“Would it not be better to simply forget what happened? After all, as you yourself said, there have always been women eager for your attention.
“I’m sure you’ll find love again,” he finished, voicing a wish he harbored for himself, a wish that had suddenly seemed far more possible when he’d looked up and seen a beautiful woman trapped in a tree.
“You’re rather missing the point, Gordo,” Robbie said as he threw himself onto the sofa. “I’m not just doing this for myself. I’m doing it for all the other poor sods whose hearts she might break.”
He turned his head and regarded Gordon with a measuring, sidelong look. “If I were a woman in such circumstances, you’d take the case, wouldn’t you?”
“Perhaps,” Gordon replied. He wasn’t really sure what he’d do. However, he truly believed it would do Robbie more harm than good to sue. “What reason did she give for breaking the engagement? She did have a reason, I assume.”
Scowling, Robbie sat up. “She said she didn’t love me,” he replied with more than a hint of defiance, as if such a thing were too ludicrous to be credible.
Given Robbie’s experience with the fairer sex, he might be excused for thinking so. Nevertheless… “Perhaps it’s for the best then,” Gordon replied, repeating the same thing he’d been telling himself ever since he’d met Catriona McNare’s fiancé.
Robbie’s brows lowered and his mouth got that stubborn set Gordon well remembered. “She said she could never love a man like me.”
A man like Robbie, who was handsome and charming and a good friend? “What on earth did she mean by that?”
Robbie jumped to his feet and strode to the window. “It means she doesn’t understand how the upper class lives. I haven’t committed any crime. I haven’t done anything every nobleman in Scotland or England and certainly France hasn’t done before me. She claims to be a lady, yet she broke the engagement over a trifle.”
If he had done something to cause her to change her mind, that made a difference. “I think you’d better tell me what exactly this ‘trifle’ was.”
Robbie didn’t answer right away. First he marched to the cabinet and poured himself another drink, making Gordon wonder if too much drink was the trifle, and if so, it was indeed no trifle. No woman of sense wanted to marry a drunkard.
“If I’m to act as your solicitor in this matter, Robbie, I have to know all the details,” Gordon said quietly, beginning to feel a bit sorry that he’d accepted Robbie’s invitation.
He thought his friend had asked him there because they were friends and it had been a long time since they’d seen each other, not because he needed legal advice, yet now there was a possibility he was going to get embroiled in a case he’d prefer to avoid.
Robbie gulped down his whiskey and when he looked at Gordon again, he appeared even more haggard, as if telling the truth was physically painful. Nevertheless, he smiled his merry, charming smile—only this time, it seemed more like a death’s-head grin to Gordon.
“No need to look so stern, Gordo. It was only a dalliance with one of the maids, the sort of thing that goes on all the time.”
He should have guessed it would be something like this. Robbie had always had “high spirits,” as their headmaster had called it when Robbie had been discovered with one of the maids at school. Indeed, he’d been famous for his liaisons and the envy of every boy in school.
But that was in the world of males. He could easily imagine—and sympathize with—a potential bride’s dismay at learning of her future husband’s lustful activities with a servant. “Did you assure her you’d be faithful once you were married?”
Robbie looked at Gordon as if he’d suggested giving up food and drink. “No. Why would I? Why should I?”
Gordon’s heart sank. “Because you were going to make such a promise when you said your marriage vows.”
“Gad, Gordo, don’t tell me you, with your profession, are naive enough to think any man’s really going to be faithful to his wife?”
“I’ve met several who are,” Gordon replied, recalling some of the happily married clients who’d passed through his offices.
Robbie slouched onto an armchair near the sofa and frowned like a petulant child. “Sometimes I forget you’re…” He fell silent and picked at a bit of lint on his lapel with his slender fingers that had never done a day’s work.
“Not of your class?” Gordon finished for him.
His friend blushed, the fire of his anger apparently quenched as he regarded Gordon with dismay, and the first sign of genuine remorse. “I’m sorry, Gordon.” He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’ll be perfectly honest with you. Yes, I dallied with one of the maids, but I never thought a fiancée or even a wife would really mind. I mean, you were at school. You heard the other boys talking about their fathers’ and brothers’ mistresses and lovers. It’s accepted in our world, or at least condoned. It was just a maid, after all. It’s not like I was keeping a mistress in the house. And I turned her out as soon as Moira learned about her.”
While Gordon was certainly well aware that many rich and titled men treated women like their personal toys to be used or discarded at will, he didn’t approve of that selfish behavior. And if Robbie thought hearing that the maid had lost her place because of their liaison was going to increase Gordon’s sympathy for his cause, he was even more mistaken. Gordon had helped too many servants who’d been seduced and cast out by their employers, suing for back wages at the very least, to have any sympathy for a master who took advantage of one.
In spite of his efforts to keep a blank countenance, his face must have betrayed something of his feelings, for Robbie’s next words had more than a tinge of self-defence. “It’s not as if the maid wasn’t willing. She was, I assure you. Very willing. Indeed, I think she seduced me.”
Gordon had heard this sort of excuse many times, too. “You were her master, Robbie. She might have felt she couldn’t refuse.”
“Of course she could!” Robbie retorted, hoisting himself to his feet. “I’m hardly some kind of brutal ogre.”
No, he wasn’t. Nevertheless…
“And I was honest enough not to make a promise to Moira that I wasn’t going to keep. But did she appreciate that? No, she looked at me as if I’d committed murder.”
Robbie ran his hand through his hair before starting for the cabinet again. “Maybe if she hadn’t been so angry…” Wrapping his hand around the decanter, he shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know what I would have done if she’d been calmer.” He walked away without pouring another drink and went to the fireplace. He picked up the poker and vigorously stirred the coals, sending ash swirling upward.
“Maybe instead of suing her, you should be grateful,” Gordon said quietly. “If you’d married her and strayed, and then she found out—”
“We would have been married and there would have been nothing she could do about it. She would have learned to accept that it’s a nobleman’s privilege, as my mother did and her mother before her.”
Gordon didn’t like what he was hearing. It smacked of brutal arrogance, of utter selfishness and a complete disregard for the feelings of another human being, the sort of attitude that spurred him to find justice for the weak and abused and cheated, and especially for women, who had so few rights under the law.
Rising, he went to face his friend, the better