An Uncommon Courtship

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  Griffith’s face lost all signs of sleepiness as he snapped his head around to frown in Trent’s direction. “Are you well? Mother? Georgina? Miranda?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I’m well.” Trent raised his hands to calm Griffith’s sudden worry. “Last I heard our family is all healthy as well.”

  A grunt that bordered on a sigh was Griffith’s only response as he turned to drop his feet over the side of the bed. “Well, if we are going to have a conversation, let’s have it elsewhere. I find having you in my bed rather awkward.”

  Trent bounced up from the mattress. “Agreed. Would you like me to wait in the upstairs parlor?”

  Griffith shrugged into his dressing gown and shook his head. “The study. I prefer to surround myself with manliness when I converse in my dressing gown.”

  “You do this frequently?” Trent’s eyes widened. He knew he hadn’t kept up with all the demands on his brother after their father died, but did dukes truly have many middle-of-the-night conversations in their dressing gowns?

  “No,” Griffith muttered, “but I have decided that manly surroundings will be a rule for any future occasions.”

  Trent grinned—a real grin born of a spark of good humor. Coming to Griffith had been the right thing to do. “Very well. I shall meet you in the study.”

  Griffith’s study was almost as familiar to Trent as his own. More so, in some ways. Griffith had inherited the room at ten years old. Since then the brothers had spent many a day sitting in the old leather chairs, mulling over the important things in life like frogs and puddings while pretending to be adults. Then they’d actually become adults and the mullings over life had gotten more serious.

  Theological debates aside, though, Trent didn’t think they’d ever discussed something as personal as this.

  Griffith tightened the sash on his dressing gown as he entered the study and collapsed into a chair. With one hand he rubbed the last of the sleep from his green eyes and with the other pushed his dark blond hair back off his forehead. “Talk.”

  The urge to pace was tough to quell, but Trent made himself sit in the matching chair and face his failure like a man. “I’ve ruined my marriage.”

  “I couldn’t have even traveled to Scotland and back in the amount of time you’ve been married. What on earth happened?”

  “Well, if you had taken the mail coach and turned right back at the border you could probably have gone to Scotland and back. It would be close.” Trent plucked at a piece of grass that had gotten stuck to his trouser leg when he cut across Grosvenor Square.

  “Trent.”

  There was no sigh, no rolling of the eyes, nothing to mark Griffith’s frustration over Trent’s delay. The simple utterance of his name was all it took to convey the sentiment that had become something of a mantra for their family. Their mother had said it first after quietly telling them their father had died, his heart simply stopping while he slept. Griffith had repeated it before getting in their uncle’s carriage to hie off to Eton. He’d said it again when Trent took the same ride to join him. It had been Trent’s turn to remind Griffith the first time he took his seat in the House of Lords. The admonishment had always been the same—that they would face reality with God at their side and England beneath their feet and do what they could to make the world better.

  Right now Trent didn’t find it very comforting. He dug his fingers into the arms of the chair, watching the skin around his fingernails whiten as he pressed the wooden trim. “I don’t know what I did. I think it’s more what I didn’t do.”

  “Which is?” Griffith rubbed his forefinger up and down along the edge of his thumb, the only sign that Trent’s slow answers were perturbing his older brother.

  “Nothing. I’ve done nothing.” Trent gave in to the desire to pace and strolled over to the desk and picked up a large, round paperweight. The black marble ball was cold and heavy, grounding Trent in the moment. “I’ve ignored her.”

  Griffith cleared his throat. “Completely?”

  “Yes.” Trent rolled the ball from hand to hand and leaned one hip against the desk. “I didn’t want to believe I was married. Still don’t, for that matter.”

  One thick blond eyebrow climbed, and Trent knew he was about to be handed the Word of God in such a way that he was going to feel ridiculous for not having turned to it himself. “‘The lip of truth shall be established for ever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment.’”

