Ice Cold Duke (Frigid Dukes #2)

Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six

“ H enry? What are you doing here?” Lucien spat, his eyes seeming to pop in his head as he took in his little brother, standing sheepishly in front of him, with a flustered-looking--and decidedly rumpled--Miss Georgina Holloway by his side. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Even as his mind knew what it was he was witnessing, his reason refused to believe it.

How could Henry be this foolish? Certainly I am misconstruing this scene!

But there was nothing to misconstrue. And from the gasp of horror his wife made--followed by the tears that filled Miss Holloway’s eyes as she turned scarlet and looked at the ground--he knew he wasn’t the only one who had reached such an incendiary conclusion.

“This cannot be,” he heard himself say aloud. “Henry, tell me I am not seeing what I think I am.”

“I-I can explain!” Henry stammered. “I promise, it isn’t what you think it is!”

“It isn’t that you are alone and unchaperoned with an unmarried young lady in a hedge maze known throughout the ton as being a scandalous location for illicit love affairs?”

Henry opened his mouth as if to argue, then shut it again. After several tense seconds, he stared down at the ground. “Well, I suppose it is that,” he mumbled. “But we weren’t having a love affair! We were just talking.”

“ Do you think that matters ?” Lucien roared, unable to contain his fury any longer. “Do you think the rest of the ton will look the other way if they think you met Miss Holloway here simply to talk? Do you truly believe they will believe that? Do you truly believe I will believe that?”

“It’s the truth!” Henry said, looking up defiantly and meeting Lucien’s gaze. His eyes were blazing, and there was a stubbornness to his look that Lucien recognized all too well. “And I will not have you implying anything otherwise and maligning Miss Holloway’s reputation.”

“You are the one maligning Miss Holloway’s reputation!” Lucien shouted, the hedges mercifully muffling the sound and keeping it from carrying to whomever might be listening. “You are the one who has compromised her!”

Miss Holloway looked up at this, her mouth falling open and her eyes widening to the size of saucers. Lucien felt little sympathy for her. She should know better than this! My brother might be the one who is more at fault, but no lady is that innocent!

“Lucien…” Lucien became aware that his wife was tugging on his arm, and he looked down to see her anxious expression shining up at him. “I should escort Georgina back to the party now,” she murmured. “The longer she is gone, the more likely it becomes that she will be missed and questions will be asked. But if people see her coming back through the gardens with me, then that might head off any rumors.”

“Good thinking,” Lucien said, his mind already jumping to every possible scenario where this ended in ruin for them all. “Go at once and find Leah. We are leav--”

Lucien stopped cold. Leah. Where is Leah?

Rounding on his brother, he glared at him with such ferociousness that Henry actually shrank back. “What about Leah?” he murmured in such a deadly whisper that it seemed to freeze the air around them. “Did you leave her alone? Is she now unchaperoned at the O’Farrell’s garden party?”

Henry blinked, and a look of horror and dawning comprehension passed across his face.

Lucien closed his eyes as horror, anger, and even guilt all flooded through him. He left her alone unchaperoned. He abandoned his duty to his family to go off and have a tryst with an unmarried young lady. And it is all my fault. I am the one who has failed my family if this is how my younger brother acts.

When he opened his eyes again, no one was moving. All of them were watching him as if waiting for him to explode. But when Lucien spoke, he was careful to keep his voice calm and neutral. He didn’t want to upset the ladies, least of all his wife.

“Emery, please escort Miss Holloway back to the party and find Leah and make sure she is alright. If anything is amiss, then you are to leave at once. Otherwise, I think it best we stay a little bit longer just so that we do not arouse suspicion. No one, and I mean no one, can discover what has happened here today. You both must act as if everything is natural when you return to the party, that you were merely catching up in the gardens, as old friends often do. Do you understand me?”

He looked hard at Miss Holloway first, as it was her he didn’t trust. But she nodded quickly before looking back down at her feet.

