“There is something I must tell you, Lucien.”
He stiffened, looking down at her, searching her gaze. “What must you tell me?”
“I married him,” she confessed in a whisper, closing her eyes so she would not have to see the expression on his face as realization took hold. “I am his wife now.”
Her brother did not answer her revelation with a single word.
Instead, he roared.
Violet was gone.
In the horrible silence of her chamber, the place where Griffin had made love to her all night long, and then once more that morning, understanding washed over him. He was ill with it. His stomach clenched, and he had to swallow down the bile.
She was gone. She had left. She was not there. She was not anywhere.
He had looked. After he had left Ludlow’s study, he had thought to seek her out in the drawing room where the other ladies had gathered, only to discover Violet had excused herself in favor of seeking him out.
The news had instantly beset him with discontent. First, because he knew what he had been discussing in the study with Ludlow, Carlisle, and O’Malley. And second, because Violet had never interrupted their discourse. Not even with a knock.
Which meant one thing: she had heard him.
She had heard what he had said.
He had been all over Harlton Hall, searching for her, and though he had already scoured this chamber once before, he had returned anyway, in the foolish hope she would be there waiting for him the second time. That she would give him her saucy smile and open her arms to him and the awful, driving sense of doom erupting within him at her absence would dissipate.
But she was still gone.
“Fuck,” he growled aloud. And then, because he was alone, utterly alone, and because it was his fault Violet had left him, and because he did not deserve her and likely had no chance of winning her back, he said it again and again. Then again. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
He found a hapless piece of furniture and upended it. He pounded his fists into the mussed bed to avoid damaging the walls in the neatly restored chamber. But the bed smelled of roses and Violet’s sweet, musky cunny juices, and it only made him angrier. Angrier and desperate and filled with a gut-wrenching sense of despair.
In the face of her absence, his earlier concerns over growing to care for her too much were paltry. It was as if part of him was missing. The very best part of him. The only part of him that mattered.
How had he been too bloody blind to see it until it was too late?
He had to explain. To beg if he must. Where the hell could she have gone?
He straightened, took a deep breath, then stalked from the chamber, determined to find her. To find her and bring her back to him. She could not have gotten far. He took the staircase two steps at a time, leapt from the last six, and landed neatly. He sought out the domestics, some of whom confirmed Violet had fled from the edifice, leaving out the front door, and that furthermore, she had seemed greatly agitated when she left.
His heart in his throat, he raced through the double front doors, but all he saw on the other side was sunshine, lush grass, a blue sky, and the leaves of the trees gently swaying on the breeze. He saw not a sign of Violet. She was not even a speck in the distance. As far as he could see, the drive to Harlton Hall was empty.
The cloying scent of spring hit him in the lungs as he hastened to the stables, hoping to God someone within knew where she had gone. He sought out the head groom first. The man was wiry and blond, possessed of a perpetual grin that served to accentuate the space between his front teeth and the darkness of the others.
“Was Lady…” he caught and corrected himself, stopping before he began again. “Did you see Her Grace, the Duchess of Strathmore, here today?”
“Not here, Your Grace,” said the head groom. “From what I understand, one of the ladies in residence went for a walk down the drive.”
His blood went cold, even though it was a confirmation of what he had already expected. It meant Violet had indeed overheard his cavalier remarks, words that had never been intended for her. And instead of seeking him out, she had simply fled. She had left him without saying a word. Without giving him the chance to explain what he had said.
But how would he have explained it?
The words rolled through him now, sending shame and self-loathing to spiral in his gut, to twist him in knots.
Too late to annul the marriage. She may already be carrying my child. All the more reason for Arden to keep from arresting me. Christ, he had spoken of her as if she meant less than nothing to him, when the truth was, she meant everything.
The truth was, his heart beat for her. She had changed him. She had claimed him. And he had been so determined to avoid falling in love with her, he had failed to realize one important fact…
He was already in love with her.
There. He admitted it. He loved Violet. His Vi. His wife.
He loved her.
And she had left him.
“How long ago did she leave?” he demanded.
“An hour, perhaps two,” responded the head groom. “Forgive me if I ought to have informed you, Your Grace.”
Damn it all to hell.
Too much time had passed, but if she was on foot, he could still find her and bring her back before it was too late. “Saddle your fastest horse for me, sir. I will return posthaste.”
He was going to find her if it was the last thing he did. But first, he had to seek out Carlisle, Ludlow, and O’Malley and reveal what a fool he was to them.
Chapter Eighteen
“I will see him cast into Newgate immediately,” Lucien growled. “To hell with Home Office and what they want. The Duke of Strathmore is a traitor, and he is a cowardly, conniving bastard.”
Violet winced at the virulence in her brother’s tone. But as shattered as she felt, one thing had not altered: she still believed Griffin was an innocent man wrongly accused. Though it pained her to defend him after overhearing his cruel words earlier, she knew she must.
“I do not think he is guilty, Lucien.”
