“How efficient of her.”
“She included a clipping from theGazette.” James accepted the glass the waiter brought and looked at William over the rim. “The duke who was found on the shore with a lady. I have to say, of all the scandals you’ve generated in the course of our friendship, this is the one that has given people the most pleasure. There is something about the image of you horizontal on a beach at dawn that the ton finds deeply, deeply satisfying.”
William said nothing. He turned the whisky glass once on the table, looking at it.
James watched him. The amusement in his expression dimmed slightly. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re never quiet. You’re occasionally strategic, and you sometimes pass for thoughtful, but you arenotquiet.” He set down his glass. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
“I’m getting married on Thursday,” William revealed. “I find I’m not particularly in the mood for the comedy version of this conversation.”
The levity left James’s expression entirely. What replaced it was something older and more genuine—the look of a man who had known William since they were boys with neighboring estates and lied to each other’s fathers about where they’d been, andwho had watched him closely enough over the years to know when the performance had stopped.
“You never wanted to marry.” Not an accusation. Simply a fact, stated plainly.
“I know.”
“You’ve said so. Repeatedly. In this room, in other rooms, in a memorable speech at Ashby’s Christmas party that I believe converted at least two previously optimistic bachelors to your way of thinking.”
“I remember.”
“And yet…?”
“And yet.” William picked up his glass. Set it back down. “The scandal exists because she helped me. If anyone is to blame for what happened to her reputation, it is me. Not the shore, not the women who saw us, not the papers. But me.” He paused. “I will not sit in this club and drink whisky while she pays for that alone.”
James was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Then don’t make jokes about it.”
“The jokes weren’t about her,” James said mildly. “They were about you.”
“They are currently indistinguishable.” William looked at him squarely. “She is going to be my wife by Thursday. Whatever she is, she will be mine to protect by the end of the week, and I would appreciate it if the people in my immediate vicinity treated her accordingly. Starting with you.”
Something moved through James’s expression, something that was partly respect and partly something more complicated that William chose not to examine.
“Of course.” He nodded.
The waiter passed. The fire in the grate flickered. At the table across the room, a man said something that made his companion laugh with too much enthusiasm, and the sound bounced briefly off the panelled walls.
“Do you remember any of it?” James asked quietly. “What happened on the shore?”
William was quiet for a moment.
This was the part he had been turning over for two days, in the gaps between arrangements and solicitors and the logistical machinery of obtaining a special license in under a week. He had gone over it carefully, methodically, the way he went over estateaccounts when something didn’t balance—starting from the last clear point and working forward.
The letter. He remembered the letter, delivered by a footman at the party, the handwriting plain and unadorned on good-quality paper, the words short and deliberate.It concerns your sisters.He remembered folding it. Leaving the party. Walking toward the eastern shore in the dark, the sea audible before it was visible.
After that, it became imprecise.
“I remember the blow,” he murmured. “The impact, and then nothing. I didn’t hear them approach. I didn’t see anything before it happened. It was too fast.” He kept his voice flat, clinical, because that was the only way to talk about it without the anger taking over. “I came to on the shore with the tide coming in and a woman kneeling beside me whom I’d never seen before.”
“And you have no sense of who it was.”
“None.” The word was quiet and absolute and contained. Underneath its quietness was the full weight of what he was not currently saying—that he intended to find out, and that when he did, he intended to be very thorough about the consequences.
James leaned forward slightly, lowering his voice without being asked to. “But you were lured there. The note–”
