Argyll sensed it before the westward doors flung wide, and the bulky guard, Jonas, stepped through them.
The bottom dropped out from under his stomach.
Daria.
Jonas’s gaze found Argyll, who leapt from the dais and took off running, shoving his way through the crowd. All around him, revelry continued without interruption. The laughter and boisterous conversation were a muffled macabre choir in his head.
Jonas located Argyll with his gaze.
Why did I let her go? Why…why…?
Argyll grabbed the younger, stronger man by his jacket front and hauled him backwards through the doors and back into the west hall.
Jonas’s Adam’s apple moved. “There’s a problem.”
No bloody shite.
A punishing weight hit Argyll squarely in the solar plexus.
My wife.He couldn’t get the question out; it remained trapped in his mind like a cancer, rotting away at Argyll’s logic.
“Delivered the…problems to your office, Your Grace.”
Through the rubbish of panic, the words registered. His office. Not his wife.
Argyll needed to hear it. He needed the other man to say it.
“My wife?”
“I…wasn’t assigned the duchess, Your Grace.” Jonas’s deep voice betrayed his confusion.
No, that was right.
There were protocols, steps to follow.
Jonas cleared his throat and gave a pointed look at where Argyll still gripped him.
Swallowing a round of curses, he released the man quickly. Panic knocked around his chest.
What is happening to me?
No.
Argyll knew.
It wasn’t what was happening to him, butwho.
Daria was his obsession. She consumed all of him.
When he headed for the private suites, a different kind of terror licked at his heels.
I am going mad.
And the state of his sanity was confirmed moments later when he entered his offices.
Oh, hell.
Argyll stared down a long line of Kearsley ladies.
