Schooling the Duke (The Heart of a Scandal, #1)

by Christi Caldwell

  “I came home, and there was shrapnel still in my leg. It became infected.” A humorless laugh escaped him, wreaking havoc on her already hurting heart. “By rights, I should have been dead. At the very least, I should be without the leg.”

  Her heart crumpled. “I did not know,” she said softly, gripping his shoulder. The heat of his skin penetrated the fine lawn.

  His eyes slid closed. “You were the hope that sustained me.”

  Feeling burned, she dropped her arm to her side. She tried to follow that unexpected shift. “Me?” she asked on a faint echo, his admission making no sense with the man who’d so callously turned her away.

  He gave her a hard smile. “For years, I had no fewer than twelve thousand questions for you. I spent more years hating you than loving you.” Her entire body jerked, and he may as well have run her through. “Resenting you. Wanting to know why. Wanting to know how a person who’d been, first, my best friend and then my lover could so easily forget me. Some days, I told myself you were a fickle, flighty creature like every other societal miss.”

  Rowena held her body so taut she feared she’d break.

  “Other days, I told myself you did it for self-preservation. As one who did all to survive, I understood that.” Graham scraped a hand over his face. “Do you know what I found? The truth I denied until I arrived at that miserable finishing school and saw you in that office.”

  She shook her head slightly trying to compare that broken man he described against the one who’d turned her away with nothing more than a note.

  He opened bloodshot eyes. “I don’t hate you. I could never truly hate you.” Her throat moved. “I hated myself for not being enough for you. I hated you for not having bothered to write me a single note when I’d written you every night I wasn’t in battle.” While he carried on, she stared back at him unblinking. He’d written me? She shook her head but the cobwebs remained. “The truth is you saved me. Through those ruthless days on the fields of Portugal and Spain, to the nights I lay in terror for the coming battle, it was your face I saw. I was fighting to return to you.” She pressed a palm to her mouth as she tried to rationalize his drunken admissions. “The dream of you sustained me, Rowena. And for that, I will be forever grateful.” He again closed his eyes.

  Through her confusion, she tried to think, to form words, to breathe. At last, she drew sufficient air into her lungs to form just three words. “I wrote you,” she whispered, hugging herself tight. “It was you who never wrote me.”

  He blinked slowly. “What?” he asked, that one-word utterance wrapped in befuddlement.

  “My notes. I wrote you every single day.” There was a panicky tremor to her slowly increasing voice. “Every single day,” she repeated. “Would you tell me you never received one of them?”

  Graham’s mouth moved but no words came out. Then, he slowly shook his head.

  “You lie,” she whispered.

  Confusion marred his features. “I never received anything from you.” There was an accusation there.

  And that was when, she had confirmation of a truth that had only come to her after all these years. He’d never received her letters. Now, his defection made sense in ways it never had, could never have before. It was why she’d received but one note from him. A note that contained an ugly part of his soul she’d never believed existed. Then, they all had darkness in their hearts. Ultimately, however, he’d believed the absolute worst of her. Doubted her loyalty and love... and had sent her away for it. “Oh, I assure you, quite possible,” she said on a bitter, broken laugh. She leveled him with shattered eyes. “You were the one who never wrote me.”

  Chapter 15

  You were the one who never wrote me...

  An odd humming filled Graham’s ears as he sought to make sense of Rowena’s denials and her charges. “I did. I wrote you whenever I was—”

  “I only received the one note from you,” she interrupted.

  “One?”

  She nodded.

  Graham looked about his darkened office. “You didn’t... I...” He faltered his way through incoherent words, unable to string a single thought together. The dream of a letter from her had sustained him through hellish nights, when the screams of dead and dying had echoed over the battlefields.

  Either Rowena was a consummate liar, which was certainly possible... or she’d never received his letters. He pressed his fingertips against his temple and rubbed, cursing the episode at Lord Wilkshire’s that had left his mind jumbled, wishing he could make sense of her pronouncement. He shook his head.

