“You’re home early,” Edward said as Charlotte came through the front door. She didn’t bother to hand her coat to Simmons, instead she swept right past the butler and up the stairs that her brother and Fiona were descending.
“I don’t want to talk to you.” She dashed the back of her hand across her cheeks, the silk of her gloves absorbing the tears.
“Char, what is it?” Fiona asked, trying to grab Charlotte’s hand as she pushed past them.
Charlotte tugged her hand out of the way. “It’s nothing.” After all, what was she going to tell them? She and John had never announced their engagement. They had been waiting until the perfect moment, until they could tell Edward with no care for what his response would be. If she admitted it to them now, all it would do was confirm her brother’s belief that she and John were incredibly unsuited.
Edward would never use the words “I told you so,” but they would still hang in the air, unsaid. Because Edwardhadknown better. He’d warned her against John years ago. He had known that, when it came down to it, she and John were too different as people, they wanted too different things.
Any illusion she had otherwise was the stupidness of her heart.
“Char.”
Charlotte stilled at the sternness in his tone. This was the voice he used when he would brook no dissent. The duke’s voice that was so rarely directed toward her. “Tell me what the matter is. Is it William? Is it John? Did something happen at the gathering tonight?”
She whirled to face him. Duke or not, her business was not his. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
He cocked his head in confusion, his brows furrowed. “You always want to talk. Even when you’re furious with me. Especially when you’re furious.”
She threw her hands up. “Fine. You were right. John and I are entirely unsuited. Does that make you happy?”
The slump of his shoulders as he sighed suggested that no, he was not happy. “Char…”
She held up a hand. Whatever he was going to say, she didn’t want to hear.
“Just leave me alone. I want to be alone.”
Chapter 28
With a half dozen empty trunks at his feet, John surveyed the chaos in front of him. It might not seem like it to most people, but John’s chaos always had a system. He could put his hands on anything within seconds.
In the day since Walter had returned, the chaos was exactly that. John’s brother had cleared spaces by sweeping John’s work into large, crushed, and tangled mounds.
Perhaps it was fitting. Walter had done the same thing to John’s life—leaving it broken and abandoned.
With Newton sitting by the desk keeping a watchful eye, John began packing, starting with the journals and papers and half ideas that, had they been full ideas, might have saved him. He would ship all of it back to America. Perhaps after six weeks at sea, he might bear looking at it. For now, he just wanted it all out of his sight. It was simply a reminder of how completely he’d failed Charlotte.
“Leaving so soon?” Walter asked as he swaggered into the room. Newton immediately growled, and Walter walked in a wide arc around him. “You don’t have to, you know. You’re welcome to stay for another week.”
Another week. How generous.
“I’ve booked a room at an inn,” John said. “I have no role in this household, or in London, now that you’re back. You are the viscount, remember? I am a nobody.”
Walter took a seat, propping his feet on the table in front of him, and poured himself a glass of whiskey from the decanter Mosely had refilled and left by the chair.
“It’s two in the afternoon,” John said.
Walter raised his glass in salute. “There’s never a wrong time to start.”
Hackles rising, John gritted his teeth. Walter had learned nothing from the disaster he’d created. He was the same spoiled, selfish, irresponsible man he’d always been, a fact that did not bode well for those who relied on him.
“Maybe if you’d put less thought into what can deliver you a moment’s pleasure and more thought into what the Lord Harrow should attend to, you would never have gotten into such a hole.”
Walter frowned. “Do not think to reprimand me. You are merely a second son, and a poor excuse for one at that. Society barely knows who you are, or wants to, for that matter. It has no interest in you.”
“Just as I have no interest in it,” John replied, but the words were a lie. There were pockets of thetonthat he’d become, dare he say it, fond of. Walter was right, of course. The moment word got out about his miraculous survival, John would be dropped like a hot brick. The only reason people had given him any consideration over the past weeks was because he was the new viscount.
“Well, I’m glad we’re all agreed that my return is best for everyone.”
