The right hook was sloppy.
Cassian stepped inside it, took the punch on his shoulder, pivoted, and drove his fist into Richard Sutton’s ribs. The Duke of Ronvale folded with a noise of pure outrage.
“Christ in heaven, Cassian.”
“You were dropping your guard.”
“I was breathing.”
“You were dropping your guard while breathing.”
Richard shuffled back with a gasp, raised his hands, and signaled for a moment. Cassian let him have it.
He flexed his shoulders. He had not slept. He had ridden hard from Bruton Street to Langton House, changed, walked the half mile to Threadgill’s, and asked for a sparring partner because his head was full of green eyes and the slope of a young woman’s neck, and the only treatment he knew for that condition was thirty minutes in a ring.
It was not working.
“You are vicious this morning,” Richard noted.
“I am efficient.”
“You are vicious.”
“Boys.” The voice came from the bench at the side of the ring. Matthew Turner, the Viscount Greencliff, sat on it with his cane across his knees and the patch over his left eye angled slightly toward the action as always.
He had been a major when he had lost his eye. He had been the youngest son of a baron when he had bought his commission, and the viscountcy he carried now was a borrowed thing, come to him late and unlooked-for. But before all that, he had wanted to be a poet which only Cassian had ever heard him admit. Now, in the long quiet years after Waterloo, he was the closest thing Cassian had to a father.
Cassian had stopped resenting that fact about four years ago.
“Boys,” Matthew called again, “a man who fights to forget a woman is a man who has not yet decided what he means by forgetting.”
Richard groaned. “Matthew. Please.”
“You may not like it, Richard, but there it is.”
“Matthew, I am being beaten by him because I am tired, not because I am thinking about a woman.”
“Mm. Cassian.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think about women?”
Cassian raised his guard and stepped back into the center. “Well, Iamgetting married.”
He had not meant to say it like that. He had meant to lead up to it. He had meant to make a pleasant ceremony of the announcement since both these men would be at the dinner this evening and the news would have to come out one way or another. He had not meant for it to come out as a punch.
Richard dropped his hands. He did not catch the right cross that followed. It hit him on the cheekbone and sent him stumbling back a full step. He raised one bare fist, pointed at Cassian withthe wrong end of it, and said in a voice of pure outrage, “Cassian Arnolds.”
“Richard.”
“You absolute—To whom?”
“Lady Alice Lockwood.”
“But you hate Lady Alice.”
“I do not, in fact, hate her.”