Morgan looked delighted rather than sympathetic. “This is the best news I have heard all week. What a good joke.”
“It is not news, nor a joke. It is a complication. An annoying one at that,” Victor said.
“You are seen escorting a beautiful woman everywhere whilst your grandmother announces the engagement publicly. That is precisely how news begins.”
Victor grimaced slightly.
Beautiful.
That word came far too easily now where Charlotte was concerned. Morgan leaned back lazily in his chair. “So… marry her, be done with it.”
Victor nearly choked on his drink. “Absolutely not.”
Morgan shrugged. “Why not? Nothing about your life has to change. Marry the woman, bear children as intended, and you can still come here with me. Our lives will not change.”
Victor stared at him as though he had lost sense entirely. “Because I have no desire to chain myself eternally to another person.”
“Most people call it matrimony, not chains.” Morgan grinned.
“I call it a mistake,” Victor said.
Morgan laughed again, entirely unoffended. “You protest too much. Tis the most natural thing. You are a duke, and you need heirs. This scandal is as good an excuse as any to marry. If you get on pleasantly enough with the woman, I see no reason not to.”
Victor’s jaw clenched faintly as his gaze drifted toward the crowds moving beneath the lanterns. Normally, places like this soothed him easily. Noise, drink, women, gambling, everything uncomplicated and pleasantly shallow.
Tonight, none of it is working properly.
Because every time he looked at a woman smiling at him from across the gardens, he found himself comparing her to Charlotte.
It was deeply irritating. What troubled him most was not merely the attraction itself. Victor had desired countless women before. Desire was easy. Fleeting. Controlled. Charlotte, however, made him reckless.
At the opera, he had kissed her neck in a crowded box like some youth overcome by lust for the first time. Worse still, he had enjoyed the startled little breath she made afterward far more than he ought to have.
Victor despised losing control.
Morgan watched him carefully now. “You are thinking.”
“A terrible accusation. Another bottle!” he shouted to a passing servant.
“You only brood that intensely over three things. Family, guilt, or women,” Morgan said.
Victor’s expression cooled slightly. “Careful.”
Morgan grinned without fear. “Ah. So it is women.”
Victor drank again instead of answering. Unfortunately, silence only encouraged Morgan further. He had known Morgan for a long time, and he knew him well. A consequence of getting deep into their cups and confessing all manners of inner shadows they grappled with.
“It is the companion then,” Morgan mused aloud. “Miss Brown.”
Victor’s fingers tightened slightly around his glass.
Damn Morgan and his inconvenient perception.
“She is merely troublesome,” Victor said finally.
Morgan looked unconvinced. “You say troublesome. Your eyes say something else entirely.”
Victor ignored him. Or attempted to. The truth sat heavily beneath his ribs tonight in ways he disliked examining tooclosely. Charlotte had somehow breached walls Victor spent years carefully constructing around himself.
