Callie caught her friend in an impulsive embrace. “Thank you for worrying over me. I promise you that I shall be fine, whatever happens. This is my battle to fight, and I will do everything in my power to win.”
Jo hugged her back. “You had better win, Calliope Manning. You cannot allow that scoundrel to best you.”
Sin stared in bemused silence at the woman who was to become his wife.
Surely he had misheard her.
Surely he had consumed so much whisky that he was imagining her presence in his threadbare study at half past ten in the evening. No sensible woman would dare to make demands of him. Or to arrive wearing a veil as if she were here for an assignation and to suggest to his elderly and long-suffering butler—one of the last remaining staff members he possessed—that she was expected.
It was a miracle Langdon had even heard her at the door, truly. To say nothing of hearing her clearly and shepherding her through the house without incident. Yet, somehow, he had.
“I beg your pardon, Lady Calliope,” Sin said slowly now, “but did you just tell me you will not marry me unless you are granted an audience with my mistress?”
She nodded primly, as if this were an ordinary social call. “Yes.”
The foolish wench had taken a great risk in coming here this evening. He wondered if she had even been accompanied by a servant. If she had stolen away without her eccentric aunt’s knowledge. If she had taken a hired cab.
He pinned her with his most condemning glare and took a sip of his whisky. Oh, the bloody irony of it. He was fretting over propriety. For most of his life, all disapproving glances had been cast in his direction rather than the other way around.
“I do not have a mistress,” he said at last.
Also ironic. His appetite for the pleasures of the flesh had been considerably dimmed in the last year. He had scarcely even visited his club, the Black Souls. Perhaps it was one more way in which Celeste had ruined him forever.
Lady Calliope’s dark brows snapped together into a disbelieving frown. “Of course you do. You likely have more than one of them.”
She thought she knew so much about him, the virago.
And she knew nothing.
Had not even the slightest inkling. The manuscript he had collected from her publisher more than proved that. He had made it one quarter of the way through reading her wild imaginings and had been too enraged to read one sentence more.
“Ah, yes,” he said grimly, making a steeple of his fingers and watching her over it. “According to you, I have deflowered countless debutantes during the times when I am not hosting wild bacchanalian orgies and drinking the blood of virgins.”
Her lips pinched. “I never wrote that you drink the blood of virgins.”
“I beg your pardon. Perhaps it was that I eat their hearts,” he suggested, inexplicably moved by the urge to nettle her.
“Nor that.”
“I am, however, an evil fiend who murders brothers and faithless wives, am I not?” Sin could not resist prodding.
Her chin went up in a show of the stubborn nature that had almost sent her tumbling from the window two days prior. “You claim you are not, but I find myself loath to accept your word. After all, you have proven you are decidedly not a gentleman and that you possess no honor.”
“Honor is a luxury for the men with enough coin to afford it,” he snapped.
“Yet you have enough coin for whisky and ladies of ill repute,” she countered.
His patience for her was fast waning. “What was the purpose of your call at this time of night, Lady Calliope?”
“Because I needed to speak with you. Alone.” Her lashes fluttered as she lowered her gaze to the hands she had kept folded in her lap.
“I thought you said you needed to speak with my mistress,” he taunted.
That dark gaze of hers was back upon him in an instant, flashing fire once more. “I thought you did not have a mistress.”
She was brazen and bold. And beautiful. Foolish and reckless and heartless, as well. But then, Sin’s last wife had been beautiful and heartless and conniving and faithless. He may as well marry what he was accustomed to.
“I do not,” he agreed.
Her eyes narrowed. “This discussion is going nowhere.”
“Which is precisely where you should have gone, princess,” he countered. “Nowhere. How did you find yourself here at this time of the