“Well, you can,” he assured her. “Never doubt that again.” He chuckled. “Perhaps we should have you perform in the theater.”
“Even you wouldn’t be that scandalous,” she teased. “A wife who performs in the theater!”
“And a duchess, no doubt.”
They moved from the hallway into the parlor where Rosalie collapsed on the nearest settee. She suddenly felt very tired. All the energy that had been coursing through her before and during the meeting with Lord Redfield had now seeped out of her, leaving her depleted.
“Do you think he believed us?” she asked, looking up at the Duke, who had seated himself across from her on another settee. “I couldn’t tell if he was convinced.”
The Duke considered this. “I’m not sure,” he admitted slowly. “But I was certainly convinced. For a few moments, I was having trouble telling fact from fiction. He did look rather sold on the arrangement by the end.”
“I thought so,” she said, recalling the look of urgency on Redfield’s face as they had been leaving, “but he wouldn’t admit that he is profiting from the opium.”
“No, he is still cautious,” the Duke said. “But that caution also convinces me even more so of his guilt. Why wouldn’t he vehemently deny being involved if he was innocent? No, the only reason to stall is because he is, but he wants time to consider our offer.”
“That’s true,” she said, nodding at the sensibleness of this. “He certainly knows more than he was letting on. And if he wasn’t profiting from it, he would be furious with us for suggesting so. But maybe he is still considering whether or not to get involved.”
“In that case, our proposal will tell us whether or not he is an honest man or a scoundrel.”
He smiled at her, and she felt her heart swell. The smile was warm and caring—protective, even. It was the tenderest look he had given her ever since they had been caught together in the library at Violet’s house.
“For now, all we can do is wait,” the Duke continued. “Hopefully we will hear from Redfield in a few days. Until then, I propose that we try to find out as much as we can about the opium business.” He frowned. “I realized while I was speaking that I actually have no idea what the money from an investment would go towards. What is the infrastructure needed to sell opium?”
Rosalie laughed. “Oh, my innocent husband,” she teased. “He’s called the Beast of Carramere, but he doesn’t even know how to smuggle drugs.”
The Duke’s laugh was the sweetest sound she had ever heard.
The next few days were interminable. Rosalie tried to distract herself with books, and the Duke certainly had a large enough collection to keep her occupied, but for once, she found that reading wasn’t having the desired effect. No matter how exciting the book, she couldn’t keep her thoughts from drifting to Lord Redfield and what his answer would be.
“It’s because your life is more exciting than a novel,” the Duke said when she finally confided this to him over dinner on the second night after the meeting with Redfield. “For the first time, perhaps. This is what happens when you stop living in a fantasy and begin living your own life.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You forget my life has been one scandal after another. This isn’t the most unusual thing to happen to me.”
“But perhaps it’s the most thrilling,” he suggested.
She didn’t want to admit he was right, so she changed the subject.
To distract herself, Rosalie busied herself with starting to plan repairs to the house. It was true what the Duke had said to her: she really did have an unlimited budget and everything at her disposal to try and turn the rundown castle into a home.
The first thing she did was begin to air out the rooms, clean them, and sweep them.
“Then we must send for new linens from London,” she instructed the housekeeper. “It won’t do to have moldy sheets on the beds and moth-eaten curtains.”
“And what about the west wing?” the housekeeper asked her tentatively. “There is so much to repair, but His Grace has always refused to talk about any plans to have it fixed.”
Rosalie considered this. As much as she disliked the eyesore of the west wing—and as much as she hated to think of leaving the place in such dire conditions—she also didn’t want to do anything that would anger the Duke. Relations between them had been decidedly more congenial ever since the meeting with Redfield. She thought he liked the sense of adventure and doing something together. She certainly did.
“Let’s leave it how it is for now,” she said. “I will bring in builders from the local village to look at the rest of the castle, especially the bedrooms, and they can start on those first. Maybe by the time they’ve fixed up the rest of the castle, His Grace will be more open to discussing the west wing.”
For now, however, she wasn’t ready to shatter the fragile peace between them.
They were still sharing a bed, and while the Duke had been nothing but patient and respectful of her boundaries, she had felt the tension sharpening in the air between each night as they went to bed.
On the morning of the third day after visiting Redfield, she woke to find his arm had been thrown over her while she slept. She kept very still, pretending she was still asleep, while inside, her heart was hammering as wildly as the hoofbeats of a cantering horse.
For several minutes, she lay there, not moving, until at last she realized she was being silly.
Clearing her throat, she waited. The Duke made a soft, sleepy sound and shifted but not enough. She cleared her throat again, and this time, he rolled away from her, taking his arm with him.
