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He hated the way his cheeks warmed with embarrassment. And with shame, for the way she said it, as though it was a perfectly reasonable thing for Sophie to think. Which it was. But dammit, it wasn’t reasonable. If he could take it all back, he would.
He cleared his throat, but before he could speak, she said, “Of course, she’s wrong, too.”
“She is?” he said, his voice an octave higher than he would have liked.
“You’re not trying to punish me. You know that it’s impossible.” She looked up then, blue eyes meeting his. “You can’t punish someone who has nothing to lose.”
The words stung. They had when she’d spoken them in his office at Parliament, and they stung now. Except here, he was closer. And he was looking more carefully. And that’s when he saw it. The truth. The lie.
She did have something to lose.
But what?
“You’re right. I am not out for revenge.” She looked away then, as though she knew he could see into her, and she wanted to protect herself. He pressed on. “Would you like to know what Sesily thinks?”
She missed the button she was working on. “No.”
He watched her grip the hook more firmly. Try again. Miss again. He stepped closer, taking the hook from her hand. Turning her toward him. She snatched her arm away. “I don’t need your help.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said. “You’ve never needed me.”
It’s always been I who needed you.
He left that bit out, instead extending his hand to her. “Dinner awaits.” Not that he cared. He’d stand here next to her, breathing her air, for the rest of time if she’d let him.
She exhaled too harshly and slapped her arm into his outstretched hand. “Fine.”
He worked the button hook, ignoring the irritation in her voice. “Sesily thinks I want you back.”
She shook her head. “Sesily doesn’t know anything about marriage.”
He rather thought she knew quite a bit. He finished the buttons and ran a thumb across the soft silk. “Finished.” He did not release her, but he did not hold her, either. Instead, he reveled in the feel of her, of this woman for whom he’d searched for years. For whom he’d longed for years.
I want you back.
What if he said it? What would she do?
Her eyes lifted to his, her black lashes impossibly long. For a moment, he thought she would say something. Something important. Something that might change everything. But she didn’t. Instead, she took her arm from his grasp and said the least important thing she could say. The thing he’d just said himself. “Dinner awaits.”
They never said the things that were important.
They were descending the great central manor stairs when she spoke again. “It’s time you participate in this process, Mal. You’ve a choice to make.”
You, he thought. I choose you.
He swallowed back the words. “The competition begins in earnest tonight then?”
She nodded. “It does.”
“With what? Fencing? Fighting? Cutthroat charades?” Her lips twitched in a little smile, and he was quite proud of himself.
“Nothing quite so . . . on the nose.”
“No rounds? What a pity.”
She snickered. “We begin with food. She must be able to keep your house.”
He didn’t give a damn about food, but he could pretend. “Ah. Hence the duck.”
They made for the dining room. “I know you like duck.”
He shot her a look at her insistent words. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
“I spent months learning what you liked. Before we were married and after, even when I was not welcome in your house.” He couldn’t look away from her, even as she stared ahead, refusing to meet his eyes. “I had every intention of planning your meals. Of keeping your house. Of being your . . .”
She trailed off, but he heard the word. Wife.
And he also heard the past tense.
Why were they always in the past?
“Also, I know you loathe asparagus,” she said, and the words were injected with something akin to smug triumph.
“I do,” he said.
“You just wanted to undermine me.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.” Not that it was an excuse, but it was the truth.
“You never said we had to interact.” He sighed, and she misunderstood it for irritation. “You know, you brought this upon yourself, Haven. You decided you wanted a new wife. You decided you wanted me to select her. This is the process. Imagine. You might even like one of them.”
But he wouldn’t love one of them.
“I don’t need to like them to marry them,” he said, knowing he sounded like a beast.
“It helps, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “We never liked each other.”
“Nonsense,” she said as they approached the dining room. “If we hadn’t liked each other so much, perhaps it all wouldn’t have gone so wrong.” Before he could reply, she said, “I’ve put you with Miss Mary. Be kind,” and nodded to the footman standing guard outside the dining room. The boy opened the door, revealing the motley crew of houseguests, who all turned to see the duke and duchess arrive.
“Wait,” he said, and she had to turn back else risk censure for ignoring him. There were benefits to being a duke. He lowered his voice and said, “What do you think I brought you here for?”
They’d discussed her sisters’ theories. But he cared only for hers.
She watched him for a long moment before she said, low enough that only he could hear, “I think I am here to be your toy.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“You don’t want me, but you don’t want anyone else to have me, either. You never have.” They were not true, but the words stung with brutal honesty, because she believed them. And then she added, “You don’t want any part of a life with me.”
The words sent a chill through him, evoking a memory he’d forgotten. A memory he wanted to expel immediately. Hang dinner and everyone at it. “Sera—”
She shook her head. “Your Grace. I have been in this particular position before.” She was already turning to the room, where a collection of fresh-faced women was waiting.
