Never Surrender to a Scoundrel by Lily Dalton Page B

held my tongue and told you Mr. Kincraig is a gem in the rough and that everything will turn out for the best.”
    Clarissa squeezed her hands and laughed, albeit darkly. “I wouldn’t have believed you. Go on. I know you’d both like to see your husbands after a night spent apart.”
    Sophia moved closer, a frown on her lips. “I don’t think you should be alone right now.”
    Clarissa went to her dressing table and looked at her reflection in the mirror. What a mess she’d made of her eyes, with all the crying last night. What a lovely bride she would make, if indeed they married. If her conscience allowed it.
    “Mr. Kincraig is to arrive before eleven. It is my wedding day and I’d like to bathe and dress if you don’t mind.” She looked over her shoulder at them, doing her best to hold her countenance placid. “Could you send Miss Randolph? And one of you, could you please look in on Grandfather? As I am responsible for the shock that caused his downturn in health, I’d like to know if he is all right.”
    Sophia nodded, her expression no less worried. “Yes, dear, of course.”
    A knock sounded on the door, and Sophia looked out and spoke to whomever stood in the corridor. She nodded, and closed the door.
    Her shoulders rigid, she looked at Clarissa. “It’s Mother, with the physician. I think he is here to confirm the…the…”
    “The pregnancy,” Clarissa said, nodding bravely. “It’s all right. Let them in.”
      
    Dominick sat in the same chair, at the same table, staring at the same bottle he’d stared at since returning to his residence some five hours before. He’d removed the cork a score of times—and thrust it back into its berth just as many—daring once, but only once, to lift the opened bottle to his nose.
    What a mistake that had been.
    Even now, with the bottle securely corked, he smelled whiskey in his nostrils—and his mouth watered.
    He closed his eyes and bit his bottom lip. The scent crept inside his head and encircled his brain and kindled a fire inside his chest, already blazing there over the injustice served up to him last night in Lord Wolverton’s chambers.
    He’d been so careful, meticulously executing each assignment, knowing his superiors watched and judged his every action and reaction. At last, he’d regained everything he’d lost. For a fleeting moment, his world had been returned to right.
    But now he feared his dreams were just as charred and destroyed as the perfectly marvelous foreign assignment orders he’d committed to the flames.
    He hissed into the darkness. His present predicament was all part of God’s curse upon him, brutal and ceaseless. For a brief moment last night, he’d thought his penance paid, but apparently not—
    All those nights he’d pretended to be a sotted drunk, he’d never touched a drop. It had all been a well-executed act, designed to draw Wolverton’s enemy closer, when in truth he remained clear-headed and alert for any sign of danger.
    Of course he’d been tempted, but never enough to surrender, but this thing with Clarissa—
    “Put it down, Blackmer.”
    He blinked, breaking his stare at the bottle, which was tipped against the crystal rummer in his other hand. Exhaling through his nose, he lowered the bottle to the table, but not without regret. His stomach twisted in want, and his mouth went sour, denied.
    He’d been one breath away from the pit, the same one that had consumed him within its shadowy blackness for nearly a year after Tryphena’s death—until he’d dragged himself out from its depths and decided to live.
    “I’ve been waiting for you to come. What took you so long?” he said to the shadow in the doorway, a man who stood tall and lithe and, like him, still dressed in evening clothes from the night before.
    The shadow answered. “As you can imagine, there were others with whom I had to consult.”
    Always the others. Faceless, powerful men who determined his destiny from behind a veil of