Malcolm pushed past the guards at the palace gate and stormed across Green Park, his feet taking him automatically toward Mayfair. He couldn’t shake the strangling squeeze of betrayal that Katya’s confession caused. She should have told him. That was all he could think about as he stomped past unwary bystanders, nearly plowing into a few of them in his temper. She should have told him right from the beginning, before Natalia was even born. If he’d known he would have…he would have….

His mind failed to conjure up what he would have done all those years ago, with Robert still alive, Katya firmly married to him, and Tessa fresh in her grave. He damn well would have done something, though. He would have done something if Katya had told him the truth after Robert’s death. But no, she’d kept her secret and squandered her time jumping in and out of the beds of half the men in London. Had she done that simply to punish him for coming to his senses and leaving her to her husband?

His angry thoughts were still swirling when he found himself at the door of Peter’s townhouse. He vented some of his frustration pounding on the door, then glaring at Peter’s astonished butler.

“Is he in?” Malcolm growled, pushing past the man into the entryway.

“If you could wait here, I’ll check—”

Malcolm ignored the man, storming down the hall toward Peter’s study. “Peter,” he shouted. “Where the devil are you?”

He rounded the corner into the study, finding it empty. At the same time, footfalls sounded on the stairs, so Malcolm returned to the hall.

“What in God’s name are you doing, barging into my home and causing a racket?” Peter asked, coming down the stairs. He was in his shirtsleeves and looked as though he hadn’t shaved that morning.

“Did you know Natalia Marlowe is my daughter?” Malcolm demanded with enough anger in his tone to suggest Peter had been in on the secret.

Peter nearly stumbled down the last two stairs, his eyes going wide. That was all the answer Malcolm needed, but Peter answered, “No,” in an astonished tone anyhow. “She is?”

Malcolm’s fury abated by a hair. At least he wasn’t the only fool Katya had duped. “The girl figured it out based on…evidence.” He wasn’t about to explain that he’d spent the night in Katya’s bed and been more or less caught by their children. The young people might have figured things out, but he and Katya had been damned sure to keep the nature of their association a secret from their meddling friends.

Another secret. Malcolm did his best not to flush with ironic guilt as Peter let out a breath and approached him.

“I take it Katya has known all along,” Peter said.

“Evidently. Though how she can be sure it’s mine with the way she carries on is….”

His words died on his lips at the censorious scowl Peter gave him. The bastard even crossed his arms and shook his head like a scolding father.

“Katya might have enjoyed herself, but she’s never been careless,” Peter said, striding past Malcolm and gesturing for him to follow down the hall to the study. “Otherwise there’d be far more little Marlowes running around London. Ones that couldn’t claim even a shred of legitimacy.”

“Are you defending her?” Malcolm snapped, heading straight to Peter’s liquor supply as soon as they were in the room.

“No, I’m….” Peter let out a breath and rubbed his forehead. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“You’re defending that deceptive tart?” Malcolm sloshed scotch over the lip of one of Peter’s tumblers.

“Good God, Malcolm. Listen to yourself.” Peter crossed the room to snatch the decanter from Malcolm’s shaking hands, pouring himself a small glass. “You’re insulting the woman we all know you love, and why? Because she hurt your feelings?”

“My feelings have nothing to do with it,” Malcolm growled, immediately hiding his lie by gulping scotch. The liquid burned its way down his throat but only served to turn his stomach more. “I had a right to know about my own child.”

“I’m sure you did,” Peter said, putting the stopper back in the decanter with a clink. “But it’s all water under the bridge now. Why are you really angry with Katya?”

“Because she’s a lying bitch,” Malcolm snapped, but the ache in his heart told him that there was a world of other reasons, each more painful than the last, that had been building up for over a decade.

Peter sent him a flat stare. “Katya is Katya. Yes, she can be a bitch, but can you blame her? Look at what she’s up against on a daily basis.” He gestured toward the window, as though the male hordes of London were waiting on the other side to put all women in their places. “She wouldn’t be who she was if she didn’t fight tooth and nail for her pride. And I mean that in terms of a lioness protecting her young as well.” He pointed at Malcolm with his tumbler, then took a sip.

