Marrying His Cinderella Countess. Louise Allen

were drunk,’ she observed coolly.

      It was a shock to be spoken to in that way by a woman and, despite his uneasy sense of responsibility, the flat statement stung.

      ‘I was mellow—we all were. And we were in the middle of a game in which I was winning consistently—Lytton should have seen that it was a bad time to interrupt. We began to play with the new pack. Crosse lost heavily to me again, then started to shout that I was cheating, that I must have cards in my cuffs, up my sleeves. That I had turned away to talk to your stepbrother in order to conceal them.’

      That red face, that wet mouth, those furious, incoherent accusations.

      The man had scrabbled at the cards, sending counters flying, wine glasses tipping.

      ‘Cheat! Sharper!’

      Everyone had stopped their own games, people had come across, staring...

      ‘I told him to withdraw his accusations. So did the others. He wouldn’t back down—just kept ranting. It seems he was on the brink of ruin and that this bout of losses had tipped him over the edge. He was so pathetic I didn’t want to have to call him out, so I stripped off my coat, tossed it to him to look at. He still accused me of hiding cards. I took off my waistcoat, my shirt. Then, when he overturned the table shouting that I had aces in my breeches, I took those off as well. Everything, in fact. He’d made me furious. Francis stood behind me, picking things up like a confounded valet. People were laughing...jeering at Crosse.’

      He paused, sorting out the events through the brandy fug in his head, trying to be careful what he told her.

      Everyone had been staring, and then Anterton had laughed and pointed at Blake’s wedding tackle, made some admiring remark about size. ‘Hainford’s hung like a bull!’ he’d shouted. Or had it been a mule?

      He had laughed at Crosse.

      ‘Not like your little winkle-picker, eh, Crosse? The tarts wouldn’t laugh at his tackle like they did at yours last night at the French House—would they, Crosse?’

      ‘Crosse fumbled in his pocket, dropped something, and went down on his knees, groping for it. Then I saw it was a pistol. He was shaking with rage.’

      I thought I was going to die—stark naked in the wreckage of a card game.

      As the club secretary had pushed his way to the front of the crowd Blake could recall wondering vaguely if you could be blackballed for being killed in the club like that.

      Conduct unbecoming...

      ‘Crosse pulled the trigger. The thing was angled upwards, so the bullet scored the track you’ve seen across my ribs and hit Francis, who was still standing behind me.’

      Miss Lytton gave a short gasp, cut off by a hand pressed to her mouth. She was so white that the freckles across her nose and cheeks stood out as if someone had thrown a handful of bran at her.

      ‘He really is dead?’ she managed.

      Very. You don’t live with a hole like that in you.

      ‘It must have been instant. He will have felt a blow to the chest, then nothing.’ He thought that was true—hoped that it was. Certainly by the time he’d knelt down, Lytton’s head supported on his knees, the man had been gone.

      ‘Where is he now?’

      She was still white, her voice steady. It was the unnatural control of shock, he guessed, although she didn’t seem to be the hysterical type in any case. She had dealt with a bleeding man on her doorstep calmly enough. An unusual young lady.

      ‘At the club. There was a doctor there—one of the members. We took him to a bedchamber, did what was necessary.’

      They had stripped off the wreckage of Lytton’s clothes, got him cleaned up and dressed in someone’s spare nightshirt and sent for a woman to lay him out decently before any of his family saw him.

      ‘I have his watch, his pocketbook and so on, all safe.’

      ‘I see.’

      Miss Lytton’s voice was as colourless as her skin, and that seemed to have been pulled back savagely, revealing fine cheekbones but emphasising the long nose and firm chin unbecomingly.

      ‘He must come here, of course. Can you arrange that?’

      He could—and he would. And he would try and do something about that mass of blood-soaked papers with a hole through the middle that had been stuffed into Lytton’s breast pocket. There was no way he could hand those back as they were.

      ‘Certainly. It is the least I can do.’

      The dowdy nobody of a woman opposite him raised her wide hazel eyes and fixed him with an aloof stare.

      ‘I would say that is so. If you had listened to your friend when he was obviously anxious about something, instead of drunkenly goading that man Crosse, then Francis would not be dead now. Would he, my lord?’

       Chapter Two

      Her hostility had hit home—visibly. Ellie suspected that if he had been himself, alert and not in pain, Lord Hainford would have betrayed nothing, but she saw the colour come up over his cheekbones and the bloodshot grey eyes narrow.

      ‘If your brother had not come to the club, yes, he would be alive now, Miss Lytton.’

      ‘My stepbrother Francis is...was...the son of my mother’s second husband, Sir Percival Lytton. I took his name when she remarried.’

      She could hardly recall her own father, the Honourable Frederick Trewitt, an abrupt man who had died when she was eight. Her mother’s remarriage had given them much-needed financial stability, although Sir Percival had shown little interest in his stepdaughter at first—so plain and quiet, where her mother had been vivid and attractive.

      Not at first.

      As for Francis, three years her senior, he had ignored her until, his father and stepmother dead, he had needed a housekeeper.

      She had felt no affection for him, waiting for him to turn out like his father, but as time had passed and he’d shown her nothing but indifference she had begun to relax—although never to the point of leaving her bedchamber door unlocked.

      The use she could be to her stepbrother had given her the only status that Society allowed a plain young woman of very moderate means and no connections—that of respectable poor relation.

      ‘You were close, of course. This must be a dreadful shock for you...a great loss.’ The Earl had reined in his irritation and was clearly ransacking his meagre store of conventional platitudes. ‘I quite understand that you are distressed.’

      ‘If my stepbrother had removed himself to some remote fastness and I had never seen him again I would not have shed a single tear, my lord,’ she said. ‘That does not mean I do not grieve the fact that he met his end in such sordid circumstances, thanks to someone else’s selfish neglect.’

      She would have felt pity for any man killed like that, let alone a relative.

      ‘Madam, neither the place nor the circumstances were sordid, and Lytton was in a club where he might have safely passed the time with any number of acquaintances while he waited for me to be free.’

      Hainford got to his feet and regarded her with something very like hauteur.

      ‘That he chose to insinuate himself into the middle of a fracas was entirely his choice, and the result was a regrettable accident. Unless you have an undertaker in mind I will engage a respectable one on your behalf. I will also establish how the Coroner wishes to proceed and keep you informed. Good day to you.’

      Polly scrambled to reach the front door before he did, and came back a moment later clutching a small rectangle of card. ‘He left this, Miss Lytton.’