In which Our Hero takes matters—and Our Heroine—into his own hands.
By Friday Gregory was desperate.
Thrice he’d called upon Lucy at Fennsworth House. Thrice he’d been turned away.
He was running out of time.
They were running out of time.
What the hell was going on? Even if Lucy’s uncle had denied her request to stop the wedding—and he could not have been pleased; she was, after all, attempting to jilt a future earl—surely Lucy would have attempted to contact him.
She loved him.
He knew it the way he knew his own voice, his own heart. He knew it the way he knew the earth was round and her eyes were blue and that two plus two would always always be four.
Lucy loved him. She did not lie. She could not lie.
She would not lie. Not about something like this.
Which meant that something was wrong. There could be no other explanation.
He had looked for her in the park, waiting for hours at the bench where she liked to feed pigeons, but she had not appeared. He had watched her door, hoping he might intercept her on her way to carry out errands, but she had not ventured outside.
And then, after the third time he had been refused entry, he saw her. Just a glimpse through the window; she’d let the curtains fall quickly. But it had been enough. He’d not been able to see her face—not well enough to gauge her expression. But there had been something in the way she moved, in the hurried, almost frantic release of the curtains.
Something was wrong.
Was she being held against her will? Had she been drugged? Gregory’s mind raced with the possibilities, each more dire than the last.
And now it was Friday night. Her wedding was in less than twelve hours. And there was not a whisper—not a peep—of gossip. If there were even a hint that the Haselby-Abernathy wedding might not take place as planned, Gregory would have heard about it. If nothing else, Hyacinth would have said something. Hyacinth knew everything, usually before the subjects of the rumors themselves.
Gregory stood in the shadows across the street from Fennsworth House and leaned against the trunk of a tree, staring, just staring. Was that her window? The one through which he’d seen her earlier that day? There was no candlelight peeking through, but the draperies were probably heavy and thick. Or perhaps she’d gone to bed. It was late.
And she had a wedding in the morning.
Good God.
He could not let her marry Lord Haselby. He could not. If there was one thing he knew in his heart, it was that he and Lucinda Abernathy were meant to be husband and wife. Hers was the face he was supposed to gaze upon over eggs and bacon and kippers and cod and toast every morning.
A snort of laughter pressed through his nose, but it was that nervous, desperate kind of laughter, the sound one made when the only alternative was to cry. Lucy had to marry him, if only so that they could eat masses and masses of food together every morning.
He looked at her window.
What he hoped was her window. With his luck he was mooning over the servants’ washroom.
How long he stood there he did not know. For the first time in his memory, he felt powerless, and at least this—watching a bloody window—was something he could control.
He thought about his life. Charmed, for sure. Plenty of money, lovely family, scads of friends. He had his health, he had his sanity, and until the fiasco with Hermione Watson, an unshakable belief in his own sense of judgment. He might not be the most disciplined of men, and perhaps he should have paid more attention to all those things Anthony liked to pester him about, but he knew what was right, and he knew what was wrong, and he’d known—he had absolutely known—that his life would play out on a happy and contented canvas.
He was simply that sort of person.
He wasn’t melancholy. He wasn’t given to fits of temper.
And he’d never had to work very hard.
He looked up at the window, thoughtfully.
He’d grown complacent. So sure of his own happy ending that he hadn’t believed—he still couldn’t quite believe—that he might not get what he wanted.