At a table laden with asparagus.
He looked to his wife, knowing smirk on her lips.
She was wrong. He did want her. He wanted the life with her.
And, this time, he would not stop until he had it.
Chapter 15
Tick Tock Talbot Triumphs!
April 1833
Haven House, Mayfair
He heard her the moment she entered the house.
If Haven were honest, he heard her the moment her carriage pulled to a stop in the street outside the door. The moment she stepped out, like a goddamn queen. He couldn’t see her from his study, but he could feel her, changing the air in the square beyond. Thieving it.
He heard her in the sharp rap of the knocker on the door, and for a heartbeat, he considered telling the footman not to answer.
But therein lay the problem that would always exist between him and Seraphina Talbot—he would always answer her call. Like a damned sailor to a siren. It had been three days since they’d been caught, with another week to pass before they were tied together forever. And it would only grow worse after they married.
“Where is he?” The question was fairly thundered, the frustration and anger in the words rocketing through him on a flood of similar emotions. And anticipation. And desire.
Shame flooded him with the last. He shouldn’t want her. He should want to be rid of her. He should want never to see her again. He should want her punished for what she’d done—trapping him into this farce of a marriage, which was no farce at all because the entire aristocracy and every gossip rag in Britain seemed to know the truth of it.
“I shall stay here all day until he is receiving, so you’d might as well bring me to him.” Haven stoo
d at that, telling himself he was heading for the door to his study because he wanted to protect his servant from her wrath and not because he was tied to her like a dog on a lead.
“M-my lady,” the footman stammered beyond. “I sh-shall see if the duke is at home.”
“No need,” she said.
“My lady! You cannot simply . . .”
But no one had ever successfully told Seraphina Talbot what she could and could not do, and she certainly wasn’t going to begin taking instruction from a footman when she did not take it from the footman’s master. “Oh, but I can! Don’t you read the papers? We are to be married!”
Anger flared at her words and Mal set his hand to the door handle of his office, preparing to summarily exit her from his property.
He opened the door as she arrived. “We’re not married yet, Lady Seraphina. I’ve still a week before I put my special license to use.”
One mahogany brow rose in a perfect arch. “I assure you, I am well aware of my ever-tightening yoke, Your Grace.”
It was his turn to look surprised. “It is I who limits your freedom, then?”
“That is the way of men and women, is it not?” She smacked him in the chest with a newspaper. “You punish me all you like. That is the bed in which I lay. But you leave my sisters out of it, you bastard.”
He took the paper. “I’m sure we are both a bit saddened by the fact that I am not, in fact, a bastard. If only I were, we wouldn’t be in such a situation.” When she did not reply, he looked to the paper, instantly knowing to what she was referring. Still, he could not resist irritating her. “The king is vacationing in Bath.”
“I should like to dunk you in a bath,” she said, setting a finger to the paper. “There.”
He’d read the story earlier in the day. Haven Hooked by Huntress! Irritation flared as he was returned to it. Irritation and hot embarrassment.
She did not wait for him to recover. “Shall I recite it from memory? Men!, warn the clearly deeply concerned editors of the News. Mind yourselves! Lowborn ladies lurk London-wide, longing for largesse!” Mal grimaced at the alliteration. She noticed. “Oh, you do not care for the overwrought language? Let me move on, for it gets significantly worse! Heed the harrowing tale of the Duke of Haven! Do not fall victim to wicked, wanton Wisteria . . . no matter how willing! These are Dangerous Daughters, all!”
He looked to Sera. “Do you wish me to disagree?”
She looked as though she wished him dead. “You don’t even know my sisters.” She raised her voice. “You never even came to my home to attempt to know them.”
“I do not know them,” he said. “But as it is my name being dragged through the mud and you who is doing the dragging, I am not predisposed to trust them with unmarried men.”
“Oh, yes. Poor unmarried men, weak-willed, doughy boys with neither control nor intelligence. So easily marked and ruined by women—ever more powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were all descended of witches.”
He raised a brow.
She continued, “Poor, sad men, so kind and blameless, fairly wandering the streets in their impotent impressionability. How well they must be protected from the wiles of women, who want nothing but their destruction.” She paused. “That is our tale, is it not? You, the tragically heroic Samson, and me, the temptress Delilah, thieving your power?”
Malcolm’s gaze narrowed. “You tell me. Delilah took money and land.”
“I took nothing from you.”
“No,” he said. “You did worse. There was no honorable thievery in your actions. You made a trade for your spoils.”
She gasped. “Are you calling me a whore?”
“Your words, Sera. Not mine.”
He should never have said it. For a moment he thought she might strike him. He would have taken it. Would have deserved it, even. But she didn’t. She straightened, her shoulders going stiff and square, and her fingers curling into fists. He stood, prepared for the blow. Knowing he deserved it and somehow unable to apologize for his behavior. He was too proud and too angry.
