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"Soo touched his fingertips together "When you say, someone saw him…was the man in question identified?"

"No The second house the female servants’ quarters"

"Why did suspicion fall upon her, then? Had she a beau? A flirtation of some kind with a man?"

He asked the questions, but hisfar ahead She’d admitted the duke hadn’t forced her Had he made her promises? Seduced her?

"No," Gordon said "But when the matter was raised, they checked There was blood on her sheets, and it wasn’t her tih him at all that implied In the square below, Miss Barton raised her chin He couldn’t ray eyes snapping at hiine that fifty pounds and a reference would paper over what happened to me? she’d asked

She’d been a virgin That o had supposed She’d clairees of force, and all the ones that suggested theo the villain in this particular drama

He resented that Clermont had foisted that role upon him

"If you need to rid yourself of her," Gordon said, "a feords about this in the right ears, and she’ll be driven off in no time at all"

She would be There had been a similar case last year--a lady’sfrom hisThe other servants had crowded around her in the square when she left with her single valise They’d jostled her They’d called her nalass and fifty feet between them They’d called her whore and slut, and those had hardly been the worst of the epithets hurled He’d been halfway down the stairs to put an end to the riot when soht of her blood had been as effective at dispersing the crowd as a legion of constables wielding billyclubs

Hugo had few pretensions about his own s that didn’t skirt the boundaries of ethical conduct soof Miss Barton at the center of such a crowd It wasn’t a faceless throng that he saw around her when he envisioned that, but his own father loo, boy, so get back out there--

"Well?" Gordon asked "Am I to spread the story?"

"No"

"That see of the sort"

It was simple self-preservation If soo was liable to kill him in cold blood He would never achieve any of his aed for murder

Besides, the whole point was to keep Clermont’s name out of the business If she were labeled a slut, it would take the gossips a few short hours to decide who she’d been playing the slut with

There were better ways to drive her away The pressure he’d applied so far was mere child’s play

He didn’t want to do it He liked her He ad about her that wouldn’t leave hirain to crush the dreams and ambitions of a woo Every tiled