  Griffith had always liked the book of Proverbs. Trent placed the weight back on the desk, knowing the time for lying was over, even if he’d only been lying to himself. “Well, when you put it like that.”

  Trent crossed back to the chairs. He placed his forearms on the back of the old upholstered wingback and stared into the cold fireplace. “I suppose my moment caught up with me today, then. The thing is, this isn’t what I thought my marriage would be. I always pictured myself taking my time, courting my wife through the Season, maybe even longer.”

  Griffith sighed and leaned his head against the back of the chair. “What’s stopping you?”

  Trent really should have let Griffith sleep, because apparently his mind was addled by the middle-of-the-night interruption despite his ability to quote Scripture. “I’ve already got a wife, Griffith.”

  The raising of a single eyebrow called Trent’s intelligence into question and made him want to plop down in the chair and sulk. The words that followed knocked the breath from his lungs. “I guess you can take your time courting her, then, can’t you.”

  Chapter 11

  Adelaide wallowed deeper into the mattress and tucked the covers in around her shoulders, determined to stay abed until morning. She had no idea what time it was, and the drapes had been pulled tightly together, blocking out any attempts the rising sun might be making to light the room. It had to be morning, though. She’d been staring at the ceiling so long that time must have passed.

  Still, she was going to stay in bed until Rebecca arrived. The maid had been wide-eyed but silent during Adelaide’s nightly routine, not saying a word about the fact that the numerous negligees Adelaide had continued to wear in an effort to pretend her marriage was normal had been replaced by the oldest, softest cotton night rail Adelaide owned. The comfortable sleeping gown should have made it easier to stay in bed, but instead it only served as a reminder of the pique she’d been in the night before.

  She’d begun to regret her outspoken behavior before Rebecca had even left the room. Regretting the words didn’t mean she knew what to do, however. She’d had plenty of time to consider her options, though, since she wasn’t about to seek him out in the dark, quiet house. She would wait until breakfast, when they were seated in a nearly public room, to make things right.

  Her fingers curled around the edge of the coverlet, and she moved it aside to stare across the room at the dark shadow that was the door connecting her room with his. Was he sleeping? Watching his windows for the sun’s permission to rise, as she was? Had he sat up last night, waiting for her to come apologize? He had to know she’d never seek him out in his bedroom. If she’d been willing to do such a thing she’d have done it days ago. Then they might not have had last night’s incident at all.

  A light sleep finally overtook her tired brain, but Rebecca’s quiet early morning movements had her flying from the bed like a freed raven. She dressed quickly but sat still long enough for Rebecca to take extra care with her hair.

  Adelaide’s mother had never let anyone, including her husband, see her at anything less than her best. Adelaide had never taken quite so much pride in her appearance—mostly because it never lasted past the door of her dressing room—but it couldn’t hurt to show a bit more consideration for her position as the wife of a duke’s son.

  Rebecca tried to curl the short hairs falling over Adelaide’s forehead and brushing the edges of her eyebrows, but the short hairs only sprang into a strange band of loops around her face. She considered leaving her spectacles off but decided tripping down
the stairs wouldn’t make an advantageous impression, so she left them on as she hurried from the room.

  She hadn’t been down to breakfast since their first morning in the house. Hopefully he would see her presence this morning as a sort of peace offering.

  The first sight to greet her was a trunk.

  Her feet stumbled to a halt three steps from the hall floor, eyes glued to the traveling trunk. The rather large traveling trunk.

  She took the last three steps slowly, swallowing hard at the evidence before her. A rather large traveling trunk that she recognized as belonging to her husband.

  A slight burn preceded the pool of wetness across her lower eyelid. She blinked it away, sinking her teeth into her lower lip in hopes that the sharp bite would grant her some composure. Until yesterday he’d been willing to ignore her from underneath the same roof. If she’d ever needed more proof that life was easier if you just let everyone else have their way, this was it. A single moment of standing up for herself and she was doomed to be a married widow. Or would she be a married spinster? Surely they had a term for women whose husbands deserted them after hardly more than a week, and Adelaide was sure to learn it, even if she only heard it whispered behind nearby fans.