“I have only ever loved that blasted woman, and look how she’s treated me?” Malcolm grumbled, pacing as the scotch slowly took effect.

“How has she treated you?” Peter asked with a wry grin.

“She refuses to marry me,” Malcolm admitted. He hadn’t told any of his friends about his numerous proposals and Katya’s refusal to answer them. And yet Peter didn’t look the least bit surprised. “She continues to defy me and make a fool of me, in public and in private.”

Peter chuckled. “You do a fairly good job of making a fool of yourself.”

“She flaunts her conquests in my face when I love her more than any of them ever could,” Malcolm nearly shouted, the words sharp with emotion.

Peter finished his scotch and set his tumbler back on the tray. “So you’re telling me that you’re angry because a woman whom you love but have no binding claim to continues to live her own life and enjoy herself, and that she has gone to great lengths to protect her children from what would certainly be a social disaster if it were widely known? This is what has you so irate?”

Malcolm turned away from his so-called friend, downing the last of his scotch with an exasperated gulp. He was being an ass. His own children—both of them, God help him—were being more rational about the situation than he was. If any of his friends behaved as he was, he’d laugh them into oblivion. But it was his heart on the line, dammit. He’d sacrificed everything for love—with Tessa and with Katya—and he’d come up a loser both times.

“All I’ve ever wanted is someone who would love me with as much devotion as I love them,” he murmured, half hoping Peter wouldn’t hear him.

“Katya does love you,” Peter said in an equally somber tone. “She always has. But she loves you on her terms, not yours. If you had accepted those terms from the start, your story would have been a very different one.”

Malcolm clenched his jaw, wanting anything but for his friend to be right.

“Tessa loved you too,” Peter said, quieter still. “No matter what happened at the end.”

Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut, but he couldn’t block out the horrific scene of her deathbed—the pain she’d been in after a difficult birth, the hysteria that had overcome her when she lay there bleeding to death, and her final, horrible words. It hadn’t been fair. None of it had been fair. He’d come within a hair’s breadth of ruining his name and fortune to extract Tessa from Shayles’s clutches and to help her to obtain a divorce, and within a year, she was gone.

He would still exact his revenge for that, for the life Tessa deserved but never got, but first things first.

“There are certain things a man deserves to know,” he said, turning back to Peter. “Who his own children are, for example. How would you feel if Anne had had a child that she didn’t tell you about?”

Peter’s expression hardened to cold stone. “You know full well Anne was incapable of bearing children and that trying to bear one killed her,” he said in a hush.

“I’m sorry.” Malcolm hid his slip-up by returning his tumbler to its tray. Peter’s first marriage had been a source of heartbreak for him for twenty years. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“The trouble is, Malcolm, you never are.” Peter shifted his stance as though shaking off the demons of his past. “You say you love Katya, but you demand she change to suit you.”

“I do not,” Malcolm argued.

Peter merely raised a doubtful brow at him.

“I just want her to be honest with me, to stop humiliating me by running around with every young buck who strikes her fancy,” Malcolm went on.

Peter crossed his arms. “And who does she have her sights set on now?”

“That dolt, Christopher Dowland.”

Peter let out a breath and shook his head. “He’s far too young for her. Besides, the only man she’s looked at with genuine interest for years is you.”

Malcolm scowled at his friend, inclined to think Peter was a trusting fool. Katya looked at every man who crossed her path with interest. And who knew whose bed she was in when she wasn’t in his?

At the same time, a nagging doubt whispered at the back of his mind. Was she really as big of a flirt now as she’d been fifteen years ago? She smiled and flirted, all right, but it had been ages since rumors of her proclivities had found their way to him. But why would he hold on to such certainty about Katya’s lack of loyalty toward him if she wasn’t so loose with her affections?

“Look, friend,” Peter cut through the gloomy silence of his thoughts. “I’m just packing to head back to Starcross Castle for a week. Mariah is due in a month, and in spite of my duties in Parliament, I intend to be there for this child as I was with the first one if I possibly can.”

