“I asked her to marry me last night,” Thorn snarled. “She refused me, so I could hardly claim to be married to her. I planned to ask her again.”
“You asked her to be your wife after you slept with her? You thought that Lady Xenobia India St. Clair would marry you because you were gracious enough to offer your hand after bedding her? Why would she want to marry you?”
“She might have been carrying my child,” Thorn said tightly. But a bitter chill was sweeping through him. Vander was right. Why the hell would India want to marry him?
Vander made a guttural sound of disgust and spat his words. “You didn’t use a sheath? What in the hell were you thinking?” His eyes glittered at Thorn in the darkening room.
“I don’t think around her,” Thorn said, telling him the truth. “When I asked her to marry me, she refused. She said that she’d give me the child if we had one.” Vander—more than anyone else in the world—would know what that meant to him. The agony that her comment roused.
But Vander just snorted. “You believed her? Damn it, Thorn, you don’t really want her. You don’t even know her!”
“I didn’t realize she was lying to me until later,” Thorn said tightly.
“She baited a trap and you fell into it. You might have had a chance with her—after all, she took you into her bed—but that’s gone.”
Images tumbled through Thorn’s mind: Rose looking up at India as she read her a book, and India telling him about her parents’ desertion. Vander was right. She had tested him, and he had failed.
He stood up, slowly, knowing that he would be covered with bruises in a few hours. They had gone at each other like rabid animals.
Vander still sat against the wall, his arms on his knees. Without raising his head, he said, “She’s mine, Thorn, and the sooner you get used to it, the better. You treated her like a doxy, and you didn’t protect her when she needed it.”
Every word struck Thorn’s gut like another blow from a balled-up fist.
Then Vander looked up, pushing back hair soaked with sweat and brandy. “You had your shot, and you lost. I’m going to marry her. I’ll leave it to you whether we remain friends.” He got up, lurching slightly, one hand pressed against his side, and left without a backward glance.
Thorn walked into his own room reeking of spirits, with vision only in his left eye.
The hell with it. That dream was over. He’d had it for, what, half a day? The dream that India was his, that he could marry a woman like her: brilliant, glowing, beautiful . . . funny. As wild in bed as she was elsewhere, the kind of woman who lunged at life, fear be damned, and embraced it.
But Lady Xenobia India was a lady. And he was a bastard, who had behaved like a bastard. Of course she didn’t want him. She’d let him down kindly, in fact.
He sank into a steaming bath and forced himself to face the truth. He would offer his hand in marriage one more time, if only to prove to India that his proposal was motivated by far more than the possibility of a baby.
But it was a useless gesture. Daughters of marquesses didn’t marry bastards, not in any part of England that he’d heard of. India would marry Vander. She was meant to be a duchess. They would be happy together, shining, beautiful examples of England’s peerage.
He got out of the bath and dressed swiftly. If he was going to ask a future duchess to marry him, he would do it like the gentleman he wasn’t. Not by dragging her into an alcove and treating her like a whore. No, he would go on one knee, he decided, tying his cravat in a Gordian knot.
And once she rejected him, that would be that. He would lose his oldest and truest friend and the woman he loved in one blow. Suffocating darkness welled inside him at the thought.