Page 8 of The Wolf of Mayfair
“What, are you not equally interested in meeting with the duke?” he taunted. “That detail does not escape me.”
She pressed her lips together. For she wasn’t. She had absolutely no wish to meet an all-powerful duke whose wife had clearly hidden a dear friendship from him.
Wingrave arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps you’ve heard scintillating tales of how he’s destroyed the reputations and social standings of fellow peers because of even the slightest offense?”
Wingrave’s pastimes included bedding beauties. His sire, on the other hand, enjoyed playing with—and destroying—people’s lives to appease his own moments of boredom.
Helia tried and failed to swallow.
“Or,” Lord Wingrave continued, with apparent glee at her disquiet, “then there are the young debutantes who became spinsters because the duke has blacklisted their families. And do you know why he did that, my dear?”
When she didn’t answer quickly enough, he prodded: “Hmm?”
She managed to shake her head.
Wingrave leaned close and whispered, “He thinks nothing of destroying lives, because it brings him great amusement to do so.”
Helia gasped. She raised her fingers to bury her exhalation of horror—too late.
Cruelty for cruelty’s sake was something she could not understand.
And this is the family to whom you’ve turned,a voice in her head jeered.
Except . . .
“What of your mother?” she asked softly. “What stories do you have of her?”
A muscle rippled along his powerful, square jaw.
“It brings me the utmost pleasure to say neither the duke nor the duchess are in town,” he declared, with the first hint of true mirth she’d spied from him—something she’d believed impossible until now.
It did not escape Helia’s notice he’d not a nasty thing to say about his mother, and she felt hope rekindle in her breast.
That sentiment, however, proved short lived.
Lord Wingrave nodded. Like an obedient pup, his butler trotted over and immediately opened the door.
Wind whipped inside. Snow piled up in a growing mound around the foyer floor.
She looked from the marquess to the threshold, then back to the marquess again.
“Ye would send me out inthis?” Only the knowledge that if she were turned away, there’d be absolutely nowhere to go kept her pleading with him.
“Not only am I sending you out in this, I’m doing so happily.” He glanced down the length of his aquiline nose at Helia. “I’ve already shown you greater generosity than this situation merits.”
Never before had she known a soul could be so dark and empty as Lord Wingrave’s. What made a man this way?
“You’ve said enough mocking things about me being Scottish,” she said, needing to know why he detested her so. “Is that why ye’ll so easily turn me out and let me die on the streets of London?”
“My dear,” he drawled, sounding faintly amused. “I’d have to work up the emotion to care that you are a Scot. I couldn’t care either way whether you were Mary, Queen of Scots, returned from the dead or Bloody Mary herself.”
“Helia Mairi Wallace,” she whispered.
He stared blankly at her.
Maybe if he knew her name, he would see her not as a bothersome thing on his doorstep but a living, breathing woman.
Och, my lass, with yer jolly smile and happy spirit, ah couldn’t have picked a more perfect name for ye.