“Of course he is guilty,” Lucien all but spat. “He has been colluding with the Fenians, selling secrets, putting the lives of not only the League members, but England’s citizens, in grave danger. And when he was on the brink of imprisonment, he stole my own sister from my home and forced her to marry him in some ludicrous attempt to keep himself from gaol. I should kill him instead of arresting him. I damn well ought to squeeze the life from him with my bare hands.”
“He did not force me to wed him,” she admitted. “I went with him willingly, and I married him willingly.”
And welcomed him into her bed and heart both willingly as well, fool that she was.
The carriage rocked on, taking them back to London, or at least as near to London as they could reasonably reach in one day. How she wished Lucien would say something. His silence was worse than his vitriol.
“You went with him willingly?” he repeated at last.
“Yes,” she said quietly, shame nearly robbing her voice. She had deceived and betrayed her brother, and all for a love that was one-sided. A love that had been built upon manipulations. How stupid she had been. How easily she had allowed Strathmore to lead her by the heart strings.
All it had required was some kisses and caresses. Some well-placed words. The illusion he trusted her, that he cared for her, that she meant something to him.
A muscle ticked in Lucien’s clenched jaw. “You mean to tell me, the elaborate scene in which he took you hostage and held a makeshift blade to your throat, was all a ruse?”
She nodded miserably.
“Damn it to hell, Violet!” he exploded suddenly, slamming his fist into his knee with violent force. “What were you thinking? Have you any idea how worried I was for you? To say nothing of poor Aunt Hortense. She was in tears the evening I returned to find you gone. I was terrified Strathmore would harm you. That he would ravish you, or worse!”
She winced, closing her eyes against the sight of her brother’s anguish and anger. “I am sorry.”
“Sorry does not ameliorate the damage you have done or the pain you have caused. Open your eyes and look at me, Violet.”
Violet shook her head. She did not think she could bear it, or the shame and misery swirling around her would close over her head and drown her, swallowing her whole. “No.”
“Yes, damn your hide,” he insisted, his tone commanding. “You will look at me and explain to me why you did what you did.”
She forced her eyes open, knowing he would persist, that his stubborn streak would always win out over hers. What she saw in the depths of his green eyes, eyes so like her own, made her heart ache.
“I believed in his innocence, Lucien,” she defended herself. “I…I still do, even after all that has come to pass. He is far from perfect, and he has wounded my heart and my pride both, but he is not guilty. Strathmore is not responsible for selling League secrets to the Fenians. Someone else is, and you must find the real criminal to protect yourself.”
“He is guilty as sin,” Lucien argued grimly. “A treasure trove of correspondence was extracted from his personal documents. I have proof a thousand times over of his guilt.”
“Someone broke into his home,” she countered. “Before it was searched. The correspondence was planted in his study at that time.”
“He knew he was under suspicion, and he was desperate. He staged everything at his townhome to shift the blame from himself, but we were wise to his actions. You know nothing of what happened, or the evidence that was unveiled, Violet.” Her brother’s tone was curt and dismissive. “I knew it was a mistake allowing him into Lark House, goddamn it. Home Office was insistent he needed to be watched, rather than arrested.
“From the moment I learned he was sniffing about your skirts, I had a terrible feeling of dread. When you came to me about not wanting to wed Almsley, you were already planning on running off with Strathmore, weren’t you? What did he do, sneak into your chamber and woo you with some kisses and pretty words? Is that all it took for you to betray me, Violet?”
She flinched at the ease with which he had unraveled her, with how close he had gotten to the truth. But she could not bear to acknowledge it. So instead, she fixated upon the catalyst for her running away with Strathmore and ruining her life.
“I believe in his innocence, Lucien. I am sorry I worried you and upset Aunt Hortense. I deeply regret causing you any pain. But you would not listen to reason, and time was running low.”
“And I suppose you imagined if you married the blighter, I would not be as inclined to see him tossed into Newgate, where he so richly belongs, to await his trial. Is that it? You thought you could save him?”
Yes.
She said nothing, trying frantically to assemble her thoughts. She had thought the idea had been hers, but she thought back to Griffin’s words earlier.
She has no inkling I had reached the determination on my own, that the only way I would be able to stave off Arden and escape from Lark House, was with her as my pawn.
She had been his fool, hadn’t she? Had she been wrong about his innocence as well? For the first time, she found herself doubting him. Questioning their every interaction, each word, touch, and deed.
“When did you marry him?” Lucien asked into the silence that had descended between them.
“Yesterday,” she whispered, biting her lip against a sudden rush of tears. She would not cry. She would not cry. She would not cry. Yesterday felt as if it had been a lifetime ago. She could not have fathomed the changes awaiting her.
The disappointment.
The heartache.
The despair.
“If it has not been consummated, we will have it annulled. You can still marry Almsley if he will have you. We can tell him you were married against your will if we must,” Lucien said, planning aloud. “When Strathmore goes to trial, his despicable actions, abducting you and running away with you under duress, will not work in his favor. And no one will blame you.”
