The Dissolute Duke

Now that was new. Sitting up, she tried to remember some more, but couldn’t. A new resolution firmed. He had taken her maidenhood without her consent and now would pay for it.

The laws of the land were there to protect the innocent and every Lord in his position had been brought up to acknowledge such a code. Ethics safeguarded chaos. When such tenets were broken, this was the result: a hasty marriage between strangers, flung together by the flimsy strands of expedience.

‘I was foolish to come to your house in the first place, your Grace, and more foolish to stay. This is my penance.’ She kept her tone distant, formal, just a polite conversation. When she leaned forwards she caught sight of herself in the wide shiny silver of an unused platter. Her cheeks were worse, even in the few short hours since leaving her chamber. She doubted she had ever looked quite so awful and her groom’s handsome visage just made everything a hundred times more humiliating. Shallow, she knew, but in all her girlhood fantasies she had not imagined herself appearing so very bedraggled at her own wedding feast.

Lord Fergusson came up behind them, placing one hand on each of their shoulders. ‘If you can have a marriage like I had for forty-three years, then you will be well blessed.’ His old eyes brimmed with kindness.

Tay Ellesmere simply looked across at her. Answer this as you will, he seemed to be saying, shards of irritation noticeable.

‘Indeed, Lord Fergusson,’ she replied, remembering Mary-Rose, his beautiful wife, who had passed away suddenly the previous summer.

‘But may I offer you a few words of advice? What you put into a marriage is what you get out from it and agreement is the oil that smoothes the way.’

‘Then with all the agreements between us, ours shall run most smoothly,’ Alderworth observed.

He had changed the meaning of the word ‘agreement’, but Lord Fergusson did not understand his reference. Her new husband’s hands were in his lap. Fisted. Not quite as indifferent as he made out to be. Another thought struck her. Every knuckle had been grazed as though he had only recently been in a fight. Was that why his eye was black and his jaw cut? Please, God, let it not have been her brothers who had hurt him.

‘I knew your uncle, Duke.’ This was said tentatively. ‘The Earl of Sutton.’

‘Unfortunate for you.’ Her groom’s tone was plain ice and Lord Fergusson left as quickly as he had come, a frown on his face as he scrambled away.

‘He is an old man who would do you no harm, your Grace, and he has only just lost his wife. Besides, this is a wedding and people expect—’

He broke in before she had finished. ‘What do they expect, Lucinda? All that is between us here is dishonesty and farce. The charade of a marriage and the farce of a happy ever after. And now you want me to lie about an uncle who was not fit to be around children, let alone one who—’ He stopped suddenly, his green eyes as dark as she had ever seen them, fathomless pools of torture. The real Taylen Ellesmere who lived beneath all he showed to the world was evident, the pain within him harrowing.

‘You speak about yourself as a child? This uncle, the Earl of Sutton, he was your guardian?’

Only horror showed now, though the shutters reflecting emotion closed even as she watched and the implacable ruthless Duke was back.

‘Enjoy your day, my dearest wife, because there are not many left to us.’

With that he stood and walked out of the room.

Chapter Five

God, she knew. Lucinda Alice Ellesmere was guessing his secrets as easily as if he had written them down for her, one after the other of sordid truth.

He should have remained silent, but the old man and his useless dreams had rattled him, made him remember his own hopes as his mother and father had spat and hissed each and every word to the other, unmindful of a small child who heard the endless malice and rancour. He had promised himself he would never marry and yet here he was, chained to a family who would like nothing better than to see him dead and buried.

‘If you slope off now you won’t get a penny, Alderworth.’ Cristo Wellingham came to his side, the room they were in empty. Unexpectedly Lucinda’s youngest brother produced a cheroot. ‘You have the look of a man who might need one,’ he said, offering a light and waiting as Tay took the first few puffs. Smoke curled towards the ceiling, a screen of white and then gone. Tay wished he could have disappeared as easily as it did and, closing his eyes for a second, he leaned back against the wall, enjoying the first rush of its effects.

