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“Correct,” Gerrit said testily. Did the man think he was so dull-witted as to not realize that? “What the hell is your point, Chatham?”

The other man’s face hardened. “I want your word that you will not bear a grudge against her for breaking that family tradition.”

“Bear a grudge?” Gerrit repeated, genuinely confused. “Why would I do such an illogical thing?”

To Gerrit’s complete mystification, Chatham laughed. “My wife told me you were not the sort of man to engage in illogical behavior.”

“Your wife? How would she know? I only met her for the first time last night.”

“I suspect it was just an educated guess.”

There was something about Chatham’s smirk that told Gerrit he was, yet again, missing some conversational nuance. But he could not bring himself to care about that at the moment. Instead, he dragged the conversation back to the matter at hand. “I will treat Lady Kathryn with the same respect and consideration that I would any woman.”

“Thank you. That was my main concern.”

“Was there something else you wanted to discuss?” Gerrit prodded when Chatham kept staring at him.

Chatham appeared to shake himself. “No. No, that was it. I will fetch Kathryn.”

Gerrit nodded and the other man left the room. He stared at his hands rather than the shelves full of mismatched books that surrounded him. But even though he was not looking at them he could hear them jeering at him. His unease at the distracting noise—for lack of a better word—was something he felt often whenever he was outside his home. After all, the world was an extremely disorganized and unsymmetrical place.

The duke’s library was worse than the Earl of Sutton’s ballroom. Perhaps that was because a ballroom was, by its very nature, lacking in symmetry when it was being put to its specified use. A library, on the other hand, was a place for quiet reflection. But there would be none of that in this cacophonous chamber.

Gerrit’s gaze slid from his hands—one of which rested on each knee, exactly an inch from his kneecaps—to his exquisitely polished Hessians, his eyes widening with revulsion at the random scatter of blood-red roses on the thick pile beneath his boots. Although he jerked his gaze away immediately, the haphazard rug pattern branded itself on his mind’s eye and he had to squeeze his eyes shut until silver sparks on a field of black velvet purged the image from his brain.

“Your Grace?”

Gerrit’s well-tutored body unfolded from the chair at the sound of a female voice.

“Your Grace, Lady Kathryn,” he said as the two women approached. He frowned at Lady Kathryn’s red-rimmed eyes. Did she have a summer cold, or had she been weeping? Gerrit determined to keep a safe distance from her in the event it was the former.

“I will sit in the window seat so that you two may talk privately,” the duchess said, her plain, expressionless face far easier for Gerrit to look at than her beautiful sister’s, which was positively seething with emotion.

Lady Kathryn gracefully lowered herself onto the settee, and Gerrit flipped up his tails and resumed his own seat. Lady Kathryn gazed at her feet, giving him a moment to study her unobserved. Was she being forced into this? Is that why her eyes were red?

He would be damned before he married another unwilling female.

“Are you here against your will, my lady?”

Her head whipped up and Gerrit’s belly clenched when he met her brilliant green eyes, which fairly blazed in the sunlight. The vivid translucent shade brought to mind the emeralds he’d dug in the Wadi Sikai Valley on one of his trips abroad.

Eyes like emeralds? Gerrit blinked at the uncharacteristically fatuous thought.

“I am here of my own free will, Your Grace.”

So, it would be marriage, then. Gerrit took a deep breath and opened his mouth.

“But there is something you should know that might change your mind about—about what you are about to ask.”

Good God. What now?

Thankfully, he only thought the words. Aloud, he said, “What do you mean?”

She swallowed. “I am not a virgin.”

Chapter Eight

The face of Gerrit’s dead wife rose like the specter she truly was. “How many men?” he snarled.