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A chill skated down Nicolette’s spine, and she clutched Mathias’s hand. Shutting her eyes, she dragged in a calming breath.

She made to pull away, but Mathias held her firm. “Let me handle this,” he murmured.

Giving a tight nod, she glanced over his shoulder.

A yellow-green bruise and a healing cut on his lower lip revealed Kilbourne had been in a fight recently.

“Who knew the Spiteful Spinster, Nicolette Twistleton, was really a little trollop?” Kilbourne sneered, slurring his words.

Nicolette’s stomach coiled, and she couldn’t quite prevent her upper lip from curling.

What a dissolute sot.

Though she’d experienced heartache and disappointment, she also recognized she’d been spared far worse when he’d jilted her. Thank God he had, or she’d never have known unconditional love.

“Have a care, Kilbourne,” Mathias said, an unmistakable steely thread to his words as he stood and drew Nicolette to her feet. “I expressly made my feelings on the matter clear, previously. Besmirch Nicolette again, and we will face each other on a dueling field.”

“No, Mathias. You cannot,” she gasped, clasping his forearm. Tugging on his arm, she said, “Let’s return inside. Please.”

Kilbourne wasn’t worth being injured or dying over.

That’s what she’d told Ansley when he vowed to meet the duke on the field of honor after he’d jilted Nicolette. She’d pleaded with him and told her brother she loved him too much for him to take such a risk.

And now, here was Mathias threatening that very thing. A wave of dizziness swirled through her at the thought of him being taken from her. She could not face life without him. Not when she’d just realized how very precious he was to her.

She’d read about such fanciful notions in her novels and had always attributed that nonsense to the heroines’ overwrought emotions. But this terror frantically tunneling through her was all too real.

Kilbourne’s insults mattered not.

Her reputation mattered not.

All that did matter was Mathias’s safety.

Yes, I recall, Westfall.” Kilbourne touched his mouth with a gloved finger. “You punched me for calling her promiscuous.”

Mathias had?

When?

“But this…” Kilbourne waved a languid hand toward them, wavering unsteadily on his feet. “Proves I was right in my assumptions. After you left White’s, I bet twenty pounds, you’d bedded her already.”

What a loathsome wretch.

He gave them a sloppy grin. “Seems I won that wager.”

Mathias went impossibly still before grating out, his voice dangerously low and lethal, “I warned you, Kilbourne. Now I shall demand satisfaction.”

“No, Mathias,” Nicolette protested, digging her fingertips into his arm. “I don’t care what he says or thinks. He is nobody. Nothing.”

Kilbourne looked slightly taken aback.

Conceited bore.

Did he really think she’d been pining over him for all of these months?

“But, I do,” Mathias said, a hint of something lethal in his silky tone.

“Because I called her a trollop? Or was it, strumpet?” Kilbourn threw his head back and laughed. “Nicolette’s behavior tonight proves that I was right.”