She had a choice. And here she was, on the floor.

Her nose burned. A hot tear leaked down her cheek. She swiped at it. How humiliating, to have secrets she hadn’t known she kept laid bare to her, by Cecily no less—we are engaged to be married. The agony had been unexpected, like the cut of a razor blade hidden in treacle.

She had been so confident in her decision to never share her life with a man. So safe in her conviction that tender feelings and domesticity were for other people. The certainty had made it simple, had taken the sacrifice out of her work, which demanded that she remain alone, alone.

Her sobs came uncontrollably like hiccups, sounding silly in the silence, but she could not stop them. She had been deluding herself. There had simply never been someone to tempt her enough. Until now. And right away, she must have given whole chunks of her heart into Tristan’s careless hands, because now the inside of her chest ached, felt torn up and bloody. She must have held a hope deep down that despite what the world told her every day, she was just as deserving to be handled with care as the next woman.

A dark smudge advanced on her, and then Boudicca crept onto her lap, comfortingly heavy and soft, and making low yowls of distress.

Lucie hugged the small furry body closer. “Don’t worry. I shall get up in a moment. I always do, you know that. I’m just feeling very sorry for myself right now.”

A black paw landed on her chest, right where it was hurting.

* * *

Tristan saw and heard nothing on his way to his lodgings, consumed by the emotional carnage raging back in Norham Garden. Raging in his own chest. His disgust with himself was a physical thing, it strained his nerves and every fibre of his muscles. Tender feelings and his deviant ways evidently made terrible bedfellows. But he had had a long life of deviance and only a month of loving a woman and thus he had made a mistake. Old habits. He would rectify it, and woo Lucie back, because damned if it didn’t feel as though he had lost her today.

He pounded his door in Logic Lane with his fist.

A moment later, footfalls sounded. His eyes narrowed. Those were not the light steps of Avi.

His body was humming with tension when a moment later, the door opened.

His mind blanked.

He was face-to-face with the Earl of Wycliffe.

Chapter 33

The earl, of average height and build, had to tip back his head to meet Tristan’s gaze, and his gray eyes briefly squinted with irritation.

He was not nearly as irritated as Tristan. This was the man who had banished his own daughter, and he was standing in his corridor, unannounced and uninvited.

“Good morning, Wycliffe,” he drawled. “What an unexpected honor.”

Chiefly, it was unexpected. Whyever this man was here, his unannounced presence did not bode well.

“Why don’t we take this inside, shall we,” Wycliffe suggested.

There was a crowd in his reception room: Avi was skulking in front of the cold fireplace, looking tight-lipped and affronted, and, at a markedly safe distance away from him, stood a bespectacled man with the grave air of a solicitor and Wycliffe’s valet of twenty years. The valet was holding his crimson velvet topcoat. He must have left it at the fair last night.

“I beg your pardon, milord,” Avi said, putting up his chin. “His lordship insisted.” His eyes flickered balefully toward the earl.

“You did well.” He sounded calm. He felt calm, too, alarmingly so.

He turned to the earl. “Pray, do tell how I may help you?”

Wycliffe tipped his cane at his own valet. “Is this your coat?”

“Given that my monogram and coat of arms are prominently displayed on the inner lining, I assume this is a rhetorical question. The question is, why do you ask?”

Wycliffe’s face set in hard lines. “My ward, the Lady Cecily, returned to her hotel room wearing it,” he said. “At close to midnight last night, after a search party had come up empty-handed.”

The world turned cold as the meaning of the words sank in.

It was not yet nine o’clock. Whatever tale Cecily had told, it must have been cabled to Wycliffe Hall posthaste and spurred the earl to take the next train to Oxford.

“What exactly are you implying?” he said, his voice very soft.

Wycliffe raised a disbelieving brow at him. “That we have a situation.”

“Actually, you and Lady Cecily have a situation.”

“Of which you appear to be the cause.”

“Is that what the lady claims?”

