Page 107 of To Catch a Viscount

Her mother continued her examination, and then she nodded. “Very well,” she murmured. She started to turn to go, but stopped, going absolutely motionless, like she’d seen the head of Medusa and paid for that glance with eternal immobility.

“Mama?” she asked, but her mother remained as if in a trance, staring at Marcia’s necklace.

Frowning, Marcia touched the pendant that had captured her mother’s attention.

“Where did you get that?” her mother asked breathlessly.

Marcia gripped the gold heart. “I… Faith. After Charles ended our arrangement, she gifted it to me. She said…” Her cheeks went warm, and she couldn’t complete her sentence regarding the childish talisman they’d professed it to be.

“Its wearer captures the heart of one’s true love,” her mother said.

Marcia scrunched up her nose. “Not that, per se. Something about—”

“Winning the heart of a duke?”

“You know of it?” Marcia asked.

For the first time in longer than Marcia could remember, her mother smiled a genuine smile that gave her eyes a happy glimmer. “I know of the tale,” she murmured, and then she touched Marcia’s fingers that still clutched the bauble. “And I wore it a long time ago. Your father… Marcus, gifted it to me once.”

Marcia caught the inner flesh of her cheek hard between her teeth and worried it. Knowing that her mother had worn this back when she’d been a young woman nearer to Marcia’s age, believing in love and happily ever afters even after the ugliness that had been visited upon her, lent this memento an even greater poignancy.

Her mother patted her hand. “It is going to be all right,” she vowed.

She spoke with a confidence about the future that Marcia desperately wished she could feel this day.

She wasn’t coming.

She was late.

Andrew knew as much, not because he’d consulted the timepiece heavy in his pocket, but, rather, because his gaze was trained on the hearth near the front of the library, and the timepiece there revealed the rapidly passing moments.

She who’d been left at the altar would leave him.

In that moment, he found himself facing the great swell of dread that had been there since he’d visited her and asked her to marry him.

It had kept him from sleeping, and it had followed him as he’d dressed for the day and as he’d taken up a place at the opposite end of the room to wait for his bride.

It was here now, and it was here with a bloody vengeance.

I cannot do this.

He was the absolute worst future husband.

Marcia’s father hadn’t been wrong, and neither had Rutland.

Andrew was a bounder. The worst sort of scoundrel.

And she was an innocent in every sense of the word. With a certainty as steady as the turning of the tides, Andrew would hurt her. That was the only way this would end.

Oh, she’d spoken of all the reasons they would be perfectly compatible, and in her matter-of-fact presentation of that list and the items upon it, he’d been able to believe her in that moment.

He’d even been able to hold on to that confidence she’d spoken with during his meeting with Wessex.

It had begun to feel real only after he’d returned home and started on the official end of this marriage business—securing a license and speaking to the archbishop.

And that realness had forced him to confront that he was wholly incapable of being the man she was worthy of. Because he was a cad. He liked his cards, and he liked his women, and hell, he didn’t even know if he could be faithful to her. And she deserved fidelity.

Sweat slicked his palms, and he dusted them along the sides of his trousers.

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