  She nodded.

  Impossible. He’d been gone for more than two years, and in that time, he’d received not a single missive outside the one sent by his father after Alistair’s passing. A niggling of unease whispered around his mind with the dark seeds now planted. Graham looked down into the flames leaping in the hearth. His fingers trembled at his side, and he flexed his palms to still that quaking. He tried again. “I don’t under—”

  Rowena met his gaze squarely; a hurt accusation in their brown depths. “I wrote you every day,” she said softly, searching her eyes over his face. Her fingers curled in the fabric of her skirts. “At the end of each week, I would lace one of my ribbons around a stack of letters and send them on to you. By the candle’s glow in the dead of night, when my family slept on, I would kiss those pages.” A bitter, broken laugh left her lips. “And I never received a word.”

  She’d written him. His throat worked. He’d seen the truth in her eyes: the shock, the horror. “Who would intercept them?” his voice emerged a gruff accusation. “Who would field all your missives?” Who would want to see him in abject misery?

  Rowena drew in a shuddery breath. “Someone determined to keep us apart.” Her voice broke. “Your father,” she whispered. Her stricken gaze met his. “It was your father. He despised me.”

  A charged tension filled the room, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the fire.

  He lowered his eyebrows, seeking to make sense of the murky waters she’d thrust him into where all his certainties over the years were thrown into question, challenging long-held facts that had shaped deeply-burned resentments. “My father did not discourage our friendship,” he puzzled aloud. The late duke had shown him little attention. Until Graham had been named heir upon his return from Portugal.

  Another hoarse, humorless laugh burst from her lips. “Of course he did not. Not while you were merely his spare. Why should his second-born son not be tupping the starry-eyed village girl so eagerly spreading her legs?”

  Graham whipped his head to face her. “Do not say that,” he said sharply. He fixed a glare on her. He’d not have her disparage herself. Not now and certainly not in memory of what they’d shared.

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” she persisted, misunderstanding the reason for his order. Rowena took several bold steps toward him. “Before your brother’s passing, what use did your father have of you?”

  None. His father had no use for his second son. It was a fact that had chafed for the small boy he’d been. Then the new vicar had moved into the village with his wife and young daughter, Rowena. His life had become full—until he’d gone to war and found her gone.

  She dusted a hand over her face. “It hardly matters what you felt in those days, Graham.” Her voice rang with fatigue and frustration. “Your father ordered me gone.”

  His entire body jerked, and he backed slowly away from her, he gave his head a frantic shake. “No,” he whispered because if there was truth to those few words, then that would mean she’d not left him but had been forced away. It would mean that all these years he’d spent hating her had been for sins that belonged to another: his father... And me.

  Rowena hugged herself in a lonely embrace. She continued as though he’d not spoken, as though his world was not ratcheting down around him. “I was in the gardens.” Hers was a threadbare whisper, laden with the agony of remembered suffering. “The day he arrived...” Her lower li
p trembled. “I believed you were dead. Why else would the duke come to call on me?” An acrimonious laugh belonging to an older, more cynical woman split her lips. “How naïve I-I was,” she rasped out. “That a duke would ever call on me for any such reason.” The gleam of tears in her eyes turned them into crystal pools of despair that struck worse than any bullet or blade to lance his flesh. “That would have meant I mattered in some way.”

  He shook his head, not wanting her to go on. For if her words were spoken in truth, then it would mean that his life these years had been nothing more than a lie orchestrated by his merciless father. I’m going to be ill. “What did he want?” he asked hoarsely.

  She eyed him cautiously, with a lifetime’s worth of mistrust in her eyes. She expected him to doubt her. “He ordered me to leave. If I didn’t...” She briefly closed her eyes, and that visible sign of her grief ravaged him. “He would see my father removed from his position as vicar.”