“Yes of course,” Emery murmured, and she released his arm and held hers out to her friend. “Come, Georgina, let’s get you back to the party.”

His wife’s eyes slid to Henry, and for a moment, the two of them looked at each other. Lucien thought he saw disappointment in Emery’s eyes, and shame in Henry’s. It did little to ease the fury that was still simmering inside of him, ready to burst out to the surface.

Miss Holloway took Emery’s arm, and then Emery led her away, back down the path from which they’d come, turning right at the next fork instead of left. Lucien watched them. It was only after they had disappeared from sight that he turned back to his brother.

Henry seemed to cower in front of him, but Lucien didn’t care.

“Do you have any idea what you have done?” he asked in a cold, furious whisper.

“Lucien, I promise, it isn’t as bad as you think. No one saw us!”

Lucien scoffed. “Apart from the fact that you cannot know that, it doesn’t matter. What you have done is beyond stupid, in fact it is the most profoundly and unforgivably stupid thing you have done in your life. You have ruined that young lady, Henry. You have compromised her! And in doing so, you have behaved like the worst rake imaginable.”

Henry’s face flushed--with anger or shame, Lucien wasn’t sure--and his jaw tightened. “I did not compromise Miss Holloway!” he said, a bit more forcefully. “We were only talking. I love her, Lucien, and I just wanted to make sure that she felt the same way.”

“It doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do with her here!” Lucien shouted. “By bringing her to a place such as this, unchaperoned, you compromised her. It doesn’t matter what did or did not take place, it matters what it implies about her and her virtue!”

Henry’s stubborn anger seemed to be disappearing, replaced by panic. “But--”

“You say you love her, but no gentleman who loved a lady would ever put her in this kind of position! It is one of the worst things you could have done to her!”

“What would you know about it?” Henry shot back, the fire in his eyes blazing now. “What would you know about how a gentleman treats a lady he loves? You have never felt a flicker of love or affection for anyone in your entire life! Not even for your family!”

“How dare you--” Lucien began, but Henry cut him off.

“Miss Holloway knows I would never dishonor her. She knows I only wanted to talk to her and ascertain the depth of her feelings.”

“You aren’t listening to me!” Lucien snarled. “Nor are you convincing me that Miss Holloway is a good match for you if she would allow you to get her alone like this without a chaperone!”

“I am listening to you!” Henry shouted back. “You aren’t listening to me! Just because you never had a burst of passion for a lady in your life and needed to be alone with her doesn’t mean that the rest of us are like you! Some of us are willing to risk a little scandal in order to follow our hearts--in order to spend at least a few minutes of privacy with the woman we love! Courtship in the ton is impossible, Lucien! Everything has to take place surrounded by other people. Even your most intimate conversations are overheard by a chaperone! It makes it impossible to share your true feelings, or get to know someone on a deep level, to know if they are really the right person for you. That’s why I wanted to come here with Georgina today: just to make sure that we really knew each other and what we want before we commit to spending a lifetime together! If you don’t understand that, it’s just because you are every bit the heartless, feeling-less wretch the ton knows you as!”

His brother’s eyes narrowed, and a look dangerously close to hate filled them. “Not all of us can marry a girl we hardly know and act as if it makes us noble! Not all of us are obsessed with performing our duty above following our hearts!”

Lucien felt as if he had been slapped across the face. He was reeling. His brother had never spoken to him like this, and to hear these words now brought up more feelings than Lucien could handle. He felt anger, of course, that his little brother would insult him like this. But he also felt other things--more complicated emotions--like guilt and even envy.

But why should I feel guilty because I have never snuck off with an unmarried lady? I have always done the right thing, and that is an admirable quality.

“I won’t be made to feel bad because I have never dishonored a lady and tried to justify it by saying I was ‘following my heart’,” Lucien said at last. “Nor will I tolerate you speaking of my marriage to the duchess as if it was something I did in order to appear noble--I married her for one reason and one reason only: to save our family reputation after you behaved in one of the most reprehensible and irresponsible ways imaginable. A behavior, I might add, that you have repeated here today on an even more egregious scale.”