“Yes,” Malcolm sighed, rubbing a hand over his face in an attempt to clear his thoughts. “Go. Be with your wife.”

“And what do you intend to do?” Peter asked. “Nothing stupid, I hope.”

Malcolm glared at him. “Of course not.”

Peter didn’t look convinced. All the same, he thumped Malcolm on the back with a grin. “You love Katya, Katya loves you. Leave the past in the past and move forward. You’ve gained a daughter out of the whole mess, and you should probably spend some time making up for lost years with her.”

Malcolm agreed with his friend, but age-old doubts continued to nag at him as he left to make his way back to Buckingham Palace. He hadn’t made it more than halfway before shoots of anger poked up through emotions he could only describe as confusion. This was all Shayles’s fault. He wasn’t certain how, but every horrible thing in his miserable life could be traced back to Shayles. The day he’d met the man at university had been the darkest day of his life, worse than the war. Without Shayles, Tessa wouldn’t have needed rescuing, nor would dozens of other unfortunate girls. Without Shayles, Katya wouldn’t have been so determined to meddle in politics and put herself in danger by infiltrating his club with girls on her payroll. Without Shayles….

He let out a breath halfway through Green Park, letting his shoulders drop. It always came back to the same thing. Whenever anything didn’t go the way he wanted it to in his life, he laid it at Shayles’s feet. The man was guilty as sin and the devil combined, but that didn’t mean it was his fault whenever things failed to go the way Malcolm thought they should.

He changed direction, heading toward his club instead of back to the palace. The last thing he needed was to face Katya, her children, and his daughters when his thoughts were in such turmoil. He needed solitude and a place to stew in peace. A meal and another glass of scotch wouldn’t be amiss either.

By the time the sun began to set that evening, he’d successfully avoided anyone he knew and come close to swallowing his anger. Close. All that flew out the window when, of all people, Galston marched into the club with an anxious look on his face.

“What are you doing here?” Malcolm asked him, setting aside the newspaper he’d been pretending to read while lost in his thoughts.

Galston breathed a sigh of relief as soon as he saw his master. “We’ve been looking all over for you, my lord,” he said.

“We?” Malcolm frowned and crossed the room to deal with his butler off to the side, where half of the other men in the room weren’t watching them like old women looking for gossip.

“Your daughter has been concerned about your whereabouts all day,” Galston reported.

Malcolm came close to asking which daughter, but thought better of it. He sighed and headed for the hall that would lead to the club’s front door. “Where is she now?” he asked.

“If Lady Stanhope’s words were true, they should all be at Spencer House for the ball.”

Malcolm scowled. If Lady Stanhope’s words were true. The man had said a mouthful.

Malcolm didn’t bother returning home with Galston to change into more suitable clothes for a ball. He piled Galston into the carriage he’d come in to fetch him, against Galston’s protest that Malcolm should be the one to take the carriage while he found other means to return home. After that, he headed on foot to Spencer House, half hoping a footpad of some sort would attempt to accost him. He was in the mood for a fight.

No one impeded his progress, though, and long before he was ready, Malcolm arrived at Spencer House. And within minutes of entering the crowded, overheated ballroom, Cece spotted him.

“Papa,” she scolded, dodging a few gray-haired men who seemed to think ogling freshly-debuted young women was a spectator sport. “Where have you been?” Her words were as angry and clipped as…well, as his would have been, under the circumstances.

“What I do with my time is none of your concern,” he grumbled, kissing her cheek. “You look lovely. How did the presentation go?”

Cece wasn’t about to be side-tracked. She huffed in frustration and hooked her arm through his, dragging him deeper into the room. “Now that you’ve had your temper tantrum, it’s about time you apologize to Lady Stanhope for embarrassing us all this morning.”

Malcolm’s brow shot up. “What kind of insolence is this? Why, if we weren’t in public, I’d turn you over my knee and give you—” His threat died on his lips as the image of spanking Katya’s delicious, round backside sprang up in his mind instead of a father disciplining an unruly child. His face heated, and he writhed with discomfort.

