The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the time Minnie snuffed her candle that night and slipped between her covers, all the emotion of the day had passed from her. She felt as if she were standing in the aftermath of a wildfire, the terrain around her blackened and burned as far as the eye could see. She could almost smell the smoke, could feel the hidden embers inside her that had not yet burned to cold ash.

  “Don’t fall in love with him, Minnie,” she warned herself. But the room was dark, and her bedsheets had not yet warmed from her body heat.

  If only he’d been less handsome, less wealthy…and not at all a duke. A blacksmith. A bookseller. Someone else with that keen mind, those piercing eyes, that brilliant smile that seemed to be made for her alone.

  Instead, he was one of the highest peers of the realm. He could have his pick of thousands of women. In fact, he was probably picking a woman right now—that was the sort of thing dukes did, was it not? Dukes entertained women as mistresses, choosing from blond and brown and black hair, depending on the whim of the evening, taking whatever they wanted and leaving a handful of coin as memory. Being a duke meant that one had a perpetual harem at one’s fingertips. All one had to do was ask for it.

  The thought should have disgusted her, but for some reason she imagined Robert—no, she had to think of him as the duke, not as a name, not as a person—looking over a passel of girls offered by a thin-faced proprietress. She imagined his gaze settling on some girl with honey-brown hair and a larger-than-usual bosom.

  “Her,” he would say. “I want her tonight.”

  I want you.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, to imagine that his desire—whatever inkling of it he had—would persist long enough for him to purchase a substitute. She writhed in her bed. But she couldn’t get the notion out of her mind.

  He might be in bed with her at this very moment. His hands would brush her breasts, like so. His lips would find not the palm of her hand, but her neck, her lips. There would be no hesitation, no holding back. There would be nothing but his rock-hard want.

  His body would cover hers, and she would surrender to him. She would spread her legs, wrapping them around him…

  Those thoughts were enough to warm her bed, but once she’d started the imagery, she could not shut it off. It was her own fingers between her legs, her own hand against her nipple. But she imagined him wanting her as much as she wanted him, taking her in her imagination the way she could never allow in real life. He plunged into her, hard; she shook as she brought herself to the brink. And when she came, biting her lip to keep herself from screaming, it was his face that she saw.

  The bed was too hot after that, so hot that she threw back the blanket and let the cold air wash over her, honing her nipples to hard points once more. But the cold didn’t bring the clarity she so desperately needed.

  She stood, crossed the room to the washbasin, and poured from the pitcher. The water was ice-cold; the washcloth rough against her skin.

  Maybe he had picked a woman tonight who looked like her. Maybe he hadn’t even picked a woman, but had sat in his chamber and done to himself what she had just done. The thought left her with a deep wistfulness.

  If only…

  “There are no ifs,” she told herself sharply. “Only what is.”

  This was the reality that she had to accept: What had just happened—that was the closest she would ever come to making love with the Duke of Clermont. One night, she might think of him, and if she were very lucky, he might spare a thought for her in response. Her throat tightened with yearning.

  It didn’t matter.

  She’d learned long ago that her own emotions never mattered. Things were what they were, no matter how she felt about them. And this particular emotion… This one had sent her reeling far enough off course.

  Still, she fumbled open her curtains. On another night, she might have looked down—down at the cabbage fields, down at the half ring of crushed gravel in front of her great-aunts’ cottage.

  Tonight, for the space of time it took her heartbeat to return to normal, she looked up. Up at the quarter moon, gleaming through the fringe of clouds, up at stars that twinkled for queen and peasant alike. She looked up until the clouds covered the moon and cut out all the light.

  It was much later that evening when Robert walked the streets of Leicester again—this time with Oliver beside him. The fog had descended, mixing with the coal smoke to form an unholy pea soup, one that clung to his coat. Somewhere, a church bell to his right began to chime the nine o’clock hour; it was joined shortly by its neighbors to the left, and then those behind him, before him—a chorus of bells that seemed all the more eerie within the quiet grip of the mist.

  “What is it?” Oliver finally asked. They’d been walking since the church had rung the half hour without saying a word.

  Robert clenched his fist in his pocket.

  “I am trying to do the right thing,” he finally said.

  The town was quiet. Strange, how sharply the factory whistle divided the days here. One moment, you could not escape the rattle of machinery; the next, it fell still and silent, like some noisome behemoth collapsing in its tracks. It left a curious silence in its wake, one louder than the quiet of a countryside. He could almost feel his teeth rattle with the sound the machinery did not make.

