“It’s my uncle.” He rose and moved to stand at Grace’s side like a palace guard protecting his beautiful young queen.
“Your uncle?” she said breathlessly, beginning to stand.
“Courage, love.” The endearment slipped out before he could stop it. He placed one hand on her shoulder, feeling the fragile network of bone and sinew under the satiny skin. “Don’t let him see you’re afraid.”
“I am afraid,” she whispered, subsiding under the downward pressure. Beneath his fingers, her pulse fluttered like a trapped bird.
A brawny lackey opened the door to the salon and his uncle swept in with a retinue of three footmen wearing the dark green Lansdowne livery. He stopped a few feet away from Matthew and the woman poised in rigid silence on the sofa.
“Good evening, Matthew.” He removed his leather gloves and high-crowned hat and handed them to one of the servants who bowed and left.
“Uncle,” Matthew said in an expressionless voice.
Lord John glanced around with the supercilious expression familiar from hundreds of previous visits. He waved his cane at the remaining two footmen. “Build up the fire, close the windows and curtains, then wait outside.”
The servants bustled around the room, turning it into a stuffy greenhouse. When they left, the door’s discreet click echoed loudly in the vibrating, airless silence.
“I am most displeased with you, nephew,” Lord John said when it became apparent nobody was going to ask what he was doing here.
The power games were childish, Matthew knew, but they were all he had. Over the years, he’d become adept at unsettling his uncle. Now he bent his head in an insolent approximation of a bow. “My commiserations, Uncle.”
As expected, his uncle ignored the sarcasm. Instead and with an unmistakable air of ownership, he lowered himself into the vacated armchair and rested his hands on the huge lump of amber set into the top of his cane. There was a prehistoric fly trapped in the gold. The spiteful symbolism had never been lost on Matthew.
His uncle’s narrow mouth set in sour lines. “I was in Scotland on the King’s business when I received disturbing reports that you’d attacked one of your warders.”
“One of my warders attacked this lady,” Matthew returned coldly. Grace’s fading bruises indicated what had happened eloquently enough.
Her chin tilted with cool pride. Her face was as pale and perfect as a marble effigy on a tomb. She hadn’t risen to curtsy. His uncle would register the insult although he gave no sign he even noticed her.
Lord John paused. “Whatever the truth, I find myself concerned about developments. The wench has proven a disappointment. I should have realized that she wouldn’t suit my purposes. I will replace her.”
Aha, battle was engaged, Matthew thought with savage satisfaction. After an unusually brief preliminary skirmish. His uncle liked to toy with his victims, watch them run hither and yon in a futile bid to escape his fiendish nets. The abruptness of this attack indicated Lord John was more rattled than he appeared.
Excellent.
Matthew curled his fingers reassuringly upon Grace’s shoulder. The muscles under his hand were tight. She knew what his uncle meant by the word replace.
“On the contrary, Mrs. Paget is all I could wish her to be,” he said smoothly.
His uncle tried and failed to adopt a friendly man-of-the-world tone. “Come, lad. Believe me, she’s a paltry milk-water chit. You need a woman who knows how to please a man. You have no grounds for comparison when it comes to a fuck.”
Grace gave a tiny start and a shamed wash of pink colored her cheeks. It must pain her intolerably to realize that his uncle knew to the day when she’d started sharing Matthew’s bed.
“Mrs. Paget stays,” he said implacably.
These days John Lansdowne was unused to anyone defying him. Anger flashed in the arctic eyes and the thin hands clenched on the cane. As each year passed, he became more lordly, as though gradually he took on every trapping of the marquessate except the title. That the title remained forever barred to him was a source of infinite regret, Matthew knew.
“You’ll forget her soon enough when a red-blooded jade warms your sheets. Mrs. Paget threw herself on my mercy last time I was here and begged me to remove her. My boy, you must see it’s wrong to force a respectable woman to whore herself.”
“I’m sure the guilt keeps you awake at night,” Matthew said with heavy irony.
“You will never release me, Lord John.” Grace’s words sliced through the atmosphere of building animosity like a crystal knife. “I know too much. You mean to kill me.”
Lord John’s eyebrows, graying copies of Matthew’s, arched disdainfully. “Madam, you overestimate your significance.”
“I believe not, my lord.” Contempt dripped from each word.
“You’re very bold now you’re my nephew’s harlot,” his uncle said equally coldly. “What of the virtuous widow?”