Page 66 of An Offer By the Beastly Duke

Something hard, cold, and entirely merciless settled inside Malcolm’s chest.

He had seen men threatened before. He had seen men with loaded pistols pointed at their hearts. He had seen men with ships burning to ash beneath their boots. Those men cursed and bled and laughed because fear had nowhere else to go.

This was worse. Penelope was not afraid for her own life. Charles knew it. He had found the exact place to bury the knife to inflict the most agony.

Malcolm turned slowly back to the smaller man. “You will withdraw whatever petition you mean to file.”

Charles laughed again, wiping a fresh line of blood from his chin. “I shall do no such thing.”

“You will.”

“And why? Because you glower handsomely, Your Grace?”

Malcolm stepped so close their chests nearly touched. Charles had to tilt his head back far enough to strain his neck. “Because if you lay a single finger on that boy, I will make every door in England close to you. Permanently.”

Charles’s throat bobbed. He swallowed hard. Then his eyes darted toward Penelope, and the reminder of her vulnerability brought some of his courage back. “You have no authority over Nicholas.”

“Nor do you, not yet.”

“I am his uncle.”

“You are a parasite coveting a dead man’s title until the rightful heir grows old enough to strip your power from you.”

Charles’s face darkened with rage. “Mind your tongue, Brigrock.”

Malcolm’s fist flexed, his knuckles whitening.

Penelope’s face crumpled. She pressed both hands over her mouth, turned her back to them, and let out a silent, racking sob.

Malcolm felt the sight like a cold steel blade slipping between his ribs.

Charles saw the hit land, too. “Ah,” he whispered, vindicated. “There it is.”

Malcolm looked at him.

Charles wiped his bloody mouth with the back of his hand. “You cannot save her with your fists, Your Grace. In fact, you have just handed me my case on a silver platter. No respectable English court will leave a young earl with a mother who behaves as she does.”

Penelope shook her head, her back still turned. “No.”

“A mother whose lover assaults her family.”

“He is not my lover,” she cried out, the words ragged and torn from her throat.

Charles smiled up from the floor. “Then what the devil is he?”

The room fell into a suffocating silence.

Malcolm looked at Penelope. She stood half-turned away from both of them, one trembling hand pressed against her throat. Her lashes were thick with tears. Her mouth shook violently before she bit down on her lower lip to stop it.

Faint music drifted through the thick oak door from the ballroom beyond. Faint laughter. A shallow, glittering world continuing just yards away while Penelope’s entire life balanced on the edge of Charles’ filthy smile.

Malcolm had not planned it. There was no strategy. There was only the raw, suffocating reality of her terror. Only Nicholas’s bright, innocent face in his garden. Only the absolute certainty that Charles would drag them both into the mud and call it family duty.

Malcolm turned fully toward the blackguard.

“She is my fiancée.”

Penelope froze.