He Struck Her at the Ball, Never Knowing Her Husband the Duke Stood Watching From the Doorway

Chapter 3

He had the door blocked. He had chosen the corner from which the doorway could not be reached without passing through him.

“Lord Rotherby,” Vivienne said, and her voice dropped into the register she kept for weather and vermin — cool, level, perfectly pitched so that it could not be mistaken for conversation. “You gave me a fright. I believed this room to be empty.”

“Empty.” He rolled the word around his mouth. “Empty is exactly what you are, Vivienne. Empty, and standing very still inside another man’s stones.”

“Lady Thornbury.”

“Does he even touch you?” Greave took a step nearer, and the firelight slid across his face like something looking for a way in. “Or does he lock you in a cabinet at Thornbury Hall and go off to whichever actress is fashionable this month? Come now. We were friends once. You may tell me the truth.”

Vivienne lifted her chin a half-inch. Her spine went straight as a rule. “You are drunk, my lord, and you are speaking out of turn to a duchess. Step aside. I am returning to the ballroom.”

She had walked past him a hundred times at a hundred houses in the last year. She had nodded to him at Almack’s — no, at the Arden Rooms — she had nodded to him across the pit at the opera, and she had been careful, always, to be exactly as warm to him as she was to a footman, and she had believed that was enough. That was the sort of arithmetic a woman was taught to trust.

She took one step.

His hand shot out and closed on her upper arm.

The grip was not chivalrous and it was not accidental. His fingers dug in, hard enough that she felt the shape of every one of them through the silk, and it was the sheer strength of it — the sudden physical fact of a man’s full hand bruising her through a gown that cost more than his horses — that made her heart hammer so violently against her ribs she was certain he could feel it through the floor.

“Don’t you turn your back on me,” Greave said. His breath was hot and it was wrecked, the smell of brandy rising off it like fumes off a spirit lamp. “You owe me this conversation. You owe me everything. Do you know what my creditors have been doing to me? Do you know that I am to be carried into the Fleet by Friday, like a common swindler, unless —”

“Unless what?” She yanked her arm. He only tightened. “Lord Rotherby, you are hurting me. Release my arm.”

“Unless you stop pretending you don’t remember.”

The panic was sharp and bright and she forced it down with both hands, because she had learned at nineteen, at a garden party in Richmond, that showing fear to a man like Percival Greave was the same as handing him the knife.

“Your ruin is of your own making,” she said, keeping her voice almost to a whisper — because a scream in this house would be heard, and being heard was its own species of destruction. “You drank your estate. You gamed away your horses. Now release me, or I shall scream, and you will have rather more to explain than a debt.”

He laughed. It was a ragged, broken sound, with no floor under it.

“Scream, then. Scream, and let all of Mayfair come in and find the Duke of Thornbury’s wife alone in a dark room with a ruined man, with the door shut, and no husband in England to vouch for her. We both know you won’t do it, Vivienne.” He leaned closer and his voice went soft and filthy with intimacy. “You’re far too terrified of what your precious Duke would think of you.”

He was right. That was the part that burned.

One year of impeccable behaviour, of smiles that cost her nothing and gave nothing, of being the perfect silent ornament on Adrian Hale’s arm — and it could all be burned down in ninety seconds, not by her conduct, but by the appearance of it. She could feel the whole architecture of her safety leaning, creaking, on this one man’s hand.

“You’re going to help me,” Greave said. “You’re going to help me and then I’ll go.”

“How.”

“Your earrings.”

For one full second, Vivienne genuinely did not understand him. She looked at him as though he had begun speaking in Erse. Then she followed his gaze — to the drops that hung either side of her jaw, each one a matched blue-white flame on its gold hook, each one worth more than most men’s carriages and house and horses together.

“You are mad,” she breathed. “You are suggesting I rob my husband to pay your gambling debts.”

“Those alone would clear half of what I owe Crayle.”

“Let go of me.”

“You owe me,” Greave shouted. The sound bounced off the panelled walls and came back at them both, and she heard it land in the corridor beyond like a stone in water. He jerked her a half-step closer; his face was inches from hers, and up close the ruin of him was complete — the eyes too wide, the jaw unshaven, the whole architecture of a gentleman with the roof fallen in. “You led me on. You played the innocent girl who could not wait to see me at every garden party, and the instant a coronet came along you stepped on my throat to get to the altar. You ruined me, Vivienne. You ruined my life, and then you ruined your own, and you did it all with a smile and a curtsey —”

“Enough.”

The word came out of her and it came out hard, and the sweet cold mask she had spent a year perfecting cracked down the middle and fell away.

She used the free hand, and she used it properly — shoulder behind it, the way her brother had taught her to shove a gate that had swollen in the wet — and drove her palm flat into his chest. He was drunk enough and unprepared enough that the blow worked. His fingers tore loose. She stumbled a half-step free, and she stood there in the firelight with her arm stinging and her breath coming rough, and she gave him the last thing she had.

“You are a pitiful, weak little man, Percy. My father saw it in a week, and I was too blind to see it in a season, and I am not blind now. I did not marry Adrian Hale for his title.” Her voice did not shake. She was prouder of that than of anything she had done in a year. “I married him because he is twice the man you could ever manage to be in a hundred lifetimes. Now get out of my way.”

The words went through him the way a blade goes through silk. She watched them land.

Something in Percival Greave’s face went out. Not the anger — the anger brightened, flaring up behind his eyes like a lamp with the glass knocked off. His chest heaved. His hand, hanging at his side, began very slightly to shake.

He has nothing left, she thought, with a clarity that arrived too late and too cold. He has absolutely nothing left at all but this. And I have just taken the last of it.

“Percy —”

The movement was so fast she never saw the arm come up.