Wycliffe’s expression was bemused. “She claims nothing, as one would expect in such a situation. What is clear is that you were seen together at a fair, just as you were seen leaving the fair together and so abruptly at that, it was impossible for Lady Wycliffe to follow her charge. What is also clear is that my niece was seen leaving the punt house at Lady Margaret Hall hours later, distraught, and wearing your coat, after a search party had been sent out for her.”

The inside of his chest was ice. Circumstantial evidence would look crystal clear to the gossips. Who, at the end of the day, were the true judge and jury on such matters.

“My coat may have been in the boathouse with her ladyship, but I certainly was not,” he said, to Avi rather than to Wycliffe, for his valet was regarding him with wide-eyed disappointment, and damned if that didn’t sting.

“Then where were you between eight o’clock last night and midnight?” Wycliffe demanded.

In the corner, the man in gray had begun scribbling in his notebook.

And Tristan knew that he could not charm, or fight, or drink this away. It was coming at him with the unerring trajectory of a bullet, and he stood with his back against a wall.

He nodded, as if to himself. “Where I spend my nights is none of your business,” he informed Wycliffe.

The earl’s expression did not change; he had expected this. “Then I must ask you to accompany us to Wycliffe Hall.”

“Of course,” Tristan said pleasantly. “As soon as my lawyer is here. Avi, be so kind and send a cable to Beedle’s St. James residence.”

Wycliffe’s face fell. “To London?”

“Yes.” Tristan sat down in the wing chair and stretched his long legs before him. “It should take him three hours at the most to make his way here. Do you care for any refreshments?”

* * *

The bright, airy luncheon room of the Randolph smelled of summer, courtesy of the flowers spilling from the generous centerpieces on every table. Tiered silver platters were laden with tea sandwiches and lemon curd tarts, and tiny violet jam pots to complement the scoops of clotted cream for the freshly baked scones. It should have been a perfect feast for a woman with a sweet tooth, but Lucie might as well have been spooning sawdust into her mouth. A numbness dulled her senses. Again and again, her mind drifted back to Tristan’s profile, looking so very pale, when he had walked past her kitchen window. It is over, she thought. She would never know his kisses again.

“Dear, if you were of a mind to leave, no one would take offense.”

The soft murmur went through her very bones.

She slowly turned to Lady Salisbury, who occupied the chair to her right and had leaned in close. How did she know? Concern was writ plain on the countess’s face.

She cleared her throat. “Apologies,” she said carefully. “I have been a trifle absentminded.”

Lady Salisbury nodded. “Well, it is a shame,” she said. “Do keep in mind it is not your fault, though some of them may sneer at you. Personally, I have never been fond of placing a whole house in Sippenhaft, collective punishment, for the foolishness of one of its members—it strikes me as a rather socialist thing to do.”

This did not make much sense after all.

She cast a furtive glance around the table, then the room. An undercurrent of tension hummed beneath the dazzling opulence, she now noticed; subtle, but oh, it was there. Gazes slid away when they met hers; heads that had been stuck together for some whispered gossip pulled apart.

She put down the teacup she had been holding up mindlessly for the past minute.

“Considering this is a celebratory luncheon, everyone seems vaguely nervous,” she murmured.

Lady Salisbury shot her a poignant look. “Have you not heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Oh my, so you have not.”

A prickle of alarm spread coldly down her back. “What happened?”

Lady Salisbury looked left, then right, and leaned in closer still. “About your cousin—Lady Cecily,” she whispered. “Apparently, she did not come home after the fair last evening. There was a search party.”

Lucie froze. “Has she been found?”

The countess tutted. “She returned by herself. All in one piece. Well, almost.” Her left brow arched meaningfully. “Apparently, Lord Ballentine had disappeared with her. She was next seen late at dusk, wearing his coat.”

Silence filled her head. The edges of her vision went white. Then the shapes and colors of the surroundings snapped sharply back into focus, and the murmur of voices swelled to a roar.

“Lady Lucinda?”

She stared back into Lady Salisbury’s quizzing blue eyes. “Impossible,” she whispered.

The countess shook her head. “What a shame. Such a lovely girl. Now her engagement will be marred by scandal. Though the silly geese her age will no doubt find it all terribly romantic. . . .”