“Perhaps just a little bit noodled.”
Lord Maccon looked shamefacedly down at the floor of his cell.
“It is time for you to face up to your responsibilities, my lord. Three weeks is enough time to wallow in your own colossal mistake.”
“Pardon me?”
Professor Lyall had had more than enough of his Alpha’s nonsensical behavior, and he was a master of perfect timing. Unless he was wrong, and Professor Lyall was rarely wrong about an Alpha, Lord Maccon was ready to admit the truth. And even if Lyall was, by some stretch of the imagination, incorrect in his assessment, the earl could not be allowed to continue to be ridiculous out of mere stubbornness.
“You aren’t fooling any of us.”
Lord Maccon resisted admission of guilt even as he crumbled like the metaphorical cracker. “But I turned her out.”
“Yes, you did, and wasn’t that an idiotic thing to do?”
“Possibly.”
“Because?” Professor Lyall crossed his arms and dangled the key to his Alpha’s cell temptingly from one fingertip.
“Because there is no way she would have canoodled with another man, not my Alexia.”
“And?”
“And the child must be mine.” The earl paused. “Good gracious me, can you imagine that, becoming a father at my age?” This was followed by another much longer pause. “She is never going to forgive me for this, is she?”
Professor Lyall had no mercy. “I wouldn’t. But then I have never precisely been in her situation before.”
“I should hope not, or there’s a prodigious deal regarding your personage about which I was previously unaware.”
“Now is not the time for jocularity, my lord.”
Lord Maccon sobered. “Insufferable woman. Couldn’t she have at least stayed around and argued with me more on the subject? Did she have to cut and run like that?”
“You do recall what you said to her? What you called her?”
Lord Maccon’s wide, pleasant face became painfully white and drawn as he went mentally back to a certain castle in Scotland. “I’d just as soon not remember, thank you.”
“Are you going to behave yourself now?” Professor Lyall continued to wave the key. “Stay off the formaldehyde?”
“I suppose I must. I’ve drunk it all, anyway.”
Professor Lyall let his Alpha out of the cell and then spent a few minutes fussing about the earl’s shirt and cravat, tidying up the mauling Lord Maccon had inflicted while attempting to clothe himself.
The earl withstood the grooming manfully, knowing it for what it was: Lyall’s unspoken sympathy. Then he batted his Beta away. Lord Maccon was, when all was said and done, a wolf of action.
“So, what do I have to do to win her back? How do I convince her to come home?”
“You are forgetting that, given your treatment of her, she may not want to come home.”
“Then I shall make her forgive me!” Lord Maccon’s voice, while commanding, was also anguished.
“I do not believe that is quite how forgiveness works, my lord.”
“Well?”
“You remember that groveling business we once discussed during your initial courtship of the young lady?”
“Not that again.”
“Oh, no, not precisely. I was thinking, given her flight from London and the generally slanderous gossip that has resulted and permeated the society papers ever since, that public groveling is called for under such circumstances.”
“What? No, I absolutely refuse.”
“Oh, I don’t believe you have a choice, my lord. A letter to the Morning Post would be best, a retraction of sorts. In it you should explain that this was all a horrible misunderstanding. Hail the child as a modern miracle. Claim you had the help of some scientist or other in its conception. How about using that MacDougall fellow? He owes us a favor, doesn’t he, from that incident with the automaton? And he is an American; he won’t protest the resulting attention.”
“You have given this much thought, haven’t you, Randolph?”
“Someone had to. You, apparently, were not putting thought very high up on your list of priorities for the past few weeks.”
“Enough. I still outrank you.”
Professor Lyall reflected he may have, just possibly, pushed his Alpha a little much with that last statement, but he held his ground.
“Now, where is my greatcoat? And where is Rumpet?” Lord Maccon threw his head back. “Rumpet!” he roared, bounding up the steps.
“Sir?” The butler met him at the top of the staircase. “You yelled?”
“Send a man into town to book passage on the next possible channel crossing. It’s probably first thing in the morning. And from there a French train to the Italian border.” He turned to look at Lyall, who made his own more sedate way up the stairs from the dungeon. “That is where she has gone, isn’t it?”