“I’m otherwise engaged tomorrow night,” he lied. He had absolutely no plans, but he’d make some. He needed a day, or several—or better yet, a sennight—to build up his control in dealing with her.
“You’ve just risen from your sickbed!” she protested. “You couldn’t possibly have made plans!”
“I am going to make them,” he said, feeling like a complete and utter ass.
A look of such determination settled on her face, he didn’t know whether to admire her or be fearful of how hard she was going to make it for him to keep her at a distance and keep things between them as cool as possible. “The next night, then,” she countered, her tone as equally determined as her visage.
“Perhaps.”
Her back went ramrod straight, but she grunted in response before departing. He watched her walk out of his bedchamber as White passed her on his way in with another tray. White said nothing, but the look he gave Callum told him that White did not like Callum’s decision to stick to his plan. When White opened his mouth as Callum took the tray, Callum shook his head. “Not a word. I do not need your recrimination of my character. Believe me when I say I am my loudest critic; nevertheless, the plan I am putting in place is to protect her.”
“But—”
“No,” Callum said. “I’ll not listen to arguments.” Already, the yearning for her was gnawing at him, and White introducing more doubts in Callum’s head would not help matters.
White grunted but said no more. He gave a backward glance as he left the room, making it clear that he was still unhappy with Callum.
Once alone, Callum started to eat, determined to fill up the space where the need for her was growing, but it was useless. He shoved the tray away as thoughts of the conversation he’d just had with her came to him. Admiration filled his chest, and on its heels came images of the day in his painting studio years ago when he’d introduced her to a woman’s pleasure. He groaned. He needed to take his mind off her. So he made his way from his bed to his corner desk, and there he sat, making plans to gather reinforcements to help him destroy his cousin. As far as he could see, it was their only hope.
Chapter Eleven
“You didn’t!” Frederica and Guinevere exclaimed at the same time, both giving Constantine matching looks of astonishment from their places opposite her on the plush green settee.
“She didn’t what?” Lilias asked, breezing into the room, her lilac skirts rustling. The door to the parlor, where the butler had escorted each of the SLAR members to wait for the duchess, swishing shut.
Constantine opened her mouth to answer her friend, who was settling herself in a high-backed chair beside Constantine, but before Constantine could get her reply out, Frederica spoke for her. “Kilgore was not kidnapped by ruffians he owed money to as his cousin long claimed. Kilgore’s cousin wanted to be marquess but didn’t have the bollocks to kill Kilgore, so he hatched a scheme to have him taken and put in an asylum in Scotland. That’s where poor Kilgore has been for the last year.” Only Frederica could deliver such a tale so matter-of-factly.
“No!” Lilias exclaimed, her blond brows dipping as she frowned.
“Yes!” Frederica answered once again for Constantine, enthusiasm for the tale now making her voice even more boisterous than normal.
Guinevere shot Constantine an apologetic look for her younger sister, to which Constantine subtly shook her head. Frederica, not being emotionally attached to the tale, was summing it up much more succinctly than Constantine likely would have. If she’d been left to explain what had happened again, and all that she had discovered since Callum’s return, it would have taken another hour, as it already had while they waited for Lilias to finish whatever task had kept her abovestairs with her husband.
“Kilgore was kept there in chains!” Frederica pointed to her wrists and ankles. “Constantine has seen his scars. And Kilgore’s boy, Peter—”
“Kilgore has a child?” Lilias exclaimed.
“Oh no,” Frederica answered, shaking her head and waving her hand dismissively at Lilias. “Peter was in the locked room with Kilgore. Well, for a time he was. The lad is only thirteen summers, so when Kilgore escaped his chains and started an insurrection, he naturally brought the lad with him, since it was the lad’s own father that put him there in the first place. Oh!” she rushed on. “Kilgore also brought with him a man with a childlike mind.”
“I always thought Kilgore had a soft spot,” Guinevere chimed in, looking thoughtful.
That expression and statement was exactly why Constantine had called an exclusive emergency meeting of SLAR with only the members present. She’d grown to consider them her closest friends over the past year. Truly, they were the first real female friends she’d ever had. Having spent her young adult life feeling inferior to most women in theton, it had been difficult for her to make friends. But then she’d developed a friendship with Guinevere after Guinevere’s husband, Asher, the Duke of Carrington, and Constantine had bonded over mutual unrequited secret love of Guinevere and Callum, respectively. This was before either of them were married, of course. She truly loved all the ladies in SLAR, but these particular ladies had prior dealings with Callum and had tried, at various times after he’d disappeared and then been pronounced dead, to tell Constantine stories of him, which she had refused to hear in an effort to put him from her heart and affections.
Now she needed to hear those stories to ascertain who her husband really was, though her heart told her he was honorable and caring. A man with no honor or heart would not have brought Peter and White back with him to live in his home. Nor would a dishonorable, cold man treat White with such caring, as Callum had done today, nor had he protested at all when she’d told him about leaving a sum of money to Peter. No, Callum had a heart, and he was caring, but did he care for her anymore? She thought, despite his protestations, that he might, but was she being a fool?
Lilias looked at Constantine. “Perhaps you ought to relay to me what you said to everyone else. I’m feeling a bit confused.”
Constantine nodded and quickly conveyed the rest of what she knew and her conversations with Callum since he’d returned. “So,” she said, thinking carefully upon what she wanted to say, “I asked each of you here today because I need your advice.”
“Excellent!” Frederica exclaimed. “I shall give mine first. Once-a-month copulation hardly seems like enough to me if you love him and he loves you.”
“How on earth would you know?” Guinevere demanded. “You’re not even wed.”
Frederica glared at her sister. “Well, no, but Lilias passed her Gothic romance collection to me after she wed Greybourne, and it has been most enlightening to read the lengths women will go to when struck with love and desire for a man.”
Constantine cleared her throat. “The advice I need,” she said, drawing all eyes back to her, “is if it would be the height of foolishness to risk my heart once more for Callum?”
“Do you love him?” Guinevere asked gently.