No one except Lucien, but she did not say it. Her brother did not forgive, and she could see in the harshness of his expression, the tense determination, the rigidity of his posture, that he did not forgive her now.
“It is too late,” she forced herself to say through numb lips.
Too late to annul the marriage. She may already be carrying my child. All the more reason for Arden to keep from arresting me.
A sob rose up within her, strong and overwhelming. It was a wave on the ocean, white-capped and frothy, crashing over her head. And she could do nothing but wait there and allow it to batter her.
The sob broke free.
She pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Did he hurt you?” Lucien growled, his tone once more deadly. “Tell me the truth, Violet. I will not let him live if he hurt you. Do you understand me?”
Of course she understood. Her brother was fiercely protective. Griffin had hurt her, but not in the way Lucien meant.
“Only my heart.” The words were torn from her, from the deepest, darkest, most painful, broken part of her. Only the most vulnerable part of her. The part that had dared to fall in love with a beautiful man and his devil-may-care air. A man who had cooked for her, and kissed her as if she were something he meant to consume, who had told her about his mother, who had fretted over the bandage on her hand when she had returned from her visit to Charles. A man who had snuck to her chamber to make certain she had not been injured. A man who had made her body sing and her heart sigh.
Surely not all of it had been a lie.
Surely some of it had been real.
He may not love her, but had he truly been that adroit at deception?
“You fancy yourself in love with him, Violet?” Lucien asked, drawing her attention back to him once more, back from where it had been, dwelling in the past.
Lingering over Griffin.
“I do not fancy myself in love with him,” she said. “I am in love with him. I know it with all my heart.”
He may not deserve that love, and her love may well be misplaced, but love did not work that way. It could not be rescinded in a heart’s beat. It did not disappear because it had been given to the wrong person.
Was Griffin the wrong person?
“Bloody fucking hell,” Lucien cursed.
It was the first time she had ever heard him curse with such vulgar force in her presence, and she knew the slip spoke to how upset he was. She did not think she had ever seen him this disturbed since the day he had returned to Albemarle carrying their mother’s body in his arms.
Was this a death to him as well?
“I am sorry, Lucien,” she apologized again.
“If you love him, why did I find you walking down the drive all alone, hell-bent upon escaping him?” he demanded.
The answer to that question was simple, and yet it was so very complex.
“Because he doesn’t love me.”
And then, her tears came again, burning her eyes, sliding down her cheeks. She surrendered, let them fall. Let the sobs claim her along with the pain.
Cursing again, Lucien shifted to her side of the carriage. Putting an arm about her shoulders, he gathered her to his chest. She sobbed into his shirt front and waistcoat, huge, ugly tears.
“Everything will be well again, Lettie,” he said soothingly, using the old name he’d had for her in their childhood. “Sometimes, you just need to cry.”
She wanted to ask him if he ever had since the day he had carried their mother’s body home, and how he could be so sure everything would be well, but it had been a long time since her brother had embraced her, and she had an ocean of tears to cry, and so she held him back with all her might instead, and sobbed as she hadn�
��t in years.
Griffin had combed Oxfordshire for Violet, and he had yet to find her anywhere. Not at the train station. Not in the drive to Harlton Hall. Not on the roads in between. But he searched on, dread a knot ever growing in his gut.
No woman could have disappeared so cleanly and efficiently as she had from Harlton Hall, which meant one of several things. Either she had somehow wandered from the main roads and she was now hopelessly lost, or she had been picked up by a conveyance.
And since Ludlow’s sources had suggested Arden’s arrival at Harlton Hall had been imminent, he was betting on the latter, rather than the former. By the time he reached an inn three quarters of the way to London, his mount was tired, he was tired, his back ached, his heart hurt, and his belly was grumbling for sustenance.
The Sheep’s Head seemed an inauspicious place to settle for the evening and raise the flag of surrender until another day, but it would have to do. Until he noticed the carriage bearing Arden’s coat of arms.
She was here. Violet.
Somewhere.
The weight that had been pressing down upon his chest, threatening to cave it in, lifted. He could breathe again. He could hope again. As he handed off his mount to the stable hand and strode toward the entrance to the inn, her name was a litany inside his mind, ringing with each step.
Violet. Violet. Violet.
Thank Christ.
And somehow, he did not give a proper damn he was about to commit himself to prison, the very thing he had been attempting to avoid this last, mad fortnight. All he cared about was that she was within the stone walls of The Sheep’s Head, and he was going to find her. He would tear apart every wall and door in the place with his bare hands if he needed to.
Suddenly, he was not even hungry. He turned over the necessary coin to procure himself a room, and then he was moving. Prowling. Searching for her. There was no finesse in his execution. He simply began knocking on doors.
Banging, really.
He interrupted an angry hoary-haired fellow, a young husband and wife. He moved to the third door, rapping upon it.
Dangerous Duke Page 24