  In her hurry to get to the breakfast room and try to rectify the situation, she tripped over her own feet and caught herself on a nearby table, knocking over a candle that had been guttered out but still contained a pool of melted wax in the top. Wax that now graced the hem of Adelaide’s morning dress. With a sigh, Adelaide righted the candle and continued at a more sedate pace to the breakfast room. At least the wax was a translucent white. No one was likely to notice, particularly once she was seated and the smudged hemline was safely hidden beneath the table.

  He was standing at the window, much as he had been their first morning in London. In some ways it seemed like years had passed in hardly more than a week, and at other times it felt like mere hours. Despite his presence, there were no place settings waiting on the table, no food on the sideboard. Only him, standing at the window, outlined by the early morning light, and looking as handsome and athletic as a young woman could ever hope her husband to be.

  Adelaide would have traded all of that handsomeness for a bit of direction on what type of marriage they were to have. Or rather a different direction than the trunk in the hall seemed to be pointing them.

  His head turned toward her as his body stayed angled toward the window. A thick lock of hair fell across his forehead as his green eyes met hers and he smiled.

  The dimples appeared in his cheeks as his lips curled and displayed straight, white teeth. She swallowed hard. Perhaps she wouldn’t trade all of the handsomeness.

  Mrs. Harris bustled in with a frown before Trent could say anything. A grimace crossed Trent’s face before he turned back toward the window.

  Adelaide turned questioning eyes back to the housekeeper. “Good morning?”

  The housekeeper plopped her hands on her narrow hips and sniffed. “If it is, it won’t be on account of Lord Trent. Thinking like a man today, he is.”

  Adelaide blinked. “Well, I should hope so.”

  Trent’s laughter burst across the room, effectively cutting off any tirade Mrs. Harris had been planning. A small, indulgent tilt of the housekeeper’s lips was followed by a shrug. “I suppose that’s true. We can’t expect anything else of them, can we? He probably even had another man agree that this preposterous idea was a good one. Will you be taking breakfast down here then, my lady? Would you like me to fix you something particular?”

  Adelaide hated not knowing what was going on. Had she been in a normal house, with servants who at least pretended to mind their own business, she wouldn’t have any notion that her husband had cooked up a potentially preposterous scheme. But now she did. And she had no idea how long she would have to wait until learning what it was. Her gaze tripped from the housekeeper to her husband and back again. “I’m not very particular. Whatever Lord Trent is having will suit me.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know what he’s having, seeing as he felt the need to have breakfast elsewhere this morning.” She sniffed in Trent’s direction before turning a smile back to Adelaide. “I’ll fix you my specialty.” Mrs. Harris strode toward the door with purpose.

  Leaving Adelaide alone with her husband. A husband who had apparently eaten breakfast elsewhere this morning. She wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

  Trent stepped forward and pulled out a chair for Adelaide, even as he frowned at the door Mrs. Harris had walked through. “There’s no law against a man eating two breakfasts,” he grumbled.

  A giggle threatened to climb up Adelaide’s throat, but it was squashed by the reminder that she still didn’t know where the man had eaten that morning.

  Adelaide cleared her throat and waited as Oswyn set a cup of coffee down in front of her. Once he’d left the room, she turned to her husband, who had settled in the seat to her left. “Where . . . That is, er, um . . .” She swallowed and blinked at her coffee. “You’ve already had breakfast?”

  Trent nodded, taking a sip of the tea the footman had brought him. “At Hawthorne House. I stayed there after talking to Griffith last night.”

  Tension Adelaide hadn’t fully realized she’d been holding seeped away. It was perfectly acceptable to have breakfast with his brother, if a bit odd. It had been rather late when Adelaide left him in the dining room last night, and he’d given no indication that he had any intention of leaving the house again.

