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“Gentlemen,” he greeted jovially as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

They stood, their serious eyes following his approach.

Their serious eyes, which contained that all-too-familiar sentiment. Disappointment.

Averting his gaze, Andrew made his way over, taking up a spot on the other side of his desk.

Proving himself the coward he was, he could not meet their stares. He couldn’t face more of that disappointment.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” he said after they’d all been seated.

“Don’t do that, Andrew,” Huntly gently chided.

Huntly, Justina’s husband, who had beggared Andrew some years ago, collecting Andrew’s future inheritance and unentailed properties.

“How could you?” Rutland asked in that gravelly voice of his.

The slightly pained quality of that question the marquess put to him was worse.

Andrew would have preferred him icy cold and threatening and dangerous to this.

He stared beyond his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “It is… complicated.”

With a panther-like stealth, Rutland leaned forward in his seat. “Complicated,” he bit out, and Andrew found greater comfort in that anger. “Complicated. My God, Andrew you took an innocent young lady to a place of sin and ruined her.” A muscle pulsed in the other man’s hard jaw. “The daughter of my friend, at that.”

“The lady asked me to—”

“To ruin her?” Rutland slammed a hand down on the edge of Andrew’s desk in a volatile display at odds with the self-control the marquess was otherwise always in possession of.

Andrew’s ears went hot. “She was determined to… to explore certain ends of London, and I—”

“And you were just so very gallant as to see to the chore yourself?” Rutland interrupted, his lips curling in a frosty smile, and then he gave his head a disgusted shake.

“Be that as it may,” Huntly interjected, and Andrew looked over to his other brother-in-law. “Discussing why or the details of what transpired will not change them, and that is not why we are here.”

“It isn’t?” he could not keep from asking.

Wordlessly, both men shook their heads.

A pit formed low in his belly, sitting there like a great, big stone.

Settling back in the folds of his chair and incapable of words, Andrew nudged his chin forward, urging them to say whatever it was that had brought them here.

“I do not believe you are totally without honor, Andrew,” Rutland said, with more calm and logic restored to his tones.

“Why, thank you,” he said dryly. “I appreciate—”

“I do believe you will offer to do the right thing by the lady.”

Andrew’s smile froze and then slipped.

And there it was.

It was what he’d already realized at the back corners of his mind.

“I have kept tabs on you over the years, Andrew,” Rutland said. “I’m aware that your… pleasures are vast, but that they are reserved for widows and whores and experienced women. Not innocents.”

Yes, in that his brother-in-law was correct. As a rule, Andrew had avoided those off-limits ladies. He’d found the idea of dallying with virgins distasteful and had pledged to keep his pleasures to the wantons.