Page 27 of A Scandalous Kind of Duke

St. Blaise was examining a ring box, whose dainty panels were adorned in colorful Viennese enamels.

Or, as Leo liked to call the ring box, “The Coffin.”

The first pretty little thing he had ever bought.

The second if one included the ring inside it. Leo did not.

“Not your usual thing,” St. Blaise mused. “It looks cheap.”

“Don’t open that.”

St. Blaise opened it. “A bit tawdry.”

In three strides, Leo crossed the room and grabbed the box from his brother’s hand. He caught his first glimpse of the ring in eight years, those simple knots of silver, before he closed the box, dumped it in the drawer, and slammed the bloody drawer shut.

He had forgotten about the ring. He’d meant to get rid of it. That was why he had bought the ring box and dubbed it “The Coffin.” He had intended to bury it in a graveyard in Vienna, in a ritual symbolizing the death and burial of his loving heart.

How very dramatic of him. In his defense, he had been only twenty-one at the time.

The only saving grace was that Juno never knew Leo’s true reason for traveling to Vienna eight years ago, setting off as soon as he turned twenty-one and could legally make decisions for himself. She never knew of his aching regret for rejecting her after she kissed him in the meadow, or his arguments with his father and mother, or the letters he wrote and never sent because he did not have her address.

She never knew about the ring burning in his pocket, or the question burning in his throat.

The question that was never spoken, the words that had turned to ice when she stood in the park in Vienna and laughed about youthful nonsense and silly infatuations, and before he could even think about changing her mind, she was kissing some bloody violinist from Prague.

“I say, Polly, were you in love?”

Leo said nothing.

“That ring is too simple for Erika’s taste though,” St. Blaise mused, because he was not quite the pretty idiot he pretended to be. “And it looks cheap, so you must have bought it before we lost Papa Duke.”

“It was just some girl I knew. Before I met Erika.”

“The girl didn’t like the ring?”

“I misjudged her feelings.”

“And let me guess—Erika found out and that’s why she strayed?”

“No. Erika knew about her before we married.”

St. Blaise hooted with delight. “No wonder you have trouble with women, if you are actually honest with them.”

Erika, taking his hand one night in Vienna, wherever it was that Leo and his German cousins had washed up in a drunken haze.

Erika, with flashing dark eyes and a gown the color of apricot schnapps.

Erika saying: “Why so sad, English lord? If you wanted to be sad, you could have stayed in England. Did some silly English girl break your heart?”

Erika laughing.

Erika saying: “I shall make you forget this girl. What an excellent game that will be! Come with me, sad English lord, and I will make you laugh.”

And she had.

“Are you still in love with her, this girl?”

“No.”

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