One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)(31)

“You will refrain,” he said with crisp, aristocratic diction, “from addressing my bride in that familiar manner. You will refrain from speaking to her at all, unless you afford her the respect and deference her superior rank demands. Know your betters.”

A flash of jealous hatred crossed Bellamy’s face, and Spencer knew his cut had slashed deep. Obviously the man harbored a poisonous mix of envy and loathing for the social elite. Someone ought to inform him such an attitude was a grave weakness, ripe for exploitation. But that someone wouldn’t be Spencer.

“As to the value of Lady Amelia’s assurances,” he continued in a low voice meant for Bellamy’s hearing alone, “I assure you, they are worth far more to me than your miserable life. Disparage her again, and you will find yourself at the point of a blade.”

“Spoken like a murderer,” Bellamy growled.

With a careful appearance of nonchalance, Spencer bent to retrieve the bank draft from the carpet. “If Harcliffe’s token is missing, I also have an interest in locating his killers. In one hour’s time, meet me at the mews where Osiris is stabled. We’ll discuss the matter further. But for now …” He carefully pocketed the bank draft, then finally had the satisfaction of speaking the words he’d been longing to say since Bellamy entered the room. “Get out.”

“No, wait.” Amelia clasped her hands together. “Don’t leave. We still need a groomsman.”

Unbelievable. Spencer blinked at her. “Are you seriously suggesting this … this cur should witness our wedding?”

Bellamy put in, “After all you’ve heard and seen, are you still seriously planning to marry this villain?”

“Do I have a choice?” Amelia tilted her face to Spencer’s and studied him quietly.

“It’s not yet official,” he made himself say. “You haven’t signed. I will release you, if you’ve given some credence to Mr. Bellamy’s accusations.”

After a moment’s lip-biting hesitation, she reached forward and touched one hand to his. The light touch dissolved the tension in his wrist, and his fingers uncurled. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding them in a fist.

Wordlessly, she bent over the register and wrote her name in careful, deliberate strokes. After blowing lightly over her signature and returning the plume to its inkwell, she straightened and said simply, “There.”

It took a great deal to humble Spencer, but his bride—his wife—had just managed to do it.

Lily came forward next. She took the quill and signed in one of the two spaces marked “Witness” before extending the pen to Bellamy. “I think you should sign it, Julian. You know what an amiable sort Leo was. When he conceived of the Stud Club …” She paused. “Forgive me, I still can’t say that without wanting to laugh. Anyhow, he began it with the purpose of making new friends. This was why he decreed membership should be dependent on chance—he wanted to draw together people from different classes, form unlikely alliances. Don’t let his death tear that apart.” She pushed the quill at him. “Please. Do it for Leo. Or if not him, then—”

Cursing, Bellamy ruffled his hair. “Don’t ask it, Lily.”

“Then do it for me.”

With a strangled groan, he snatched the pen from her grip and bent as if he would sign. At the last moment, however, he cast the quill away. “I can’t do it. Even if I believed …” He swore. “I just can’t.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’ll do it,” said Ashworth. The battle-scarred warrior elbowed his way past Spencer. “There’s your unlikely alliance, my lady.”

Unlikely indeed. “You don’t think me a murderer, then?” Spencer asked. Strange, that Ashworth should become his defender. In his entire life, Spencer had only come remotely close to killing one man, and it was him.

“No.” As he bent to scrawl his name across the register page, Ashworth spared him a cryptic glance. “You don’t have it in you.”

The tone of his remark hardly made it a ringing endorsement of Spencer’s character. Then again, Spencer didn’t really care. “Meet me at the mews,” he told the men. “One hour.”

Chapter Seven

“This is a travesty.” As he approached the mews, Spencer swore quietly into the late-morning fog.

Osiris, the greatest racehorse of a generation—champion at Newmarket, Doncaster, Epsom Downs—was stabled here, amongst common carriage horses?

The barn was dark and dank as a cave inside. A blizzard of dust motes whirled in the lone shaft of light penetrating the gloom. The horses’ stalls were cramped, as they always were in Town. Spencer’s nose wrinkled at a trough of stale, fetid water—in Cambridgeshire, his grooms drew fresh water twice daily from the stream.

At his order, the groom opened the door of the stallion’s stall and released him into the small yard. The horse shook himself, nostrils flared and head swinging from side to side. The groom jerked roughly on the halter, and Spencer’s jaw clenched with anger. Had the man been in his employ, that one move would have cost him his post.

“How is he exercised?”

“We turn ’im out twice a day. Sometimes a walk about the yard on a lead. Don’t like to be saddled no more, this one. Touchy with the grooming, too.”