“Hullo, love, I thought you were never going to join me.”
Malcom followed that booming greeting across the ballroom . . . and found him.
His foe.
Or . . . his cousin. Odd, he’d never thought of the other man in that light. The distant relative whose parents had sought to off Malcom and had succeeded in erasing him from the world.
Malcom had to remind himself the proper pattern to breathe: In and out. Easy. Measured cadence.
“Tristan,” the young lady greeted, hurrying across marble flooring haphazardly covered in paint-covered sheets. Worktables littered the room with sculptures and clumps of stones set out.
What in God’s name . . .
Malcom took it all in.
Either the man was mad or . . . Nay, there was nothing for it. The man was mad. He hurled blue and green paints at a wall already sloppy with color.
“You’re late, love.”
“Tristan!”
This time, that insistence penetrated the baron’s levity. He turned . . . and stopped.
“You’ve company,” his wife said as she reached his side. “Lord Maxwell.”
Missing a jacket as he was, the baron’s lawn shirt did little to conceal the other man’s muscles as they coiled. He, too, was a man braced for battle.
Aye, mayhap there was blood shared between them, after all.
“I want a word, Bolingbroke,” he called from the middle of the room, content with the distance between them and the booming of his voice off the soaring walls. “Alone.”
Except . . . the baroness slid her hand into her husband’s, her meaning clear. And then Malcom noted with some shock the baron weaving his fingers through the young lady’s. “Whatever you can say, you can say in front of my wife,” he said with a calm Malcom no longer felt.
He remained locked on those joined hands.
And had he not been fixed as he was, so closely attending that silent gesture of support, he’d have failed to note the slight rhythmic pulse as the lady squeezed Bolingbroke’s palm. Just as Verity had done not even eight hours earlier.
And for the first time since he’d stepped foot inside Bolingbroke’s residence, Malcom found himself the one knocked off-balance. He struggled to regain his footing. “Are you intending to hide behind your wife?” Because there’d be no secrets this day. There’d been secrets enough for two decades.
“I have nothing to hide,” the other man replied, his voice quieter, and yet, it still carried. And contained within was a conviction from a man who believed the words he spoke.
“You threatened my wife.” How easily that descriptor slipped out. How right it felt. Because Verity, she was so much more to him. I want her to be so much more . . . Staggered by that realization as it hit him square in the chest in the presence of his greatest enemy, it took a moment to heed the long beats of silence.
“I beg your pardon,” the baron sputtered.
Releasing his hand, his wife took a step forward. “How dare you? My husband is a man of honor. He would never dare threaten or harm anyone, let alone a woman.”
“And yet, he’s the son of a couple who’d steal a child and everything that child owned.”
The baroness blazed to life with a stunning, if incoherent, defense of her husband.
“Poppy,” the other man said quietly, lightly tugging her arm. He repeated it again more forcefully, and penetrated her outrage.
A look passed between them, an intimate glance belonging to two people who required no words in one another’s presence.
I’ve felt that with Verity . . . I know that with her . . . I want that with her . . .
Lady Bolingbroke shook her head.
Her husband nodded.
She gave another shake.
And after she gave him a prolonged look, her shoulders sagged. Brushing a hand through those curls that hung loose down the lady’s back, the baron leaned down and whispered something. And then placing a kiss against her temple, Bolingbroke stepped away.
“You’re not wrong, Maxwell,” the baron said solemnly as he abandoned the previously staked-out corner of the ballroom. This most unlikeliest of places for a showdown. But then, this paint-splattering, endearment-calling gentleman was also the unlikeliest of opponents. “My family wronged you. My parents . . .” The baron averted his face. But not before Malcom caught the fury, shame, and rage that crumpled the other man’s features. When he looked back, he was a man once more in control. “I will not diminish in any way what was done. My parents committed the greatest of evils upon you. And no apology will suffice. Anything would be inadequate.” He stopped several feet from Malcom.
The two men sized one another up.
Enemies who’d come together at last in a long-overdue battle.
“Still, all I can do is convey how sorry I am. If I could undo it, all of it, I would. Not because I give a damn about the scandal or the loss of funds.” Bolingbroke spoke with an ease that could come only from a place of forthrightness. “But because of what was done to you. I do not profess to be a good man. I’m not.” The baron ignored his wife’s protestations at his back. “I’ve gone to battle and killed men. I lived a meaningless existence upon my return from war . . . when you”—he took a step closer toward Malcom—“you were the one who should have known those luxuries.”
And yet, would Malcom have ever met Verity? Would their paths have ever crossed?
Mayhap that was what fate had intended all along . . . Mayhap fate had known that Malcom North, as Percival Northrop, the Earl of Maxwell, would have never crossed paths with the courageous newspaper reporter who’d captured his heart . . .
“I’ve hurt many. But I’ve never hurt a woman, and never would. And I’d never let myself, for any reason, visit suffering upon you for what you’ve known.”
It is an act . . . It is a show . . .
It had to be.
Because what was the alternative? That the man he’d spent these past months secretly resenting and gleefully knocking down, was, in fact, a man who’d himself been dragged into this mire, much as Malcom himself had?
Just as Verity had said.
Husband and wife exchanged a look.
Aye, because something was expected of Malcom here.
During the medieval times, men would conceal weapons in their hands, and so shaking another person’s hand conveyed that no harm was intended, and that is what I would convey to . . .
That was why she’d handed out that lesson, and in doing so invoked that reminder . . . She’d known Malcom would need that gesture.
As Malcom stretched a hand out and placed his palm in the baron’s, he was not besieged by shame or any sense of weakness, but rather an inherent right.
It was done.
And it was because of her . . . Verity.
Verity Lovelace . . . a woman who’d come to mean more to him than anyone. A woman he wanted in his life . . . forever.
He stiffened. A woman who’d come to harm at the hands of someone . . . someone who’d not been Bolingbroke. Ice tripped along his spine. For if the baron was not responsible for the attack on Verity, that meant there was some unknown foe who sought to hurt her.
At six o’clock in the morning, Verity came awake to find Malcom leaving the townhouse. Even as she’d hurried through her ablutions in a bid to catch him, knowing what he intended, she’d proven too late.