His partner halted halfway across the room and turned, a faint frown touching his lips. “Are you concerned?”
“About my bride?” Argyll laughed, his first, honest to goodness, raucous bout of humor since Daria turned his life upside down. Him uneasy about bedding a woman? “Trust me,” he said, between laughter. “I have neither doubts or concerns about bedding my wife.” His amusement faded to a chuckle. “I’ve had plenty of practice.” But never with a virgin. God, she was going to be so tight around him. Argyll dragged a breath in through his nose.
DuMond gave him a weird look.
“What?” he asked testily.
“I was referring to the fact club attendance is soft at this hour.”
Argyll drew taut. Bloody hell.
This time, DuMond roared with hilarity.
“Oh, sod off,” Argyll muttered, turning two middle fingers up.
His friend’s countenance grew serious. “Forgive me.”
That rare apology brought Argyll’s eyebrows creeping up.
DuMond ruined the olive branch with his next breath. “I have been in the same situation as you with my own wife.”
Tension snapping through him, Argyll unfurled to his full height. “Where I am?” he echoed in a silky warning. “Where exactly is it you think I am?”
“You’re navigating around a virtuous young lady,” DuMond said bluntly. “It is new. I needn’t point that out toyou.”
Yes, he’d hated and steered clear of simpering misses like the plague.
But Daria? She wasn’t one of those pitiable sorts. Oh, she was as naïve as the London day was long. She’d sought the title of duchess, but not for the other reasons avaricious debutantes did. Peculiar no longer seemed an apt description for his enigmatic wife.
“Being at sea,” DuMond said, snapping Argyll back. “It is very normal.”
Argyll scoffed. “I am not at sea.” Bloody preposterous for the other fellow to even say so. “Furthermore, our situations”—Argyll stalked across the room, jerking a hand between them as he went—“as you refer to them, are entirely different.”
DuMond rested a shoulder against the wall. “How so?”
“You knew your wife. You sampled her—”
DuMond had a hand clamped around his neck and Argyll against the door before the rest of those words left his mouth.
“Have a care,” he said through an icy smile.
The threat of death slipped through the other man’s false geniality conversationally.
Argyll’s entire body coiled for the fight. DuMond had given him his opening. But deuced, he’d made enough enemies fromformer friends and certainly couldn’t afford to lose another partner.
He nodded tightly.
The minute Dumond released his hold, Argyll scrubbed at his sore neck. “Bloody hell, I only referred to the fact you and the marchioness were well-acquainted in…matters. It’s why you went all romantic.” Poor chap.
“Is that what you believe? That because I’d known my wife intimately, I fell in love with her?”
Unable to make tails of the other man’s tones, he chose carefully. “Well,yes.”
His friend’s lips twitched. “As you are in the habit of falling in love with whatever lady you bed?”
“Of course not,” he scoffed. “It is different.”
“This I have to hear.”
