Michael gave a grunt and a nod.

“Surprising, wouldn’t you think? With the season still so young.”

“I don’t pretend to know her mind.”

“No, no, of course you wouldn’t,” Colin said softly. “No man of any intelligence would pretend to know a female mind.”

Michael said nothing.

“Still, it’s only been… what… a fortnight since she came down?”

“Just over,” Michael bit off. Francesca had returned to London the precise day that he had done.

“Right, of course. Yes, you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”

Michael shot Colin a sharp look. What the hell was he getting at?

“Ah, well,” Colin said, lifting one of his shoulders into a careless shrug. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon. Not likely to find a husband up in Scotland, after all, and that is her aim for this spring, is it not?”

Michael nodded tersely, eyeing a table across the room. It was empty. So empty. So joyfully, blessedly empty.

He could picture himself a very happy man at that table.

“Not feeling very conversational this evening, are we?” Colin asked, breaking into his (admittedly tame) fantasies.

“No,” Michael said, not appreciating the vague hint of condescension in the other man’s voice, “we are not.”

Colin chuckled, then took the last sip of his drink. “Just testing you,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

‘To see if I have spontaneously divided into two separate beings?“ Michael bit off.

“No, of course not,” Colin said with a suspiciously easy grin. “I can see that quite clearly. I was merely testing your mood.”

Michael arched a brow in a most forbidding manner. “And you found it…?”

“Rather as usual,” Colin answered, undeterred.

Michael did nothing but scowl at him as the waiter arrived with their drinks.

‘To happiness,“ Colin said, lifting his glass in the air.

I am going to strangle him, Michael decided right then and there. I am going to reach across the table and wrap my hands around his throat until those annoying green eyes pop right out of his head.

“No toast to happiness?” Colin asked.

Michael let out an incoherent grunt and downed his glass in one gulp.

“What are you drinking?” Colin asked conversationally. He leaned over and peered at Michael’s glass. “Must be jolly good stuff.”

Michael fought the urge to clock him over the head with his now empty tumbler.

“Very well,” Colin said with a shrug, “I shall toast to my own happiness, then.” He took a sip, leaned back, then touched his lips to the glass again.

Michael glanced at the clock.

“Isn’t it a good thing I have nowhere to be?” Colin mused.

Michael let his glass drop down onto the table with a loud thunk. “Is there a point to any of this?” he demanded.

For a moment it looked like Colin, who could, by all accounts, talk anyone under the table when he so chose, would remain silent. But then, just when Michael was ready to give up on any guise of politeness and simply get up and leave, he said, “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

Michael held himself very still. “Meaning?”

Colin smiled, with just enough condescension that Michael wanted to punch him. “About Francesca, of course,” he said.

“Didn’t we just confirm that she has left the country?” Michael said carefully.

Colin shrugged. “Scotland’s not so very far away.”

“It’s far enough,” Michael muttered. Certainly far enough to make it abundantly clear that she didn’t want anything to do with him.

“She’ll be all alone,” Colin said on a sigh.

Michael just narrowed his eyes and stared at him. Hard.

“I still think you should-” Colin broke himself off, quite on purpose, Michael was convinced. “Well, you know what I think,” Colin finally finished, taking a sip of his drink.

And Michael just gave up on being polite. “You don’t know a damned thing, Bridgerton.”

Colin raised his brows at the snarl in Michael’s voice. “Funny,” he murmured, “I hear that very thing all day long. Usually from my sisters.”

Michael was familiar with this tactic. Colin’s neat sidestep was exactly the sort of maneuver he himself employed with such facility. And it was for probably this reason that his right hand had formed a fist under the table. Nothing had the power to irritate like the reflection of one’s own behavior in someone else.

But oh God, Colin’s face was so close.

“Another whisky?” Colin asked, effectively ruining Michael’s lovely vision of blackened eyes.

Michael was in the perfect mood to drink himself into oblivion, but not in the company of Colin Bridgerton, so he just let out a terse, “No,” and pushed his chair back.

“You do realize, Kilmartin,” Colin said, his voice so soft it was almost chilling, “that there is no reason you can’t marry her. None at all. Except, of course,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “the reasons you manufacture for yourself.”

Michael felt something tearing in his chest. His heart, probably, but he was growing so used to the feeling it was a wonder he still noticed it.

And Colin, damn his eyes, just wouldn’t shut up.

“If you don’t want to marry her,” Colin said thoughtfully, “then you don’t want to marry her. But-”

“She might say no,” Michael heard himself say. His voice sounded rough, choked, foreign to his ears.