Safe.
On their wedding night, he’d used the word safe. Thinking Cassandra had cried out of fear, he’d told her she was safe with him. He’d meant that she could trust him to do his duty by her, and that, as his wife, she would want for nothing. But what he wanted now was even more consuming.
He wanted, though impossible, to take away all her fears.
Occasionally, he caught her gazing blankly at some decades or even centuries-old flourish of plaster or object of art gracing the walls of Harbury Hall. She was, he suspected, finding the life of a duchess more daunting than she’d anticipated. But how could he ease her unease when he’d never mastered his own?
From the day he’d pinned on the ducal coronet, he’d beendangling above the world, suspended as if he were one of those great balloons he’d once seen floating above the ground in Hyde Park, a monstrosity held aloft by fire and heat. Like those balloons, he’d found his trajectory just as impossible to control.
Those fears, he knew, had grown out from an even deeper dread, fright that had taken root so early in his youth he couldn’t place the time. He’d always been different from his family, emotional in ways they could not fathom.
Beholding beauty in the world inspired in him greater happiness; feeling pain, greater devastation. His father’s actions implied the sensitivity that made him different also made him loathsome. And he’d accepted that as truth.
But, perhaps, his differences made him capable of a deeper devotion.
After Viv had left him, anger had vined up from his fears, two emotional aspects with the same germination. Ever since, the wild flora now firmly fixed within him had grown sharper and thicker thorns.
Tonight, Cassandra had pruned those thorns with her simple act of love. Previously obscured possibility appeared. Now, he was certain he could change…improve. He could set aside the past. He could create a better future. Not just for himself and Cassandra, but for everyone on the estate.
With care and attention, he could mend the rifts Anderson’s odd behavior had created. Even if addressing the tenants’ concerns would mean a fundamental change to the way the estate had been run during his father’s time, he would make those changes. Anderson had always enjoyed the prior duke’s complete confidence, but Harbury intended to stand his ground.
Obviously, the old way was no longer working.
But estate decisions were the last things he wanted to contemplate right now. He’d much rather be focusing on his wife. Where had shegone?
He leaned over the bed, and, with a groan, he retrieved his nightshirt and banyan from the floor. If Marsden knew how carelessly he’d cast away his garments, he would be horrified. Almost as horrified—he smirked—as Cassandra had been when he’d first taken them off.
Ladies, apparently, were less captivated by the male form as most men were by the female shape.
By contrast, nearly every feminine figure fascinated him. Plump or skinny, heavy in the upper, rounded in the lower, or—saints be praised—shaped like a bloody violin. But he hadn’t lied when he’d told Cassandra that his desire was specific to her.
Now that he knew his wife better, he understood her kind nature formed part of the secret to her allure. When he’d chosen her that night at Almack’s, had some part of him grasped that her beauty was her heart made manifest?
Possibly.
One thing, he knew for certain: tonight, she’d given him the gift of her uninhibited release, a gift he intended to cherish. As for her tender and nurturing embrace… Well, unrest and uncertainty be damned, he would not allow anything in the wide world to come between them.
He’d tell her now, only, first, he had to find her.
He donned his nightshirt, shrugged back into his banyan, and rose from the bed to check his chamber. Cassandra wasn’t the only creature missing. Mercy had disappeared from his bed as well. He pressed his hand into the indentation the puppy had left in his pillow.
Dry, thank heaven.
He hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly when he’d ordered an untrained puppy to go to sleep atop his bed. He did not, however, regret his decision. Even a wet bed would have been worth his wife’s surrender.
But now he had time to consider the puppy’s very presence.
WherehadMercy come from?
If the dog was a King Charles Spaniel—and he’d no reason to doubt Mrs. Pratt’s judgment on the subject—then the pup had been purposely bred. Mercy wasn’t just a mongrel, a stray. He must have been purchased.
Somewhere on the estate, someone was missing a dog. A very expensive dog. At a time when, according to Townsend, income was tight, and people were suffering.
He made a mental note to ask Anderson—
Anderson, again.
He halted his thought.