  “Is something going awry?” Oliver glanced at him.

  “There’s this woman…” Robert let out the words on a great whoosh of air, and his brother cackled aloud.

  “God, I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. Sebastian mentioned her and was shocked when I had no idea what he meant. Who is it?”

  Robert told him. Not everything—he couldn’t tell his brother about the handbills, as that was a risk that he insisted on taking alone. But about Minnie—how she seemed so quiet until she spoke to him. How she turned him upside down.

  “I kissed her. I can’t forget it,” he said. “I can’t do it again. I know how these things are done, and this isn’t right.”

  “It’s not right?” Oliver asked mildly.

  The silence seemed to hold an edge now. They rarely talked about the circumstances of their brotherhood, but it stood between them. Oliver’s mother had been a governess when the Duke of Clermont had visited her household. What choice did a governess have when a duke pursued? If she said yes, he would have her. If she said no, he would have her.

  “I don’t know what right is,” he finally said. “I’m a duke. She’s the great-niece of a woman who has a mere pretension to gentility. If I do something wrong here, you’re the only one I trust to punch me in the stomach.”

  Oliver shook his head. “It wouldn’t come to that.”

  The last of the bells faded in the distance. Robert could still feel her kiss, could still feel the want rise in his blood. “It might. You know who my father is. The sort of man he was.” His voice dropped. “And I want her.”

  There it was, said aloud. He wanted. He didn’t just want her body. So few people knew who he was, what he desired. And yet Minnie had accepted him at his word. She hadn’t bowed or scraped to him; instead, she’d told him that she overmatched him.

  More than that. He’d spent so long hiding how he felt, what he wanted. He had to work in Parliament to pass every bill that remotely advanced his goals, even while he gnashed his teeth at the slow pace of progress. The House of Lords bickered over the correct threshold for property ownership in voting while Robert chafed at the notion of any property threshold at all. They muttered about the privileges of peerage, when he wanted them all removed. But stating something so radical would have alienated them all. And so he kept it in. He argued minutiae. He voted for bills that made life a little more bearable when he wanted to scream at everyone.

  Minnie, now… There was a woman who knew what it was to hide what she felt. And he wanted her so badly, so damned badly.

  “I don’t trust myself,” he finally said.

  Oliver shrugged. “Why would you trust me, then? I have as mu
ch of Clermont in me as you do.”

  “You…” Robert stopped, turned to his brother. “That’s different.”

  “Same blood.” His brother took off his spectacles. “Same eyes. Same nose.”

  “But you…your…” He stumbled for an explanation. “I can be a right bloody bastard. You of all people should know that. And why you gave me a chance, I will never know.”

  “That’s easy.” Oliver shrugged and looked at the pavement. “If you didn’t take after the duke, I wouldn’t have to, either.”

  Robert stopped walking.

  “I’m not a prize, myself. I can be a right bloody bastard, too. I have a temper worse than anyone else in my family. Sometimes, when I was a child, I scared myself with my temper. I know I scared my mother.” Oliver shook his head. “I’m not your conscience, Robert. I’m not a man who will show you what’s right. My mother’s suffering didn’t wash me clean of Clermont’s blood.”

  “That’s not why I’m asking you.” The fog seemed to eat his words. “I’m asking you because…”

  When they’d been at Eton together, Oliver had spent hours fashioning cunning boxes from sheets of paper or whittling a little flock of sheep, complete with shepherdess, for his sisters. His mother had received sketches of the buildings, carefully made. And for his father…nothing was ever good enough for his father. One year, he’d been set on getting his father a pair of cufflinks. And so for months before November—because Mr. Marshall’s birthday was in November—Oliver had worked, whittling carvings for the other boys for pennies apiece, just so he could have the money for a gift.

  Robert had always watched in bemusement.

  “You’re asking me because…” his brother prompted.

  “Because I have nobody else to ask,” he said.

  Robert had always hoped for a family of his own—first imagining his father more caring than he was, then hoping that his mother would love him. When he’d realized how futile his daydreams were, his wants had shifted outward. It had started so subtly that he couldn’t pinpoint the moment.

  He’d had daydreams in which he accompanied Oliver home during the summer holidays. He’d imagined spending entire days together, talking and playing and boxing and fishing and doing whatever it was that brothers did.

  But even though that hadn’t happened—his father, and then his guardian, would never have allowed him to spend his holiday with mere tradespeople—he’d gone one step further. It wasn’t just a brother he coveted; it was an entire family.

  And, as it turned out, Oliver had one ready-made.

