Except that everyone would expect her to.
This could not be happening!
The blood in her veins turned ice cold. She had escaped marriage once. Most likely, she would not be so lucky a second time. Memories of her husband’s hands clawing at her in the darkness roared through her mind. Vicious words rung in her ears.
She could not.
She could not do it again.
The memory of her father demanding she marry Lord Beauchamp taunted her. Guilt pressed in. He was dying! It was her duty as his daughter! Her mother quietly crying in the corner.
She would not consent to such a marriage again. She needed to escape. She needed to think. “Please excuse me.” She burst to her feet.
Both women gaped at her.
But she could make no excuses. Lilly hastened from the room and, without retrieving her pelisse, fetching a chaperone, or even Miss Fussy, she exited the front door with no particular destination in mind.
The weather was spectacular that morning, the cloudless sky the color of lapis. Halfway through the month of May, flowers bloomed all around her. In a haze of anger and adrenaline, she walked aimlessly down Curzon Street and eventually found herself in the park. Not having any idea which paths led where, she disappeared into the greenery.
A very differentscene played out in a masculine household that same morning. An occasional moan interrupted an abundance of quiet. The effects of downing large quantities of scotch the night before had the occupants reeling.
After speaking with Lady Natalie at the ball, Michael had made his excuses to the countess and then left with Danbury. Plans had been put into motion. All he could do at that point was wait.
And so, of course, the logical thing to do was open a twenty-year-old bottle of scotch and get rip-roaring, skunk-devilled drunk. Danbury happily participated.
But now that morning had come, Michael questioned his reasoning of the night before.
Especially with the thick green drink, promising to cure all, sitting before each of them at the table.
“Bloody hell!” Danbury rose from his seat. He’d been perusing the morning broadsheets.
Glaring at the offensive article, he dropped back into his chair and tossed it onto the table in front of Michael.
Michael read through the vicious ramblings and then chucked it onto the table himself.
He’d had enough. “Damn him to hell!” He grabbed his jacket and shoved his arms into the sleeves, not caring whether his shirt wrinkled horribly beneath it or not.
Danbury met his gaze with his own bloodshot eyes. “Where are you going?”
Michael had no patience left. “Damn Hawthorne! He will pay for this!” Unwilling to waste even a moment longer, Michael ignored Hugh’s halfhearted attempt to calm him down and slammed out of the house.
With anger seething inside him, Michael hadn’t the patience to wait for the coachman to bring the vehicle around. Instead, he headed toward Hawthorne’s London town house on foot. The bastard had done it! He’d hurt Lilly.
Hawthorne would pay.
Marching determinedly, adrenaline pushing him, Michael arrived at the earl’s door in less than ten minutes. And when the door opened, he swept past the butler and demanded, “Hawthorne! I will see him now!”
The butler didn’t answer but looked nervously over his shoulder at a closed door.
With murder on his mind, Michael pushed past the elderly retainer and threw open the door. There he discovered Hawthorne lounging on a loveseat with a pipe in one hand and a copy of the newspaper in the other.
The idiot ought to have wiped the smirk from his face. Michael crossed the room, grabbed the man’s pristine cravat, and pulled the whey-faced miscreant off his chair.
Hawthorne laughed nervously, attempting to gain some control of the situation. “Ah, perhaps my initial assumption was correct after all. It was you, not the viscount, in the gazebo with her.”
Michael pushed Hawthorne’s rail-thin frame up higher, barely aware that the man’s toes now dangled in the air. Making a choking sound, the earl began experiencing the effects of his cravat tightening about his windpipe.
“Hawthorne, do you know what it means to be a duke?”
