Page 66 of Wedded to the Scottish Duke

“People are whispering that with how close you were standing, she might be your lover.”

Keith choked on the vodka and spat it back on the floor. Xander clapped him on the back as Aaron rescued the flagon.

“They said what!?” Keith coughed.

“You heard,” Philip said, his voice even softer. “I’m sorry. We tried to stop the rumors.”

“People like a tale. They take it and run with it.” Xander sighed beside him. “Be wary, Keith. Some people here, their words would never reach the rest of the ton, but there are plenty of men like us here tonight, and their words certainly will.”

“Be careful how much you’re seen talking to Lady Celia,” Philip urged. “For both of your sakes. Or…”

“Or what?” Keith asked.

Aaron cleared his throat and sat down on Keith’s other side. “Lady Celia’s reputation has always been questionable.” He smiled. “We all owe her for ending up with our wives… But she doesn’t behave like other ladies, and people wonder just how much experience she has. The truth is, no oneknowsif she has ever been scandalous or not.”

I know.

Keith kept the thought to himself. He was also certain that before him, Celia hadn’t experienced such things. She’d heard of them perhaps, but she hadn’t felt them. He was the first and only man to touch her.

That protective and possessive creature inside him awoke again. It purred, longing to have Celia back where she belonged.

“Just don’t give the ton proof that she has been scandalous,” Philip urged quietly. “It could come back to bite you both.”

Keith nodded. When he had first met these men, he might have thought their interference was too much, but now that he knew them a little, he understood what they were trying to do. They were not only trying to protect Celia, they were also trying to protect him.

“Ye…” Keith turned his head to Xander. “Ye talk as if ye have been on the wrong end of whispers and gossip.”

“I have been.” Xander nodded. “Do you know what I had to do to stop those whispers?” He held up his left hand, showing the wedding band on his fourth finger. “I had to marry Violet. Not that I’d change what I did.” He smiled a little, his expression unexpectedly warm. “But it is a warning. If you have no intention of marrying my sister-in-law, then be careful just how much you two talk in public.”

Keith nodded, thanking them for their warning.

“Enough of the serious,” Philip said as he passed the flagon back to Keith. “Let us celebrate. Let me know the next time you’re planning on coming, Keith. I’ll be placing all my bets on you.”

By the time Keith left that night, he felt quite separate from his own body. He was overtired from the fights, and the vodka had made his head swim.

He took his horse and rode home slowly, not wishing to cause an accident in his state, though he was barely able to concentrate on the road ahead. Instead, his mind wandered to things he had long tried to keep hidden. Unpleasant memories resurfaced.

As a child, he’d pushed open his mother’s bedchamber door one day to see her crying her eyes out. No handkerchief in the world was large enough to dry those tears as she flung herself into the window seat, her head pressed against the glass as she stared outside.

Tracing a finger down the lead lining of the glass, she had whispered how they were like bars.

“They are my prison, Keith. This place… it is my prison.”

Then the memory shifted to something else. He saw his mother and father at the front of a great hall. His father gripped his mother’s hand possessively, so hard in fact that she winced in pain. She didn’t want to be there, that was obvious.

When Keith tried to place himself between them, trying to protect his mother, despite how much smaller he was, he felt his father’s glare.

“No,”Elizabeth had whispered under the sound of everyone in the great hall clapping.“You will not hurt him,”she had pleaded with his father.“He’s only trying to protect me.”

“The boy will learn his place.”

Keith had paid the price for it that night. It didn’t stop him from trying to protect his mother, though. He always got in the way and tried to help her.

He could still remember the first time he managed to successfully stop his father from hitting her.

He had been just seventeen. He and his brother had been out on the training grounds. They’d returned together, discarding their swords and laughing about their fighting, when they had heard shouts and screams coming from a sitting room.

Keith and his brother had burst in there to see their father raise a hand to Elizabeth yet again. Elizabeth had cried out, attempting to escape, but he caught her ankle and dragged her back again.

---