father had always owned Justin and parliament ruled that a man usually knew better than his brother whether a child was his—but the rumors still gnawed at him, particularly since his mother had died some years before. Justin felt there was no one left from whom he could ask the truth.
And who to better understand these feelings than Henrietta?
Everyone had always said the same about her. The gossips claimed that her father hadn’t been the late Duke of Edington, but the Baron of Eastwick. The baron had been the man her supposed mother had run off with after her father had been very publicly caught tupping his mistress, Mary Forster.
Her brother had well and killed those rumors four years ago, right before her debut.
Which was very helpful, because as they had discovered around the same time, the rumors were true. Just not in the way that everyone expected.
Mary Forster had been a gentlewoman from the neighboring estate. In fact, as it so happened, she was aunt to John’s wife, Henrietta’s sister-in-law, Catherine. And Mary Forster was also, as they had discovered, Henrietta’s natural mother. Twenty two years ago, her father had gotten her with child and then, when John’s mother and her babe had died in childbirth, he had passed Henrietta off as that child. She was a Breminster, just not a legitimate one.
