“Perhaps not, but they are discussed,” Lord Steepleton pointed out. “Tell us, Your Grace, did your brother truly get to the goalpost before you?”
“This is not a suitable conversation,” Pollock interjected, his eyes narrowed. “Move on, Steepleton.”
“So, your brother did tup your wife before you,” Lord Steepleton suggested, his dark eyes sparkling with malice and sadism.
Cedric got up and circled his table, “I warn you, Steepleton…”
“Your threats may work on others, but they certainly don’t work on me, Cedric,” he said. “If I had known Lady Ariadne was such a light-skirt, I would have attempted to woo her myself. Perhaps I still can.”
Cedric’s blistering fist connected with an audible crack against the man’s jaw and flung Steepleton five feet into the tables behind him, crushing small tables and sending glasses shattering to the ground. The lords shouted in shock, and a moment after, Steepleton’s cronies flocked around the fallen figure.
Flexing his stinging knuckles, Cedric calmly returned to his seat and his drink. He didn’t flinch when Steepleton got to his feet, and someone pressed a handkerchief to his bleeding nose.
“Bastaaaardd!!” Steepleton spat at Cedric while holding the bloodied cloth to his nose.
“I wanted you,” he replied. “You didn’t listen.”
“Come on, Steepleton,” one of the men glared at Cedric, “You need to see a physician.”
While the three men hustled the wounded lord out of the room, Pollock came to sit across Cedric, his lips tight in disapproval. “You know this will not help your case.”
“I do,” he said. “But I will not abide by anyone disrespecting my wife.”
Pouring out a drink, Pollock said, “I am not going to lie, Holloway, this does look bad. And paired with the rumors that still linger about your first wife, people will have a lot to say. Do you have a plan for fixing this?”
“Aside from finding the bastard who is behind running these scandal snippets and prosecuting the skin off his ass,” Cedric grunted.
“Not much. People are going to say what they want to say. They will still speculate that I had her killed, they will still deny that she had a mile of lovers, and they will disparage me for being too blinded by love to stop it.”
“Did you ever find out who that man she was about to run off with?”
Silently, Cedric shook his head. “And I may never well.”
A grandfather clock chimed ten at night, and Cedric realized he’d had enough; it was time for him to go home. He stood and collected his coat from the back of his chair and donned it. “It’s high time I go home.”
“Godspeed,” Pollock lifted his glass.
Entering his rooms at a touch beyond midnight, he peeled his jacket off, expecting to find Ariadne already asleep. Dropping the coat over the back of a chair, he looked over—and found the bed empty.
A quick look into her room, and he found that it was deserted as well. Frowning, he headed to her drawing room and spotted the bright light coming from under the door.
He knocked and pushed the door open to find her seated at her table, her eyes fixed on the newspaper before her. She cursed under her breath, as he knew what it said. How long had she been here?
“Ariadne—”
“Scandal erupts in Holloway Estate,” she read out tonelessly. “On the day of her wedding to Lord Moreland, she was jilted at the altar.
“Records from the lady’s father’s estate show a step over ruination, a bankrupt viscounty, and a viscount suddenly missing. As we know, the good lady was to marry Lord Moreland, a union that would pull her family out of destitution, vanished the moment the lord slipped away from the church.
“We can only assume that with the precarious situation the lady found herself in, the duke married her out of pity. Whatever the situation, the result is clear: the good lady’s name is now synonymous with ruin.”
Cedric strode over, took the paper, and ripped it in two before balling it and lobbing it into the fire. “To hell with what they say, Ariadne.”
She looked at him, her eyes covered with a sheen of unshed tears; she gazed up at him just as her chest began to heave. Circling the table, he plucked her from the chair and took her over to the loveseat.
A sickening feeling churned in his gut as he saw the bruising on his knuckles. He went to hide them, but before he could do anything, something warm trickled on the side of his neck. Another teardrop followed, landing between his collar and skin.
“Please don’t cry,” Cedric cupped her jaw with one hand, his thumbs wiping clumsily at her tears. “Damnit, I’m so sorry…”