  In his daydreams, Oliver’s parents would grow to know him. Mr. Marshall would give Robert sage advice and occasional clouts on the shoulder, while Mrs. Marshall would slide him slices of gingerbread, or whatever it was that mothers were supposed to do. Those details had always been frustratingly vague, but it hadn’t mattered. In his wild fantasies, he’d imagined himself becoming something of a favored friend, an almost-son to these people who loved Oliver with no limitations.

  By the time he was sixteen, he’d invented an elaborate dream world—one in which he would fall in love with Oliver’s eldest sister (no relation; he’d made a point to convince himself on that score), and their difference in station be damned, he’d marry her anyway.

  Of course, he’d never met Oliver’s eldest sister. For that matter, he’d not met Mr. and Mrs. Marshall. But reality had no bearing on the substance of his dreams. Every time Oliver got a letter from home—or sent back another carving for a younger sister—Robert fell a little more in love with all of them. It didn’t matter who they were, what they were like. If they would only love him back, then he would finally belong.

  “Huh,” Oliver said, and punched him on the shoulder. A veritable love tap, that. “Well, I believe that you have nothing of your father in you.”

  Robert shrugged. “If you say.”

  But he’d had it proven otherwise—and by nobody so much as Oliver’s own family.

  It had gone like this. On the day that Oliver’s parents were finally to visit, Robert had dressed with painstaking care. He’d brushed his hair and his teeth twice over and had tied his cravat three times in an attempt to make himself look earnest and respectable. He found himself pacing the room with a restless, desperate energy while Oliver gave him odd glances.

  He knew that his daydreams were just daydreams. They were so idiotic, he had never mentioned them to his brother. But even if it was all bosh, even if they never loved him…they might still like him a little. Mightn’t they?

  The door opened. Robert turned.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marshall had to have been the most beautiful sight that he had seen. So utterly normal. They’d rushed forward, arms outstretched, and grabbed up Oliver. Who had scowled and made noises of complaint, the ungrateful wretch—noises like “Stop, Ma, not my hair,” and, “Don’t kiss me in front of the fellows!” All that fuss, just because they hadn’t seen him in a handful of months. Robert had watched from the other side of the room, a lump in his throat.

  And then the moment had come. After the affectionate greetings had been given, Oliver had turned. “Mother,” he’d said, “Father, this is—”

  But Mrs. Marshall had looked over just as her son did. Her gaze landed on Robert. And as it did, she went very still—so still that it felt as if the whole room came to a stop alongside her. Her eyes grew wide, and all the color washed from her face. She stared at him.

  And then, without saying a word, without even lifting a hand in a pretense of a greeting, she straightened to her feet, turned, and left the room.

  Robert’s lungs seemed to fill with shards of glass. Every breath he took hurt. He took one halting step after her—only to have Mr. Marshall intervene.

  “You must be the Duke of Clermont,” Mr. Marshall said, putting himself in Robert’s way.

  He’d been going to say Call me Robert after the introductions. But those words—that request for intimacy—would have only made him look all the more desperate. He managed a firm jerk of his head.

  Mr. Marshall’s voice was quiet, but it couldn’t soften the harshness of the blow. “You look like your father. Very like.” He paused. “So much like, I think, that when my wife saw you just now, she saw him.”

  He had nodded in a haze of pain.

  “Perhaps,” Mr. Marshall said gently, “this is not the best moment to perform introductions.”

  “Yes,” he’d said. “Sir.”

  And he’d understood that there would never be a moment for introductions. There would be no lazy family summers, no man-to-man talks, no gingerbread on plates for him.

  It didn’t matter what he did. He looked like his father; his father had forced himself on Mrs. Marshall.

  In a way, everything he’d made of himself stemmed from that moment—that desperation to prove himself to be more than his face.

  It was stupid to say that his heart had been broken by a pair of people he’d never met. It was even more idiotic that it was true. But for months after, every time he thought of that moment, he felt a sharp sense of loss. As if they really had been his family, and he’d lost them all at once under tragic circumstances.

  He’d mourned the loss of those dreams more than he had the death of his childhood nurse.

  “I don’t have to be your conscience,” Oliver said, breaking him out of his memories. His brother leaned into him ever so slightly as they walked, enough to convey a wealth of affection. “You have one of your own. And I trust you, even if you can’t trust yourself.”

  He didn’t have much, but what he had, that he would hold on to. And never let go.

  He gave his brother a playful nudge, but his throat was tight. “I always knew you were the gullible sort,” he said. “Lucky me.”