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Opening the door, Andrew helped her inside. “You are late,” he said, making a show of consulting his timepiece. “I told you what would happen if you were again. I almost left,” he added after he’d shut the door, and his driver had urged the team on.

It was a lie.

He hadn’t had any intention of leaving.

He would have waited until the morning sun had risen.

Instead of rising to the bait, and lighting into him as she would any other time, she remained uncharacteristically silent. She was never silent. “Where were you?”

Marcia fiddled with her cloak. “I was waylaid.”

In his peculiar relief at seeing her, he’d failed to note the unusual somberness to the usually always smiling lady. Until now.

Bloody hell. “Your parents?” And it was a much-needed reminder that he was playing with fire.

“No,” she said softly, directing her stare at the window. “Charles.”

He stilled.

Charles. As in her former sweetheart.

His lip peeled back. “Charles.” God, how he hated her use of that cur’s name.

“The Marquess of Thornton,” she clarified, taking that vile epithet as a question and not the curse it had been. “My former betrothed,” she said needlessly.

Hearing her use of the other man’s Christian name and knowing there’d been love between them unleashed a visceral feeling inside Andrew. “What the hell did he want?” he snapped, knowing he was being a surly cur but hopeless to control it.

“I believe Lord Stormont suspected it was me with you last evening. Charles asked if I was carrying on with you.”

Thornton had approached her, which meant the fellow still cared for her. That realization left Andrew with a sour taste in his mouth.

“I assured him we weren’t. I assured him that you are honorable and good to me. He promised he would not betray me,” she said on a rush, misunderstanding the reason for his silence.

There wasn’t a thing honorable or good about Andrew. If there was, Andrew wouldn’t be with Marcia even now.

“Is that all he wanted?” he asked carefully, holding his breath.

Marcia laced her fingers together and stared at the joined digits. “He also wanted to explain why he did what he did,” she said, glancing down at her lap.

A visceral, primal rage whipped through him, and not for the first time, Andrew wanted to take Thornton apart. “Well, there is no explaining it and certainly no forgiving it,” he said brusquely.

“But there is, Andrew,” she said with a greater insistence—and with a loyalty Thornton certainly did not deserve and a devotion that left a tight feeling inside Andrew’s chest.

“Absolutely nothing you can say, and certainly nothing Thornton can say, will ever pardon his treatment of you. So do not go about defending him. At least, not to me.”

“No,” she agreed. “But I can understand why he could not marry me.” A trace of sadness glimmered in her eyes.

They arrived at their destination, and he found himself grateful for the sudden end to their discussion about the illustrious Lord Thornton, her former love and sweetheart and a bloody paragon. Only…

“He’s not, you know,” he snapped, yanking her mask out from inside his jacket.

As he helped her don the article, Marcia stared confusedly at him.

“You speak about Thornton like he’s some perfect hero,” he said, tying the velvet laces gently at the back of her head. “Like he’s an honorable, otherworldly fellow, but he’s not. He’s a cad and a cur for what he did to you, and that is the only thing that should ever define him in your eyes, or Society’s eyes, for all time.” He reached for the fabric beside him on the bench and held it up. “Now put this on.”

Marcia cocked her head “What—?”

“It’s a turban.”