He said nothing for the longest time while an odd battle played out on his face. “All right,” he finally said, refusing to look at her. “We’ll discuss it more tomorrow.” It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it now. Or perhaps ever. He had become such an uncharacteristically closed book since their marriage it could go either way.
“You never know, we might actually work well together.” Rather than resort to nagging him, she tried a different tack. “I am phenomenally clever, and you seem to be of above-average intelligence—for a duke.”
As she had hoped, that brought amusement back into his eyes. “You are a supremely irritating pain in the neck, Portia. Do you know that?”
“Does it make me odd that I take that as a compliment?” She fluttered her lashes to force him to flash his dimples. “But be careful as such a pretty one might convince me to stay married to you.”
“Heaven forbid.” But he tugged her closer as he spun her around, and the solid heat of his body against hers did more than turn her head.
It made it want.
Leo did not care that he was being rude or that he had been absent from the ball for over an hour; after Portia’s latest bombshell, he still needed the air outside.
It had not occurred to him that in seeking proof of Nolley’s guilt—he would pay for all the bruises he had placed on Portia’s skin—Leo was also giving her a clear and easy path out of their marriage. One free of any threat of transportation to the other side of the world. He had been investigating the constable because he wanted to wipe the floor with the scoundrel and because he had promised her that he would get that first blot on her record erased. That blot that had been all his fault. That the evidence of the man’s guilt was also exactly the sort of evidence that would expediate an annulment had not once crossed his mind.
But now she was not only delighted at the prospect, but she wanted to help him do it, and he did not doubt that his reluctant but clever wife would manage to do that in record time, when time was rapidly becoming his enemy.
Leo could not keep stalling and hope that the sorry state of relations between them would somehow miraculously fix themselves. Nor could he keep her as his duchess against her will. That would not result in the sort of happy union he wanted with the exasperating woman he had fallen head over heels for.
“I had a feeling I would find you out here.” Instead of the woman he desperately wanted to seek him out, his mother joined him on the stone bench outside the Assembly Rooms. “Hiding again.”
“It is stuffy inside.”
“Portia seems to be coping well. She’s chatting with some of Abigail’s new friends.”
“I might have known she would gravitate toward the placard wavers.”
“In the continued absence of her husband in her life, I am just glad that she has found some people who want to spend some time with her.”
“If you came out here to lecture me, Mother, know that I am not in the mood.”
“Your eyebrows gave that away, dear. They are just like your father’s and become quite ferocious when you are in high dudgeon.” Her sigh was wistful. “I wish he was here to help you through all this as Rafe would know precisely what to do.”
“I wish he was here too, Mama.” Because Leo was drowning and no longer knew which way was up. “Portia wants an annulment.”
“I think that shethinksshe does, because she thinks you do too. She is going to continue to believe that until you let her know otherwise.”
There seemed little point in denying that when his mother had always had a canny knack of knowing exactly what her offspring were feeling. “I don’t know what I want.”
“Poppycock, Leo. You know. You’ve known from the moment you first clapped eyes on her. You are too much like your father not to know your own heart.”
He only huffed in response, so she took his hand and held it tight. “We were all talking about him today. Reminiscing. And it reminded me of when your father and I first met. He rode his horse too fast through a puddle just as I arrived at the fayre and splattered my pretty new dress in mud.” She got such a faraway look in her eyes whenevershe spoke of him that Leo could not help wondering how she bore the loss when she had loved his father to distraction. His heart was in pieces at just the thought of Portia leaving. To lose her was not something he could imagine ever coping with.
“I told him off.” His mother smiled because telling her husband off was something that she had done regularly with almost the same passion as she had loved him. “And he apologized but I would have none of it. He was just too cocky and handsome and charming.” She sighed at the memory. “It was such an inauspicious start to an epic love story, but it would not have been one at all if your father hadn’t been the stubborn, I-always-know-best fellow that he was. I was quite content to dislike him in perpetuity, but he got it into his thick skull that I was the only one for him, and thus he persisted. And oh my goodness did he persist! He pursued me relentlessly and wooed me shamelessly until I had completely run out of excuses to resist him. I never stopped wanting to strangle him though, because all the things I loved about him were also all the things that drove me mad.”
“And your point is?”
“If you want the girl, Leo, go get her.”
“In case it has escaped your notice, Mother, I already have her.”
“Not the bit that you want though.” She touched her heart and his bled some more.
“That part is already taken completely by the United League for Reform.”
“Having a worthy rival with both feet already in the door is a tricky thing to be sure.” She decided that was the perfect moment to stand. “But not insurmountable—unless you allow it to be.”
Chapter
