Baldwin arched a brow. “Don’t try to distract me, it isn’t going to work. Helena was just as worried about you as the rest. She stayed behind and will be escorted home by James and Emma. She does not expect me back until morning, so you have plenty of time to stop dancing around it and tell me just what the hell is wrong with you.”
Matthew sagged and leaned heavily against the sideboard. “I have this one glass left. Drink?”
“Certainly, we can share it. Pour, sit and talk.” Baldwin marched across the room and sat down in a chair before the fire. He kept his dark gaze focused on Matthew, who poured the drink, and settled in place across from him, handing over the glass.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said softly.
Baldwin tilted his head. “I know you saw Fenton Winter at the ball tonight. Did he speak to you? Make the same old accusations as he’s been repeating for three years?”
“No,” Matthew whispered. “I did see Winter and it did upset me, as it always does. But it’s not him. It’s…her.”
“Angelica?” Baldwin said.
Matthew tensed.Herhad always been Angelica, from the moment he’d carried her limp body from the lake and his life had been blown to bits. She was theherhe brought with him to every corner of his life.
He’d assumed she always would be. But tonight, now, theherwas very different.
“No,” he ground out. “I’m talking about my swan. My stranger.”
Baldwin’s eyes widened, and he looked around the room at the destruction once more. “A woman you hardly know inspired…this?”
“I saw her tonight,” he admitted, tilting his head back against the chair and closing his eyes. “I know who she is.”
Baldwin caught his breath. “Who?”
Saying it out loud was not going to be easy. It forced him to relive every bloody moment of that night all over again. “She is…Isabel Hayes.”
“Who?” Baldwin asked again. “I don’t know that name, nor why it would inspire all this in you.”
“She’s Angelica’s cousin. Fenton Winter’s niece and his fucking houseguest.”
Baldwin was utterly silent and Matthew waited a moment before he looked at him again. When he did, his friend’s face was pale, his mouth dropped open in shock, his eyes wide as saucers.
“Yes, that was my reaction, as well,” Matthew drawled, and reached out to snatch the glass from Baldwin’s hand. He downed half of it before he handed it back. Baldwin drank the rest, his hands shaking as he did so.
“I-I don’t even know what to say, what to do with that information,” Baldwin said at last. “It cannot be a coincidence, can it?”
Matthew got up and went back to the sideboard. This time he returned with the bottle. He filled the glass and then took a swig from the bottle itself before he set it on the floor next to his chair.
“I dragged her off to a parlor to confront her about just that. And I was…cruel.”
Baldwin drew back. “You? Not that I don’t think she deserved a little cruelty after she deceived you, but I have a hard time imagining it.”
“Just like you have a hard time imagining me destroying my study in a fit of rage and…well, other things?” Matthew asked, flicking his head toward the damage behind him. “Of course I wasn’t physically hurtful. Though I’m sure she must have felt threatened. I was…coarse. I’m never coarse. But I was overwhelmed.”
“I’m sure you were,” Baldwin reassured him. “After all, she knew your identity, did she not?”
Matthew nodded. “Though she insists it wasn’t until after my mask slipped off the first night we…” He shivered. “I would saymade love, but that isn’t exactly accurate, is it? I didn’t make love to a stranger in a mask. I took her. Claimed her. Burned something into her, just as she burned something in to me. And now I know that the person I did that with is my fiancée’s cousin. A woman who lives with a man who would shoot me through my heart if he had a chance.”
“Are they in league?” Baldwin asked.
Matthew drew a long, ragged breath. “That was my guess. He despises me, blames me, though he’s been quieter about it in the last year or so.”
“Doesn’t mean he isn’t still nursing his hate,” Baldwin said.
Matthew sighed. “And what better way to get to me than through Isabel? But she said not.”
“Of course she would,” Baldwin scoffed. “To protect herself.”
