“Your mistress,” Whitmore pointed out, arching a brow at his friend.

“My former mistress sent me a note implying she was with child.”

“And you didn’t believe her?” Whitmore asked, leaning over the table to take his first shot.

“I was highly skeptical since I hadn’t been with her for months…since I began courting your sister, and because Melissa hadn’t accepted my decision to dispense with our arrangement with grace.”

“She was peeved,” Whitmore interpreted as he shot the red object ball into the nearest pocket.

Winning, Sebastian smiled and shook his head. “More like enraged. She’d been sending me angry letters all summer. After the first few, I stopped reading them. Threw them directly in the fireplace.”

Whitmore narrowed his eyes at Sebastian, who’d retrieved the object ball and had bent to take his second shot. “What made you read the one she sent two months after the wedding, then?”

“That’s just it,” Sebastian replied, sending his cue ball cracking against the object ball, which dutifully dropped into the pocket. “The letters had stopped before the wedding. It had been weeks since I’d received one. I thought perhaps she’d come around to see reason. Instead, I was disconcerted to read that she was claiming to be with child and that the babe was undoubtedly mine.”

“You had no choice but to go see for yourself,” Whitmore offered.

Sebastian sighed and stood up straight again. “Yes. Damn my morals to hell. If on the slight chance she was with child, my child, I, of course, would do the right thing by her and provide for her and babe. Only I had no intention of doing so without seeing for myself that she was, indeed, with child. She’d lied to me before and was prone to dramatics. I didn’t put it past her to dissemble to attract my attention, either. I had been ignoring her after all.”

“So, you went to her town house,” Whitmore continued.

Sebastian took another sip of brandy and shook his head, staring unseeing out the darkened windows into the snowy night. “Worst mistake I’ve made, and that includes the time you and I thought it would be a lark to fill Chancellor Hawkings’ bedchamber with honey and let bees loose inside.”

“Nearly got expelled from Eton,” Whitmore replied with a laugh and a wince.

“Nearly got beaten to death by my father,” Sebastian replied grimly, taking another sip.

“The moment you saw Melissa, you knew she’d been lying?” Whitmore probed, taking the next shot, which merely sent both Sebastian’s cue ball and the object ball flying.

“Oh, she tried hard enough,” Sebastian replied. “She’d tucked sheets under her skirts and pretended she had to remain abed because of the doctor’s instructions. But I quickly exposed her scheme by asking her some pointed questions about how far along she was and doing the maths in my head. She was flustered, and I pulled the sheets out from under the bedclothes. She admitted she’d invented the entire tale.”