“About four or five months along,” Hastings said cheerfully, adding, “I’m very sad to say, your lordship.” It had suddenly occurred to him that he himself was in a precarious position. A nerve was pulsing in Alex’s jaw, and his eyes were glowing with rage. Hastings’s mouth shut, and then opened only to say, weakly, “I’m sure there’s no basis in fact for this report, my lord.”

Alex just looked at him. Then he reached across Hastings’s oak desk and ruthlessly grabbed his carefully arranged cravat, jerking him to within an inch of Alex’s furious glare.

“I should hate to hear that you ever repeated any of this foul, slanderous information,” Alex told him through clenched teeth.

“I will not,” Hastings managed to squeak. He could feel sweat pouring down his back. Alex disdainfully pushed him back. Hastings took in a shaky breath. Alex turned on his heel and left without a word.

The minute the door shut, Hastings sat down plumply in his chair. He was trembling like an autumn leaf in a high breeze, he realized. Insane—that’s what Alexander Foakes was. A lunatic. He, Hastings, had only told Foakes what any man on the street could tell him. Just what did Foakes intend to do? Threaten half the population of London?

Hastings carefully cracked the knuckles on his left hand. It calmed him, and his heart began to slow down. Really, what a madman, he thought with a touch of conceit. He started on the knuckles of his right hand. Finally a little smirk touched Hastings’s mouth. His high-and-mighty lordship could abuse as many civil servants as he wished; it wouldn’t change the fact that his new wife was a trollop who was sleeping with his own brother. Hastings’s smile widened. He leaned back in his chair and began to hum a little tune.

Hastings disliked his own wife—a clutch-fisted, quarrelsome woman, he thought—but he could say without the slightest hesitation that she would never sleep with anyone but him. Indeed, she hated the whole performance, as she’d often told him. But if a man’s wife is not his own, well, that man is poorer than the poorest chimney sweep. That’s a fact, Hastings thought. And if that fact made the high-and-mighty earl a bit touchy, Hastings could understand and sympathize.