Blessedly, Cece didn’t have a clue where his thoughts had gone. “Sometimes, Papa, I think you’re more of a child than the rest of us put together. And if I am insolent, I learned it from you.”

“I am not—”

His words were cut short as they slipped around a cluster of chattering women and Malcolm nearly ran headlong into Katya.

“—and I won’t be pushed around by a boy barely out of short pants,” she was in the middle of complaining to Rupert. She turned at that moment, her eyes going wide as she came close to falling into Malcolm’s arms.

“There,” Rupert said. “Right on time. The orchestra is playing a waltz.”

“Yes, a waltz,” Cece said, shoving Malcolm’s back and nudging him closer to Katya. “Go.”

Malcolm frowned at his daughter, then at Katya, his eyes narrowing.

Katya let out an impatient sigh. “Oh, very well. Since the two of you won’t leave us alone until we’ve danced.” She held out her hand to Malcolm. “Let’s get it over with.”

Jaw tight, Malcolm took her offered hand and practically yanked her toward the center of the room, where couples were forming to dance. The cheery strains of a popular waltz filled the air, and Malcolm tugged Katya into a stiff, close dance position. He swayed into the steps, leading with far more force than was strictly necessary, staring firmly over her shoulder.

“You’re still pouting, I see,” she said without her usual teasing charm.

“You say that as if I have nothing to be upset about,” he grumbled.

“You have plenty to be upset about,” she said. He glanced to her, surprised she would agree. “Knowing you,” she added with a sting.

He responded by jerking her through a particularly tight turn and deliberately knocking her off balance. She, in turn, stepped on his foot.

Their dance continued in combative silence, until Malcolm hissed, “Have you no pity at all in that cold heart of yours?”

“Oh, so you want to be pitied, do you?” She stared at him with implacable eyes.

“No,” he snapped. “You know what I mean.”

“Actually, Malcolm, I don’t,” she huffed. “All I know is that you’re more impossible than usual when you’re hurt.”

“I’m not hurt,” he insisted.

“Really?” Clearly, she didn’t believe him.

“I’m furious,” he said, barely able to speak to her. Her proximity and the heat of her body was having a sharp effect on him, but that only served to fan the flames of his anger. “All this time, I thought you loved me as I love you, when, in fact, you couldn’t care less about me.”

She missed a step in the dance. Thankfully, they were near the edge of the dancing mob and were able to stop to glare at each other without blocking other couples.

“I’ve never heard such a load of rubbish in my life,” she hissed. “It’s always the same with you, isn’t it? You don’t trust me—”

“No, I don’t,” he cut her off before she could continue her rant.

She straightened, looking wounded. A part of him instantly regretted his words, but the rest of him was too angry to care.

“What reason have you given me to trust you?” he went on. “You kept an entire child from me,” he whispered.

“For her sake, not yours.”

“All the same,” he argued. “How can I forgive that?”

“The same way I can forgive you for being a jealous pillock,” she growled.

“Do I have reason to be jealous?”

She huffed, and if he wasn’t mistaken, stomped her foot under her ball gown. The picture of righteous fury she presented was so paradoxically appealing that he was ready to declare himself a madman and drag her into an unused room for a quick shag up against a wall. But before she could throw some new insult back at him, her expression changed to puzzlement as she stared past Malcolm’s shoulder.

Malcolm twisted to see what had distracted her. Cece and Rupert were pushing their way through the party guests toward them, worried looks on their faces. Behind them marched Inspector Craig, looking extremely out of place in plain clothes and a bowler hat. Dancers and debutantes stared at them in their wake.

“Mama,” Rupert spoke first when they reached Malcolm and Katya. “Inspector Craig needs to speak with you immediately.”

Malcolm and Katya both turned to Craig, who stepped forward as though the room were empty.

“Lord Campbell, Lady Stanhope.” He nodded to each of them. “I thought you would want to know that we’re moving on The Black Strap Club.”

“When?” Katya asked, blinking.

Craig answered, “Now.”