‘I look forward to the day when the guilt of your sister’s lies finally brings her to her senses.’ The exhaustion in his voice was disconcerting, but the day had taken its toll and he was tired of the pretence.

‘When you will likely be squandering what is left of your blood money in some poverty-stricken dive, remembering the ill that you did to a blameless innocent and wondering how you came to such a pass.’

He laughed at that. ‘You did not enjoy a few of your wife’s charms before marrying her?’ A shadow rewarded the query and so he continued. ‘I kissed your sister and brought her home. That was all. If she insists otherwise, then I say she lies.’

‘With a reputation as disreputable as your own, a lack of belief in anything you say cannot be surprising.’

‘Then allow me one boon, Lord Cristo. Allow me the small privilege of some knowledge of how your sister fares once I have gone.’

‘Why would you want that? You have made it plain enough that a substantial payment constitutes the sum total of your care.’ He stepped back. ‘There won’t be more from where that came from, no matter what you might say.’

‘You will always hold her safe, then?’ Tay had not meant to ask the question, but it slipped from him like a living thing, important and urgent, the last promise he might extract before he was gone.

‘Safer than you damn well did,’ came the reply, but in Cristo Wellingham’s dark eyes puzzlement flickered. Using it to his advantage, Taylen pressed on.

‘If I wrote, would you give her my letters?’

‘Yes.’ Ground out, but honest. When Lucinda’s brother turned and left he was glad he had been given even that slight hope of contact.

Lucinda felt exhausted by all the smiles and good wishes given with such genuine congeniality that the scandal disappeared into a God-ordained union that restored the balance of chaos in a highly regulated world. A violation covered up. A wrong righted. A happy ending to a less-than-salubrious beginning.

She had been surprised at the way the Duke of Alderworth had stood next to her for the past twenty minutes, his manner with the guests at odds with his self-proclaimed lack of interest in polite society. Perhaps he, too, had finally seen that in a good show of pretence there lay freedom. When his arm touched hers the full length of warmth seared in, the shock of contact electric, her breath held still by an awareness that she had felt with no other before him.

If only she might remember what a night in his bed felt like. The very idea made her frown, because in it she sensed she was missing something important.

‘You look concerned.’ Alderworth used a gap in the line of well-wishers to address her directly.

‘It seems for all your reputation, people here are inclined to give you a second chance. I was wondering why.’

‘Perhaps it’s because you stand up as my bride, a Wellingham daughter who might deign to lend her name to my sullied one.’

‘No. It is more than that. They accord you a certain begrudging respect, which is interesting.’

‘Vigilance might be a more apt word!’ Unexpectedly he smiled at her, the green in his eyes relaxing into gold, and with the colour of his skin burnished into bronze by the outdoors and his dark hair so shortened, he looked … unmatched. Her brothers were handsome, but the Duke had some spark of incomparable beauty that set him apart from everyone else Lucinda had ever seen.

The vapidity of her thoughts held her mute.

‘Frowning does not suit you as much as laughter does,’ he remarked.

‘Of late there has not been too much to be delighted by.’

‘I am sorry for that.’

‘Are you?’ Even amidst a crowd of family friends she could not leave the question unvoiced.

She saw him glance around to check the nearness of those in his vicinity before he gave a reply.

‘I lived with lies all of my childhood, Duchess, and do not wish to encourage them. If you insist on such deception then that is your prerogative, but I will never understand it.’

Both her new title and his unwarranted anger made Lucinda step back, the same scene she had remembered at the breakfast table a week ago replaying over and over in her head.

His nakedness, the red wine, the feel of his warm skin against her own. The door locked and the key hidden. No opportunity to simply leave.

‘London is a haven for gossip, Duke, and because of your actions my name has been slandered from one edge of it to the other.’

‘A reputation lost for nothing, then.’