  Adelaide ran a finger on the curve of her coffee cup handle. “Was it business?”

  “No. Our discussion was of a considerably more personal nature.”

  “Oh.”

  Had she really wished to spend more time with her husband? If this morning was any indication, they were better off apart. Yet they’d had such a nice time in the ruins before they were, well, ruined. And the ride to church their first morning in London had been awkward but pleasant. For the most part, anyway. Why couldn’t they get back to that?

  Trent cleared his throat. “The thing is, Adelaide, I’ve decided to eat breakfast there for a while.”

  That explained the traveling trunk in the front hall. Adelaide took a gulp of coffee, wishing her food had arrived so she’d have something more substantial to focus on. “I see.”

  “You’ve never had a Season, Adelaide.”

  And now she wouldn’t even have a marriage. Not a real one. She nodded, not knowing what to say. She’d spoken her mind last night and he’d moved out. What would he do if she said anything this morning?

  He cleared his throat again, and Adelaide tilted her head so she could watch him fidget with his coat sleeves out of the corner of her eye. “Well, I’d like to give you that.”

  Her head jerked up so fast that her spectacles tumbled off her nose. Trent’s arm jerked forward to catch them before they could clatter to the table. Gentle hands slid them back onto her face, smoothing the loose tendrils of hair away from the earpieces. Adelaide’s heart thundered in her chest, the blood making a crackling noise in her ears as too many thoughts crossed her mind, the implications of his statement making no sense to her. “You want me to have a Season?”

  Trent wanted, desperately, to examine the swirls in his teacup. Or perhaps the play of light across the back wall of the breakfast room. Truthfully he wanted to look anywhere besides Adelaide’s face, but he had been enough of a coward in this relationship already and he forced his gaze to remain on hers, where he could watch the rapidly changing emotions as she took in his declaration.

  He couldn’t blame her for any of them, even though she was too composed for him to decipher the flickers of emotion with any sort of confidence.

  Oswyn delivered a plate piled high with Mrs. Harris’s best breakfast offerings. The dark frown as he looked back and forth between them let Trent know what the servants thought of his plan. He’d tried to keep it quiet this morning, but in a household such as his, no one was going to let Finch pa
ck Trent’s trunk without learning exactly where the master of the house was intending to go.

  Not that Trent felt much like the master of anything right now, much less his own household.

  Adelaide looked down at her plate, blinking as if she couldn’t imagine where the food would have come from. Eventually she picked up a fork and poked at a piece of ham. “Are we talking about a proper Season?”

  “Yes. No. Well, after a fashion.” Trent rubbed a hand along the back of his neck. Somehow his decision that seemed so brilliant at dawn now felt weak and foolish as he tried to find the words to explain his plan. “You’ll still be married to me.”

  She glanced up at him without lifting her face. “Comforting.”

  The dry comment had Trent choking on a chuckle. Now wasn’t the time to laugh, but it was nice to know that there was some wit buried inside his quiet wife, though he’d had little doubt of that after her cutting remark the evening before.

  Part of him wanted to tell her she was safe, that she was free to unleash the woman he saw glimpses of when she was caught off guard by the unexpected. What if the hidden woman was like her mother, though? He’d take sullen solitude over living with a power-hungry she-wolf any day.

  He cleared his throat and gave in to the desire to look down into his tea, afraid she would look up and see disdain on his face and think it was meant for her instead of her family—if she was indeed different than the other women in her family. Pain stabbed behind his ears as he clenched his jaw together. No matter her parentage, they were married and he needed to accept that. “What I mean is that I’d like to get to know you.”

  She cut the ham with slow, steady swipes of her knife. “And you feel the best way to do that is to move out of the house?”

  A burning sensation touched his ears, and he struggled against the urge to shift his hair so that it covered the tips, which were likely reddening. His heart beat faster, as if he were in the boxing ring instead of his breakfast room. Her breakfast room? If he was moving out, even temporarily, should he think of the things in the house as hers instead of his?