Page 74 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“If you touch her again,” Oliver said, “I will take you apart limb by limb.”

Dacre’s face changed. The charm drained from it like colour from a wound, replaced by the blunt, animal recognition of physical threat. His mouth opened.

Oliver struck him.

The blow landed below Dacre’s left eye, closed-fist, precise, driven by a force Oliver had never used and never intended to use and could not, in the fraction of a second between decision and impact, have stopped. Dacre’s head snapped sideways. His body followed, staggering, his shoulder catching the edge of the narrow table as he went down. The vase slid, toppled, shattered on the floorboards in a bright cascade of porcelain and water and white petals.

Dacre sat on the corridor floor, his hand pressed to his cheek, his eyes wide and glassy. A thread of blood ran from the split skin below his eye and dripped onto his cravat. He stared up at Oliver with utter disbelief.

Footsteps echoed from the passage behind him, and the drawing room door opened. Voices poured into the corridor, sharp with curiosity. A woman gasped. A man said, “Good heavens.” Within seconds, the alcove filled with faces, craning necks, the collective hunger of a hundred guests presented with a scene that would fuel a month of conversation.

Oliver stood over Dacre with his fist still closed, his knuckles split and bleeding, and the rage still moving through him like a tide that had not yet begun to turn.

He became aware of the silence first. Not true silence, but the charged, breathless hush that falls over a crowd when scandal displaces entertainment. Lady Hathaway stood in the doorway, her hand over her mouth. Behind her, the tenor had stopped mid-phrase.

Louisa had not moved. She stood against the wall with her wrist held against her ribs, watching Oliver with an expression he could not read and did not want to.

He uncurled his fist. The knuckles throbbed. Blood welled from the split skin across his second and third fingers, the same hand his father had used, the same closed fist, the same speed, the same absolute certainty in the moment of impact that the blow was righteous.

The corridor tilted and the scene rearranged itself inside his skull, and what he saw was not Dacre on the ground but a different corridor, darker, narrower, a study door standing open and his father filling the frame, and the sound was not porcelain shattering but a chair leg scraping against oak, or a palm striking flesh, or the bitten-off gasp his mother had never allowed to become a cry.

He looked at his hand. The blood was real. The split knuckle was real. The raw, singing pleasure of the strike was real, still reverberating through his arm, and that was the part that emptied his lungs, because his father had felt this too. His father had stood over someone smaller, weaker, frightened, and he had felt this bright, terrible clarity, and he had called it justified.

“Your Grace.” Sebastian’s voice, close, steady. A hand on his elbow, grip firm enough to anchor without restraining. “Come with me.”

Oliver did not move. The crowd murmured. Dacre was being helped to his feet by two gentlemen who did not look at Oliver as they lifted the baronet upright. Louisa still stood at the wall. Eleanor had appeared beside her, one arm around her shoulders, and Eleanor’s eyes found Oliver’s face across the wreckage with an expression that held gratitude and horror in equal proportion.

“Oliver,” Sebastian spoke again, quieter this time. “Now.”

He let Sebastian turn him. He let Sebastian guide him down the corridor, away from the broken vase, away from the whispers, away from Louisa. His legs moved because Sebastian’s hand was at his elbow and the alternative was standing still while a hundred strangers studied the ruins of the only promise he had ever made to himself.

They reached a small parlour at the end of the passage, a cramped room used for cards or private calls, furnished with two chairs and a writing desk. Sebastian closed the door. The noise cut to nothing. A single candle burned on the mantelpiece, its flame steady in the still air.

Oliver looked down at his hand. The blood had run between his fingers and stained his cuff. He pressed his thumb against the torn knuckle. The realisation tore through him. Oliver Sinclair, sixth Duke of Ashford, had lost control for the first time in his adult life and discovered, in the wreckage, that it had felt like relief.

Sebastian said nothing. He stood by the door and waited.

Oliver lowered himself into a chair. He rested his forearms on his knees. He stared at the blood on his hand and tried to find the place where he ended and his father began, and the distance, which he had spent nine years building, which he had mortared with kindness and patience and every act of decency he could lay his hands on, was no longer wide enough to stand in.

“I enjoyed it,” he admitted softly. The words fell into the quiet room. “I hit him, and I enjoyed it.”

Sebastian watched him. The candle burned. Beyond the door, the musicale was over. He had lost control. For the first time in his life, he had completely lost control, and all of London would know by morning.

CHAPTER 22

“He is not receiving callers, miss.”

The butler delivered this verdict from the threshold of Ashford House diplomatically.

“I am not a caller,” Louisa retorted gently. “I am Miss Fairchild.”

“Indeed, miss. His Grace is not receiving callers.”

She stood on the front step with the noise of Grosvenor Square continuing behind her as though the world had not rearranged itself the previous evening.

“Would you tell His Grace that I wish to speak with him about last night?” she asked at last, working hard to keep the blatant desperation out of her voice.

The butler’s expression shifted by a fraction. It was quite evident that the story of a duke striking a baronet in a corridor at Lady Hathaway’s musicale had reached the kitchens of Mayfair before the broken vase had been swept up.