Page 27
Victoria replaced the poker by the hearth and straightened, clasping her hands together. “I need your… help.”
William crossed his arms over his chest. “You know what’s strange? I’ve been hearing this all day today. Very odd.”
Victoria pursed her beautiful lips. “I need help untangling the chaos you created.”
“What did I do this time?” He raised a brow.
“You must be joking. You know what you did. You abducted me!”
William shrugged. “I brought you back, no harm done. Nobody would’ve known unless you told them. My men were very careful.”
“Not careful enough.” Victoria walked back to her chair and plopped down. “Porter witnessed my abduction, as you know. And thanks to him, rumors have spread that I was ravished by two burly thugs and therefore have been ruined forever.”
“You can’t really fault the man, can you?” William leisurely walked toward the hearth and propped one shoulder against it, crossing his feet at the ankles. “He had to divert attention from the fact that he’d ripped his breeches,” he said dryly.
Victoria’s eyes widened, and she let out a chuckle before covering her mouth. “How do you know about that?”
“I hear things.” He cocked a brow. “I trade in information, or have you forgotten?”
“Oh…” She pursed her lips. “You mean you spy on people and blackmail them.”
He spread his arms. “Do not feign surprise. You know exactly who I am.”
“I do now,” she grumbled under her breath.
William took a step forward. “What is the purpose of my being here, Lubimaya?”
Her eyes blazed with fire as she looked at him. “Do not call me that.”
“You used to love it.”
“I used to love a lot of things.”
He grinned. “I remember.”
“William,” she huffed in frustration. “That’s not why you are here.”
“Then why am I here? Please, enlighten me. Because if Porter is the reason for your downfall, I would assume you’d go to him to sweep up the rubble.”
Victoria’s jaw tensed, and she visibly unclenched her muscles to speak. “I would have gone to him in a heartbeat if I thought it would help. But the problem is, marrying someone else, marrying anyone, will not save me because I am already married. To you!”
William’s lips twitched in a barely suppressed smile. “I thought you’d forgotten, judging by the way you were behaving.”
“How was I—?” She shook her head, stopping herself mid-sentence. “It doesn’t matter. I did not ask you here to argue. As I said, I need your help.”
“To do what exactly?”
She let out a breath. “We need to spin the narrative.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Spin the narrative?”
“Yes, from an unwilling victim getting ravished by thugs to a spoiled princess who…” she paused and swallowed, then continued in a hoarse voice, “eloped with the man she loves.”
William cocked his head. “And by the man you love, you mean me?”
She jumped out of her chair, clasped her hands in front of her, and started pacing like a madwoman. “An extravagant, exotic princess who does what she wants is forgiven more freely than a poor victim who stepped out of the ballroom at an inopportune time. Being a victim creates blame for some odd reason, inspires pity, and repulses people, while being a spirited foreign princess who follows her heart just adds to the tales of exotic foreigners who live by their own rules.”
Oddly, that tirade made sense to William. He nodded. “You want to tell everyone that we eloped. I understand. You’ll need to parade me around town to sell this grand love story… which is the truth, by the way.”
