Page 69 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“I hoped you might.” Vane inclined his head once more, entirely satisfied, and withdrew toward the card room with the same unhurried ease he had arrived with, leaving Julian standing alone near the refreshments table, his jaw tight, turning over every carefully wrapped threat the man had just delivered without once raising his voice above a pleasant murmur.

CHAPTER 28

“Julian!”

Dominic burst into the study without knocking, a folded pamphlet clutched in one fist, his face flushed with an anger Julian had rarely seen on him.

“What has happened?”

“Vane. The man has finally shown his hand, and I confess I did not think him capable of sinking quite this low.” Dominic thrust the pamphlet across the desk, his hand not quite steady with the force of his fury. “It is being distributed through half the coffeehouses as we speak, and I have no doubt it will reach every drawing room in the county within the week. I have already had three separate acquaintances stop me in the street to ask, with entirely too much relish, whether the rumors were true.”

Julian snatched it up and read it.

A CONCERNING ACCOUNT OF THE DUKE OF ASHVALE’S HOUSEHOLD

His eyes moved down the page, the words arranging themselves into something that made his stomach turn cold and then hot by rapid turns.

A claim that Eleanor was his illegitimate child, conceived before the marriage and passed off as an orphan to disguise the scandal.

A suggestion that the hasty union with Louisa had been arranged purely to conceal the truth from polite society.

The arrangement, the pamphlet claimed, had been engineered by Julian himself, painting Louisa as an unwitting party maneuvered into rescuing his reputation rather than a woman who had walked into his study of her own accord and proposed the arrangement herself.

And beneath it, in language dressed up as concern rather than accusation, the further suggestion that Kit’s continued silence proved the whole household unstable, a boy left to suffer beneath a guardian too preoccupied with his own indiscretions to properly attend to his ward’s welfare, his years of silence recast not as grief slowly healing but as evidence of ongoing neglect.

“This is wild.” Julian’s voice came out low, his fury barely contained. “This is entirely false, every word of it. He has taken every private grief in this household and twisted it into something ugly enough to sell papers with.”

“I know that. You know that. Half of London will not trouble themselves to know it, Julian, not when a scandal this delicious is being handed to them in print.” Dominic dropped into the chair opposite, his own anger not yet spent. “Vane has moved exactly as he threatened he would. You refused to discredit Whitmore on his behalf, so he has decided to discredit you instead, and your wife, and those children upstairs who have done nothing whatsoever to deserve being dragged into it.”

“Has it reached Henswick House yet?”

“I could not say for certain, though I would assume the worst rather than hope for the best. These things travel considerably faster than any of us wish them to.” Dominic ran a hand through his hair, some of his earlier fury giving way to weary concern. “I stopped by my club before coming here. Some gentlemen were discussing it over their morning coffee as though it were a fact, one of them going so far as to suggest that the Duchess had known nothing of the child’s true parentage until after the wedding, poor deceived creature that the pamphlet paints her as.”

“They are making her a victim of my supposed deception, and Eleanor a mark of shame, and Kit’s grief a symptom of neglect.” Julian’s hand curled into a fist against the desk. “There is not a single true word in the entire piece, and yet I imagine that will trouble almost no one who reads it. ”

“It will not stay contained, whatever we do now. The only question is how we answer it.” Dominic leaned forward. “Has Vane any notion of what he has actually unleashed, attacking a child this way? ”

“He warned me with veiled threats at the Camdens’ gathering that I would regret refusing him. I did not imagine even then that he meant to attack Eleanor’s parentage or use Kit’s silence as a weapon against us.”

“Then you underestimated him. As did I, and I have known the man longer than you have.” Dominic’s jaw tightened. “What will you do?”

Julian set the pamphlet down, his hand flat against the desk, and forced himself to think past the white-hot anger clouding every impulse. “I need time to decide the proper course of action. This cannot be answered carelessly or in anger, however much anger I feel at this moment.”

“You have very little time, if you mean to answer this before it hardens into fact rather than mere rumor. Every day it sits unanswered, another household reads it as gospel rather than gossip.”

“I am aware of that.” Julian’s jaw tightened. “Give me the afternoon. I will not sit on this longer than that. But I will not answer it half-considered either, not when the truth of my father’s actions must come with it if I mean to answer it properly.”

Dominic studied him for a moment, some of his fury settling into something steadier, more solemn. “Then think carefully, and quickly. And Julian, whatever you decide, I would advise you not to face it alone. Not this time.” With that, he rose from his seat and left.

Julian remained at his desk a long while after, reading the pamphlet a second time, then a third, each pass leaving him colder and more resolved than the last, before he finally gathered it up and went to find his wife.

He found her in the nursery, Eleanor cradled against her shoulder, and something in his face must have warned her before he’d said a single word, because she gently lowered the baby into her cradle and turned to face him.

“What has happened?”

He handed her the pamphlet without preamble and watched her read it. Her expression remained composed even as her eyes moved across each fabricated line, though he could see the tightness gathering at her jaw, the color rising slowly into her cheekbones, which indicated how thoroughly the words had angered her.

“He is a coward,” she scoffed. “A coward who could not persuade you with reason, so has decided to attack you where you cannot easily defend yourself—through a child’s trauma and an infant’s parentage.”