  Her words had the same affect of a carriage slamming into his chest. Graham concentrated on his slow, ragged breaths. He drew on every lesson in control he’d mastered these years, and forced himself into a semblance of calm. “When did you...?” Leave. His voice emerged garbled to his own ears, and he struggled through a tight throat. Except, by her admission, she’d not gone... not willingly. He had to say it. He had to breathe the truth of her admission into existence, so then mayhap he might process everything she’d revealed. “When were you forced to leave?”

  Her spine stiffly erect, her shoulders squared, Rowena possessed the regal bearing, far greater than any duchess or queen. She notched her chin up. “You’d been injured. Near the time your brother died.” Of course. His father would have always been thinking of the title. She grimaced. “He could not risk that you would return and possibly wish to make me your wife.” Possibly wish? It had been Graham’s only wish. Every word was a lash upon his soul, and he took the stinging, sharp pain of it, and through his tumult, she continued in a stoic calm. “He promised to see the world knew who...” Her voice grew soft, and he strained to hear. “...what I was.” A bastard. It had been a detail Rowena had confided in him, and somehow, his father had found out her past.

  Then, the late, all-powerful duke had known all. The ruthless, rank-driven ways that had forever driven his now-dead father, who controlled Graham’s world, even in death.

  She looked down at her clasped hands. “He gave me fifty pounds and a carriage ride to my new post.”

  A post as instructor for pampered, privileged ladies. “Was there even a Mr. Bryant?” he asked with a faint imploring. Needing to believe that even as she’d been wronged, that there had at least been one man who’d not failed her, when he had wronged her in every way.

  Rowena shook her head. “There was only ever you,” she said softly.

  “Stop,” he pleaded, holding a hand up, trying to process. To make sense of the words she spoke. Because it would mean everything had been a lie. It would mean Graham had spent the better part of his adult life hating the only woman he’d ever loved for imagined crimes. His stomach pitched, the same way he had when he’d marched upon his first battlefield into a sea of screams and cannon fire, with the report of pistols dulling his hearing. He dug his fingertips hard into his temples.

  She wandered over to the window. Blankly, he followed her every movement. The slow, careful strides. The stretch of her hand as she brushed aside the velvet curtains. “He gave me fifty pounds.” Fifty pounds. Like she’d been a whore. Bile burned his throat. “He saw me set up with employment at Mrs. Belden’s Finishing School, as long as I did not ever come near you, again. My parents were promised fifteen pounds monthly, until his death.”

  Fifteen pounds monthly. One hundred and eighty pounds for the course of a year. That was the rate with which a parent would betray one’s own daughter. Nausea broiled in his gut. How could her voice be so steady when, with every utterance, she sent him into a muddled tumult? “You were at that miserable school because of him,” he whispered to himself. Nay, because of me. He thought of that cheerless, stilted institution he’d plucked her from by chance. A place where she’d been stifled and hidden away like a secret shame.

  “No,” she said with sadness infusing that denial. “I was there because of us. Because we could never have been, and he knew that, just as you returned and also knew it.” She directed that last piece out onto the streets below.

  “That is not true,” he whispered. He would have slain the devil himself for her. But that isn’t altogether true. Eaten alive by resentment and jealousy, I hated her all these years... That voice whispered tauntingly around his tortured mind.

  She whipped around. “You were just like him.”

  He recoiled, burned by the venom in her eyes. “No.” And yet, unwittingly, by her revelations, he had been.

  Skirts whipping about her ankles she stalked over. “Future dukes don’t wed the daughters of whores,” she jeered. “You said as much, yourself. You and your father,” she reminded him. She stormed to the front of the room. Graham surged forward on his heels, to stop her flight.

  Except—

  Rowena grabbed her book off the table and marched over.

  She tugged out a single note and hurled it at him. The sheet caught and twisted and turned a silent path to his feet. His gaze went to her tightly-clenched fingers, drained of blood, to the page. “What is this?” Numbly he retrieved the vellum and, unfolding it, skimmed words written in his hand. All the air left him on a swift exhale. He frantically ran his gaze again over the words.