Henry’s eyes shone with anger, but he said nothing, and Lucien drew himself up to his full and considerable height before continuing.

“What you have done here today is unforgivable. Not only have you dishonored a respectable young lady, but you have risked our family’s reputation again and betrayed your duty by leaving your younger sister alone and unchaperoned during her first Season, risking that someone might have taken advantage of the opportunity to ruin her reputation. She is entirely unprotected now! How can you justify that? Even if you try to justify the fact that you compromised Miss Holloway, there can be no justification for abandoning Leah!”

At last, the anger in Henry’s eyes melted away, and a look of shame and guilt filled his eyes. He dropped his head and looked down at his feet, shuffling slightly.

“I am very sorry I left her alone, Lucien,” Henry muttered. “I know there is no justification for it. When Miss Holloway arrived, I found myself completely distracted, and when I saw that you and Emery had left, I knew it might be my only chance to speak to her alone without you discovering. I’ll admit, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I saw Leah speaking to all those young ladies and thought she would be okay on her own for several minutes. I see now that I was wrong and that I should have stayed with her no matter what. I am deeply sorry, Lucien. Please, you don’t have to forgive me, but I want you to know I am very sorry.”

Lucien shook his head. “I’m glad you are apologizing for this, at least, but you’re right: I don't have to forgive you, nor do I think I can. What if Leah had been hurt? What if some other rakish gentleman decided he wanted to talk with her alone? How would you feel if it had been her and another gentleman that you’d come across here in the hedge maze? Would you believe his attempts to tell you he was only trying to follow his heart?”

Henry looked back up at Lucien and swallowed. “No,” he said dully. “I would want to kill him for dishonoring Leah like that. I would tell him that if he truly loved her he would court her the honorable way and call upon her at the house.”

“Exactly.” Lucien sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand where I went wrong with you, Henry. First the debacle with the wedding and now this. Ever since our parents died, I have tried to be a model for you as to how to behave with honor and do one’s duty. But time and time again, you behave in ways that make me believe I failed you. This is my fault, I know.”

“It’s not your fault,” Henry began, but Lucien shook his head.

“I thought I had made it clear to you what love does to a person, how it makes them thoughtless and irrational; how it poisons their minds and makes them betray their families and what is right in order to follow the whims of their hearts. But clearly, I did not do enough. Clearly, you are just as foolish and thoughtless as our parents, and there is nothing I can do to change you.”

Henry’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he looked at Lucien with curiosity for the first time since he’d been discovered.

“What are you doing here in the hedge maze?” he asked suddenly. “Why did you and Emery leave the party?”

“My wife and I are allowed to spend time alone together,” Lucien snapped, even as a hot ball of dread began to form in his stomach.

“Not in a place like this,” Henry said. “Even for a married couple, being alone in the hedge maze is scandalous.”

“I--I do not have to justify myself to you!” Lucien snapped. “You are the one who has made the mistake here, not I.”

“Or you also are capable of behaving in irrational ways when feelings are on the line!” Henry cried. “Which makes you every bit as foolish and selfish as I am!”

Lucien wasn’t going to take this any longer. His brother had insulted him long enough.

“We are leaving now,” he said curtly, turning and motioning for his brother to walk out ahead of him. “This conversation is over. We shall return to the garden party, stay for another quarter of an hour--during which you shall not speak or even look at Miss Holloway--and then we will return to the house. Once there, you will apologize to your sister and reassure her that from now on, you will never abandon her when you have promised to chaperone her and that you will never put her in such a risky position again. Not that it matters, as I will never allow you to chaperone her again.”

Henry grit his teeth and shouldered his way past Lucien and down the pathway.

“Oh, and I hope you got a chance to really get to know Miss Holloway,” Lucien said, “because after what you did today, you will never speak to her again.”