Page 100 of The Wolf of Mayfair
As though he’d not set her body afire, he casually stepped away and stood so they faced one another.
By the granite look he leveled on Helia, she may as well have merely imagined all beneficence in his earlier embrace.
“Let me take a moment and clear your innocent head of any imaginings you cooked up,” he said bluntly. “The duke and duchess hand-selected Lady Alexandra Bradbury to be my bride on account of her impeccable bloodlines.”
Unlike Helia, whose Scottish blood made her someone the duke would never approve of. It shouldn’t smart. Helia was a proud Scot, and yet somehow, knowing she’d not be considered enough for Anthony left her hurting all over.
“No,” he continued, pulling her back from her own pitiful ruminations. “Their efforts would one day spare me from the onerous task of finding a bride of my own.”
He snorted. “I couldn’t care lesswhothe duke selected as long as the lady was passable enough to bed. Not that I’m so very particular that bedding my wife should prove onerous,” he added as more of an afterthought.
Helia flinched. For his absolute indifference served as one more harsh, unwanted, but necessary reminder that all the things he’d done to Helia had not meant anything to him. Any woman would have done.
The muscles in Helia’s belly contracted.
She stood before Anthony, talking with him, but it felt like she was on the outside, watching a performance between two actors she didn’t recognize unfold before her.
Each horrid utterance to fall from Anthony’s lips turned each beautiful act between them into something sordid anddirty.
Helia grappled with her throat. “S-surely you cared that you were compatible and friends?” Her voice emerged as a whisper.
“Friends?” He tossed his head back and howled with a biting amusement. When he’d composed himself, Anthony gave Helia a pitying look. “A friendship with one’s spouse?” he repeated. “Howplebeian.”
With every brutal word Anthony uttered so very casually, Helia’s horror grew and grew.
She could only stare at him.
He was even more damaged than she could have ever imagined. If she had any sense, she’d take this recent discovery and keep a far distance from him.
What was wrong with Helia that the part of her heart he’d somehow claimed begged her to help him learn to love and feel ... anything other than this cold nothingness?
“She came to the marriage without a dowry,” he shared about his former betrothed, like it was dull gossip he recounted to some gent at the clubs.
Unlike Helia, whose father had ensured there would be funds for her, even if his estates had been unprofitable since Napoleon began wreaking havoc all over the Continent.
“But she was beautiful,” he said, equally cool and aloof.
But she was beautiful . . .
Despite Anthony’s detached assessment of the woman, he’d been so very close to marrying her it still managed to hit Helia like a kick to her solar plexus.
Anthony proceeded to rip Helia apart from the inside out.
“The lady was a Diamond.” Just as the papers had described. “Fair. Pale blonde hair.”
Alsounlike Helia. Who, with her very auburn curls and even more abundant freckles, missed only a tartan to mark her as a Scot.
She curled her hands into tight fists.
“The lady ran off with another, a McQuoid.”
A McQuoid. A fellow Scot. Now his early derisiveness about Helia’s origins made sense.
Anguish threatened to crush her heart.
“Even knowing she’d likely spread her legs for him,” he continued, knocking Helia from her miserable musings and adding more kindling to her jealousy, “I was still willing to overlook her loss of a maidenhead. In fact, I assured her she could continue bedding him after we wed.”
Tears burned her eyes. “How very big of you, my lord,” she said, her voice thick.
