“Wait a few more minutes.”
I am not sure I can stomach a few more minutes.
“Why did you force your brother and I to marry?” She asked lowly. “With no one being any the wiser, you could have dismissed the situation.”
“No, I could not,” his chest vibrated with his words. “I could not risk the chance of Leander spinning the story about you being in his bed as some conquest and not the accident it truly was.”
Ariadne tensed.It was not an accident.
She worried her lip—should she say something about that? It would only be right…but then, her mother, her sisters, and the homestead situation. Was it right to tell the truth—yes, but was leaving her family out in the cold any better?
Crumpets. Why did you put me in this position, mother?
As she mulled over the impossible situation, she felt something thick and rather forthright poking her in her lower back. Before she could ask what that was, the duke reached around her and pushed the door out. “Go downstairs to your engagement party.Now.”
She stumbled into the bright empty hallway, blinking the darkness away. The door closed behind her, and sucking in a deep breath, while fighting the shivers wracking through her body. She brushed her dress down and headed downstairs.
Sagging back on the wall, Cedric rubbed his face before fixing his trousers. Had the innocent miss felt his reaction to her rounded backside squirming on his lap?
“I doubt the innocent miss knows the difference between an unfortunate erection and an encyclopedia,” he muttered.
Before he stepped into the room, he spotted Ariadne across the room speaking to her family, three other girls who had various resemblances to their mother.
“I suspected I’d find you skulking in the shadows,” Silas Crane, Marquess of Edmonton, teased him. “You already look like a ghoul, Greymont; no need to act like one as well.”
With striking Danish blood, Silas had dusky blond hair, his nose was bold and arrogant, slashing cheekbones, and icy blue eyes. His cravat was elegantly knotted, his wool overcoat lavishly embroidered, but Silas would swear to Judgment Day that he was not a dandy.
That very jacket denied that claim.
As a friend who had gone way back, from Eton to Oxford, Silas had been his best man at his wedding to Helena and was one of the few who had stayed by Cedric’s side after the calamitous fire.
He’d often come over, unannounced, to drag Cedric out into the sun for a day on his grounds, share a meal, and go on a monologue about the shenanigans going on in London.
“I thought you were somewhere in the West Indies,” Cedric replied with a cocked brow, teasing, remembering full well the letter from earlier
Even with his title as a Marquess, Silas was a merchant to the ton, his warehouses stocked with Grecian marble, Chinese silk, Egyptian sandstone, French wine, and Caribbean rum.
“Jamaica, yes, I was,” Silas replied with a grin. “My ships are doing well, but I had to make sure they were armed. Pirates, you know.”
“You dock at Port Royal,” Cedric replied flatly. “Your men are mingling with Pirates.”
Snorting, Silas nodded to the gathering, “Did I miss you last night at the ball?”
“No,” Cedric replied. “You know I do not do balls.”
“And what is the reason for this decadent breakfast?” Silas asked.
Tugging his jacket down, Cedric replied, “You will see in a moment. I am surprised you were here and did not barge your way in to see me.”
“And risk being thrown out at this historical event?” Silas snorted, “No chance. I thought it prudent to wait until morning.”
Stepping into the room, Cedric swiped a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and cleared his throat. With practiced disregard, he ignored the way the women flinched, and the men shifted uncomfortably at the sight of his face.
“Welcome to my home, my lords and ladies. I assume many of you are questioning why I have asked you to stay behind?—”
His eyes met Leander as he stood beside Ariadne, his body as rigid as a block of stone. “—and that is because, I am happy to announce, my brother is about to marry.”
Various versions of gasps ran through the room. “
