Page 36 of To Catch a Viscount

Her expression fell, and such tangible disappointment filled her eyes that he found himself wanting to call back his rejection, only so he could restore her smile. But even he, cad that he was, knew better. “I’m sorry, Marcia.”

She gave him a long look and then shrugged. “Very well. I bid you good evening, Andrew, and wish you much pleasure with whatever lady planned to join you in this alcove.” With that, she slipped off.

He followed her departure through the crack in the curtain, watching after her as she wound her way through the ballroom, staring until she’d disappeared from his line of vision.

Good. He’d gotten through to her. Yes, he’d hurt her, and he hated himself as much as he did Thornton for doing so, and yet, no good could have come from his helping her pursue a wicked path in London.

Only, as he took his leave, giving up on keeping company with any other woman in this ballroom, he couldn’t shake the feeling, knowing Marcia as he did, that it couldn’t have been that simple to deter her from her goals.

Chapter 7

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

And there could be no doubting that Marcia was desperate.

It was why since before her exchange with Andrew, she’d confided in Faith and Anwen—and plotted with them.

For she was something more than desperate… she was determined.

The following night, standing before her friend’s bed, staring with Faith and Anwen at the parchment laid out, Marcia couldn’t shake the image of military men surrounding a table of battlefield plans.

She hardened her mouth.

Well, in a way, that was precisely what they were.

As young women without the same freedom of movement afforded men—even men of their same age and younger—they had to think out every step.

That was why she was sleeping over at Faith’s household for the evening. Her parents were so relieved at imagining Marcia with her friends, surrounded by them and smiling again, that they would never suspect she was up to anything else. She counted on that.

It was the perfect decoy and the perfect plan.

In fact, everything about her planning was perfect.

Except for Andrew’s rejection.

“I still cannot believe he rejected you,” Faith said in her slightly too loud way, the elevated tone a product of her partial hearing loss.

That made two of them.

“Hush,” Anwen chided. “We are focusing.”

Focusing. As they’d been since Marcia had sought their continued help with her plan. Had they been any other young ladies, they surely would have sought to talk her out of her efforts. Faith, however, was the daughter of a marchioness who’d opened up her own school for women, and Anwen was one of the founding members of a society of women speaking about and against the strictures placed on women. As such, they were forward thinkers.

“I think this is the one you should have always gone for,” Anwen said, leaning across the bed and touching a finger to a name inked on those pages.

The Duke of Rothesby.

Faith made an impatient sound. “A duke will not help. That isn’t their way.”

“The Duke and Duchess of Crawford are generous enough people,” Anwen pointed out.

“Yes, but they are an older duke and duchess, and everyone knows Crawford has always been the stodgy, proper type and not the roguish type more concerned with his own happiness like those”—Faith wagged her finger at the page—“roguish ones. Furthermore, that is the reason Waters rejected you,” she said, shifting them back to the matter at hand. “It was naïve for us to expect that he would do it.”

It was naïve for Marcia to have expected him to help her.

That was what her friend had meant, but was good enough to not say it aloud.

The thing of it was, she’d been so very certain her connection and friendship to Andrew these many, many years would have meant he’d have not hesitated to help her.

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