As was she. “Someday, you shall have to listen when I speak, Malcolm.”
“But not today.”
“I apologized.”
“Forgive me if three days is not enough for me to come to my senses about my soon-to-be wife trapping me into marriage.”
She did not look away. “You were there as well, Your Grace.”
“Yes. But with different intentions.” He turned away, not wanting to have the conversation again. Not wanting to remember. He waved at the door. “You are welcome to leave.”
“We do not have to marry.” She’d said it a dozen times in the hours following their discovery. Another dozen the day after. Of course they had to marry. “I made a mistake,” she added, softly. “I should never have agreed—”
“Stop.” He didn’t wish to hear it, the confirmation that she’d trapped him. He did not wish to relive the moment of realization.
She did not stop. “And if I told you it wasn’t a trap? Not at the start? Not in any of the days leading up to the end? Because it wasn’t a trap, Malcolm.” Christ, he wanted to believe her. “It was all real. I was me and you were you and everyone said it couldn’t be—”
“Stop.” He could barely contain his rage. “Still, you weave your pretty tale. I don’t care.” He took a breath, forcing himself calm. “You landed your duke, as my mother landed my father before me. I thought you were in it for me, and you were in it for a title and I should have seen it coming and that is that.”
Silence fell, thick and unpleasant as she considered her next words and he willed them to be anything but another lie. He did not think he could stomach another lie. Not from this woman who had seemed so much the truth for so long.
Finally, she spoke, something like panic in her words. “I’ve thought about this; if I leave—if I disappear, I give my sisters a chance at futures unencumbered by my scandal.”
“You can’t cleanse the scandal from them,” he said. “They own it as they own your name. They are—forever—Dangerous Daughters. Just as I am always Hoodwinked Haven.”
She swallowed and looked away. “I never intended for this. I simply thought they would find us and we would marry. And we would be happy.”
He could not contain the humorless laugh at that. “That’s the irony, is it not? That we would have been happy.”
Her eyes went wide. “And why can’t we be? I made a mistake! I love—”
“No.” The word, cold and full of anger, stopped the words. Thank God. How long had he told himself love was not a thing he would ever have? How long had he believed it was not real? And then he’d met Sera, and everything had changed. Everything, and nothing. He crossed the room and poured himself a drink at the sideboard. “Don’t ever say it. Not to me. There is no room for that here. Not anymore.”
“Malcolm,” she said, soft and achingly beautiful, and he refused to face her for fear of what he would find. He did not have to turn. He could hear the sorrow, despite its silence. Christ, he wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe her.
She inhaled, a little sniffle the only hint that he might have upset her. “If you let me go, you shall have . . .” She paused, considering the rest of her words. When she resumed speaking, he heard the truth. “I should like to give you a future, as well. One that might have happiness. Surely you cannot wish for a marriage to punish us both forever.”
“Don’t you see?” he said. “I am the product of this marriage. I watched my parents punish each other for years. My mother the huntress and my father the hunted. And me, the prize in the balance,” he added, ignoring the pain that threaded through him as he spoke. “That is marriage to me. And it seems it will be marriage for me, as well.”
“Then why choose it?” she asked, frustration and confusion in her words. “Why not find another?”
There was no other. Didn’t she see that? This was how it ended, the sins of the father, revisited upon the son. “All marriage is u
nhappy,” he said. “That’s what you taught me.”
Her eyes went wide. “How?”
There was no reason to lie to her. “When I met you, Sera, I had hope for something different and new. I had hope that we would forge our own path through marriage and destroy what my parents had wrought. I trusted you to help me do it—God knows I’ve no idea how to make a marriage happy. My parents could not stand to be in the same room with each other.”
“Mal,” she said, softly, and he loathed the sympathy in the words. The pity in them. He didn’t want her kindness. He wanted to remember her betrayal. It was easier that way. And then she said, “I don’t want that for my children,” and it did not seem easy at all.
“There shan’t be children.”
She gasped. “What?”
Children were no longer in the cards. They had not been since the afternoon at Highley, when she’d trapped him. He wasn’t interested in bringing another child into the life he had lived. “I’ve cousins. They may have the title.”
“You do not wish for an heir?”
He looked to her then, meeting her beautiful blue eyes, wide and honest. How many times had he been lost in those eyes in the last few weeks? How many times had he believed what he saw in them? “I do not. I’m not interested in a child who is nothing more than a pawn in his parents’ chess match.”
She was silent for a long moment, her throat working as she searched for words. “Is this your way of punishing me?”
He raised a brow. “You wish for children?”
“Of course. They are part of life.”
He imagined them, her children—a line of them with mahogany curls and bright, blue eyes, long frames and wide smiles. She would make beautiful children. They would.
Except they wouldn’t.
He turned away, toward the window that looked out on the rolling estate beyond. “I don’t want any part of that life.” Three months ago, it had been truth. Three days ago, it was a lie.
