“Robert!” Matthew said, his face twisting with shock.
Robert chuckled at the reaction, but it was forced. Seeing his friend’s repulsion created a shame in his chest that he normally did not allow himself to feel. Now it burned there and it took all his energy to tamp it down.
“Isn’t it better with me than with those other idiots who are going to chase the woman across ballrooms for the rest of the Season?”
The door behind them suddenly slammed and both men turned to find Matthew’s wife Isabel standing there. Although she was petite and her tummy was slightly rounded from the baby growing inside of her, she looked a formidable foe at present. Her dark eyes flashed with outrage and her mouth was set in a deep frown.
“How could you?” she snapped.
Robert looked at Matthew to intervene, but his friend shook his head slightly and backed away, leaving Robert to the lioness who had suddenly appeared. “Isabel, you look lovely, as always,” he said.
She folded her arms. “Don’t try to distract me. I overheard what you said. Robert, you must know that Katherine is facing a fire. No, not just a fire—an inferno. And you want to fan the flames?”
Robert held up his hands as that kernel of shame Matthew had created began to grow. “You know me, don’t you? I’m not going to hurt the woman.”
Isabel blinked and her disbelief was clear. “How can you say that with a straight face? A woman’s life is difficult enough.”
“You are quite the protector for a lady you do not know,” he said.
“I know enough. I know she is Charlotte’s acquaintance. I know she had to endure slurs and whispers at that ball. I saw her face. I know that when I spoke to her she was interesting and kind. The sort of person the duchesses would like to be friends with. I know she doesn’t deserveyoutaking advantage of her situation. Ofher.”
“No,” Robert said immediately. “I would never do a thing unless she was as interested as I was. I will just be irresistible.”
Isabel stared at him for a beat. Two. Then she shook her head slowly. “Great God, Robert. How can you surrender to your worst nature at every turn? How can you not see how it does you as much a disservice as it does to everyone you damage? You are better than your impulses. I wish you would see that.”
She turned and left the room without another word. Leaving Robert to stare after her. To feel that shame grow even larger.
He forced a smile as he glanced at Matthew. “Emotional in her pregnancy, I see.”
To his surprise, Matthew didn’t return the expression. “She isn’t. She’s emotional at seeing a friend do the wrong thing. I am, too.”
“Would you like to lecture me next?”
Matthew let out his breath in a frustrated rush. “You have seen with your own eyes what a fall from grace can do to a lady. Adelaide? Helena? Even Meg suffered after the situation with Graham and Simon. To pretend as if you don’t understand that is, as my wife says, beneath you.”
Once again Robert felt the distance between them. The chasm that had been created by his impulses, by the strength of his friends’ bonds of marriage. And once again, he realized that someday soon he would lose them all.
“You think so ill of me.”
Matthew reached out and squeezed his arm. “Not so ill. But I would reconsider involving yourself in something so low as a wager of seduction.”
The shame and the pain this entire exchange had brought pushed wide in his chest, and Robert scrambled for anything in the world to make it stop. To make it less. And he found it in anger.
“Says the man who had an affair with his wife at an infamous sex club,” he said softly.
The color drained from Matthew’s face slowly, but he never removed his gaze from Robert’s. “Don’t be the worst of yourself, Roseford. Good day.”
He said nothing else, but strode from the room, leaving Robert alone in the silence of the parlor. Leaving him feeling far worse than he had when he entered it.
Katherine settled into a chair before her fire and took a sip of her tea with a contented sigh that made her aunt smile.
“You are happy here?” Bethany asked.
Katherine looked around her at the cozy room. It was a little parlor, in a tiny townhouse, but unlike in her home with Gainsworth, she had put her own personality into it during the time when the world thought she was mourning. When they were waiting for her to return so they could gawk at the woman whose husband had died in such an unseemly way.
“I am,” she said softly. “I suppose it would be seen as far beneath the palace I inhabited with Gregory during our marriage. But I’m not sorry for the change of circumstances. Thanks to my inheritance, it ismine. No one can take it away. Even if they take everything else.”
Bethany frowned at the passion with which the last was said. “You lived a long time worrying about having things taken.”
