Page 44 of Stolen By the Duke of Stone

If William were Andrew’s love child, Jessamine would not be furnishing so much love and affection for him. At least, that was what she hoped the world would think.

For her part, she didn’t know what she would do. Whatever the sins of their parents, a child was an innocent. If Andrew had been unfaithful—although, given when they married, it would be an indiscretion long before he had even met her, so it wouldn’t have been a betrayal in that sense—then she would be angry with him, but not with the child.

Never with the child.

William smiled up at her, chubby fists waving, and Jessamine took him on a tour of the garden.

Lady Marwich, who had clearly made it her mission to protect William’s reputation with every bone in her body, held him and loudly said that he looked just like Mr. Walter Kinley, the cousin to whom they were pretending William belonged.

“After all,” Lady Marwich confided in Jessamine as William was being handed to yet another cooing lady, “why should he not resemble Mr. Kinley? All babies look the same in my opinion, and I ought to know, considering I had six of my own.”

“Did you ever see Mr. Kinley as a baby?” Jessamine asked.

“I might have done,” Lady Marwich said vaguely. “I saw several babies of that time, and I could not now tell you who they belonged to. I expect I even saw your illustrious husband as a babe. His mother and I were friends. Not close, you understand, but she looked to me as a sort of mother figure, though I was only a decade or so her senior. Poor girl.”

Jessamine cast another glance at Andrew. He had been somber almost the entire party so far, and she couldn’t quite understand why. “Why was she a poor girl?”

“Only her choice of husband. One’s husband can make or break one’s life, you know. And poor Clarissa picked Ronald to be her husband. A mistake. He was not a kind man, and although he loved her, it is my firm belief that love is not enough.”

Jessamine kept an eye on William, content to be passed around the group like a particularly large potato. “How so?”

“Well, one cannot suppress one’s nature, dear. Not even for the sake of love, although it’s all very well and romantic to suppose they can. She thought he could for her, and she was sadly mistaken. Poor girl.” Lady Marwich clucked her tongue. “And then she paid the ultimate price.”

Jessamine gasped. “He killed her?”

“Of course not. Do be sensible, dear. But she died, and perhaps if she had been in a different, happier situation, she might not have done.”

Lady Marwich’s face softened, and Jessamine knew she was thinking about her own mother, who truly had paid the ultimate price. She had loved a man she ought not, and she had married him, and when he tired of her, he disposed of her as easily as one might shoot a horse.

A distasteful thing, but one that he did not shy away from doing.

Jessamine’s chest felt too tight. She sipped at the air.

“Which is, of course, why I encouraged you to marry your duke,” Lady Marwich continued, seemingly oblivious to Jessamine’s breathless hurt. “He might be a trifle stern at times, and one can see the soldier in him, but he is a good man, and honorable, and he will do you right. He has done already.” She leveled a serious look at Jessamine. “And if you ask me, you ought to be making more of an attempt to get closer to your husband. Get to know him. A man like that, trapped in his head, needs a woman’s gentle touch.” She rapped Jessamine’s arm with her fan. “A gentle touch, mind. Don’t you go barging in there like a bull in a china shop just because you think he might need a little teasing out of himself.”

Jessamine looked at Andrew again. He was listening politely to an older lady, his face an impassive mask, but he stood as though he were standing to attention.

Or, perhaps, as though he were protecting himself.

Something about being here had hurt him in some way, perhaps even in a similar way to the way in which she had been hurt.

And she would find out how.

She didn’t get her opportunity until much later on that evening, when the guests had finally returned home, and Jessamine had finally put William down to sleep. Lucy was with him, knitting in the chair by the corner, and so Jessamine felt it was safe to see her husband, at least for a little.

Her heart rattled in her chest as she rapped on the door to his bedchamber. This was a room she had never dared enter before. He had been in hers, of course, but that had been a very different experience.

She sucked in a long, deep breath at the quiet “come in” and finally ventured inside. Andrew was sitting on the bed, his hands braced against his knees, his coat and waistcoat tossed over a chair. At the sight of his shirtsleeves, Jessamine’s stomach twisted and turned like a coiling snake.

“What is it?” he asked, raising his gaze to her as though reluctantly.

Jessamine looked down at herself. She still wore the gown they had purchased together; she’d thought it better than changing into her nightwear for this conversation, but now she wondered if it was sending the wrong message.

A message like Kiss me, Andrew. Kiss me.

She cleared her throat and kept her distance. If she came any closer, she would be tempted to run her fingers through his messy hair and step in between his legs and tilt his head up to hers, so she might see every particle of his blue eyes.

And that would not—could not—happen.