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more sacred than I do. She understands nothing.’
    ‘Indeed. Her lack of understanding has become almost legendary. A shame I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting her.’
    Lydia looked down at him and her look said, You may be a duke, but you would be lucky to lie at my feet like a dog . ‘And you won’t have that pleasure,’ she said. ‘Ever.’
    Everything in him seized on it – this anger, this fear that was not his. His mind was suddenly as bright as a pinprick, turning over the many ways he could pry into her anger and make her hurt worse.
    ‘Never ever?’ he murmured.
    He could see she wanted to reply. The devil in him urged her to speak. But they had been friends too long, and she held her tongue. She sat herself in his lap, stroked his face. He kept very still and didn’t throw her away from him. It wasn’t easy for him to be touched, and he suspected Lydia was the same. Two idiots forcing themselves on each other. He caught her hand and kissed her palm.
    He fought, again, for control.
    How weary he had grown of this battle that never abated. He wrapped himself around the image of Miss Sutherland, and realised suddenly what it made him feel.
    Hope. Inside his dumb terror, he felt hope.
    ‘Must we really part, though?’ Lydia asked.
    ‘We must, darling.’
    Her fingers worked on the fabric of his sleeve, and she didn’t meet his curious gaze. ‘We could . . . could we not still be . . . friends, though?’
    ‘Ah, dear girl.’ He couldn’t conceal the pity in his voice and she tensed up in his lap. ‘You and I do not have the kinds of friends who would forgive us that.’
    She took a deep breath, and the fact that she tried again, though he had rebuffed her, bruised him deep and quick. ‘Will you know me in public, Duke? You won’t desert me to the gossips?’
    He finally understood, and it complicated everything. That was need she was trying to hide. Lydia had declared war on her husband by coming here, and Darlington was the only person she still had in the world.
    God help her.

Chapter Four
    It was all over London the next morning. How the Duke of Darlington had seduced Lady Marmotte under her husband’s nose by passing off one of his acolytes – the Chancellor’s son, no less! – as himself. It was the coup de grâce of the social season or the ruination of a parliamentarian, depending on which paper you were reading. Everyone knew, apparently, that Lady Marmotte was the money and the brains behind her husband’s political campaigns.
    One paper was full of claims by partygoers that they hadn’t been fooled for a moment, of course not, they’d just been playing along. Others gave outraged voice to the mockery it made of the peerage. An artist was called upon to discuss the similarity in feature and build between the Duke and the Chancellor’s son, Crispin Scott.
    On one point all the papers agreed: the Duke had been dared to do it by a cleverer mind than his. Everybody knew he was a simple soul.
    Kit put the paper down on the table and just resisted banging her head into it. Repeatedly.
    A simple soul.
    She very carefully didn’t throw anything across the room, and she didn’t scream. To think that last night she had thought his seduction of Lady Marmotte a kind of betrayal. God, what kind of bee-brained git was she? That man – that glorious, awful man – was her sister’s lover.
    ‘Lord Marmotte is going to petition Parliament for a divorce this morning,’ she said to Lydia, pouring herself another cup of coffee – all she could manage at this moment. She would recover soon. ‘A marriage has been ruined that is never going to be made right.’
    ‘Their marriage was in name only, everyone knows that,’ Lydia said, nibbling delicately at her toast and flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. Kit was only recently in the habit of watching her sister closely, and she couldn’t say whether her unconcern was an act or truth. An affair with that man would not be a