  ...I would have married you... on nothing more than a lie. In dallying with a vicar’s daughter, I lowered myself beneath my station. However, you are no vicar’s daughter, Miss Endicott. You are a whore’s daughter, and as such, there can be nothing respectable. If you desire a place in my bed...

  Everything from his too large “R’s” and barely closed “E’s” had been masterfully created. Graham lifted stunned eyes to hers. “I did not write this,” he breathed. Surely she must have known all that had ever mattered was their love for one another? Why should she have known that? What truth had she had of that?

  Clutching her book close, she jabbed at the page. “Your father gave it to me when I tried to come to you.”

  “You came to me?” For his father’s threats, she’d braved all, anyway.

  “And you had him turn me away with a note. It is in your hand, Graham.” There was a high-pitched quality to her timbre that suggested the thin grasp she had on her control.

  “I know,” he said hoarsely. “But I did not.” He balled the page in his hand, and the aged vellum crunched loudly. “I would never...” For on that note contained details he’d never even known about this woman before him. Details that would have never mattered to him but would very much have to the late duke. “I didn’t write this,” he repeated, holding it out. “I could never say those things to you.” His gut clenched like he’d taken a blow to the belly. Not even when he’d hated her beyond all reason could he have uttered a single one of those vile words etched in time.

  The small leather volume slipped from her grasp and tumbled to the floor with a soft thump. “You did not know...” She wetted her lips. “About my mother?”

  That tentative question gave him pause. When she’d revealed the truth of her birthright, she’d mentioned a mistake in her mother’s past that had resulted in her birth. “What about your mother?”

  For a long while, she said nothing, and he believed she intended to say nothing more on it. Then, she straightened her shoulders with the regal bearing of any queen. “My mother was a courtesan.”

  Her revelation slammed into him with the weight of a fast-moving carriage. He reeled back. Numbed. The world unmoving. And through it, he tried to pick his way around what was real and false. She had kept that detail from him? Why?

  Rowena flattened her palms against her skirts, but not before he detected the faint tremble there. “She had a string of protectors, one of whom sired me. It
was a truth I kept from you.” She angled her chin up.

  Her revealing eyes glimmered with a challenge. Why... she still believes I’ll condemn her now for that. Then, although her reaction chafed, he thought of the ruthless lords and ladies who’d take apart a lady because of the very truth she now imparted. To Graham, however, her birthright had never mattered. Only she had. To utter that now would smack of the greatest lie.

  In her failing to come to him when he’d returned, all the words his father had uttered, confirmed by Rowena’s absence and reiterated by her mother’s admission. It had shattered him in ways that the wound he’d suffered on the battlefield never could have. It was why his father would never have allowed a union between them.

  He gave his head a dizzying shake. Why had her mother not confided in him when he’d gone to her? “It does not make sense. I saw your mother. As soon as I was able, I went to your cottage.” The memory of that day flitted across his thoughts. The stark fear in the lovely woman’s eyes. The uncharacteristic somberness of Rowena’s two young sisters. “She told me you’d gone. Told me you found another.”

  Tears welled in Rowena’s eyes, turning them into brown pools of despair. She blinked back the crystalline drops.

  “Why would she do that?” he cried. To protect the Hampstead title at all costs, his father would have resorted to great evil. But there was Rowena’s own mother and stepfather. Surely the whole world had not been in collusion against them.

  “What should she have done, Graham? Defy the duke who threatened her family?”

  The blade twisted all the deeper. “Your mother put the well-being of your father and sisters before your own?” His voice emerged sharper than he intended, but he could not soften his fury. So many had wronged her. The late duke. Her family. And worst of all... him.

  “No,” she said quietly, and he went still. Rowena touched her palm to the middle of her chest. “I put the well-being of my sisters before my own. What fate would await us if your father saw us cast off his properties? What would become of Bianca and Blanche?”