Never Desire a Duke (One Scandalous Season)

by Dalton, Lily

  “Sir and madam, please sit at the table.” The older woman smiled. “Since reading the announcement of your marriage in the papers, it has been my greatest wish to prepare a meal for you and your duchess.”

  She lifted the covers from two plates set close together, side by side, in what could only be described as romantic proximity.

  “I had something finer in mind, but this will have to do.” She folded her hands and glanced downward in self-deprecation. “While certainly not the extravagant fare of your fancy town cook, a rabbit stew will warm your stomach and see you through until the morrow. Please sit, your Grace.”

  Vane looked at Sophia to find her peering back at him.

  She whispered, “I think the only polite thing to do is to enjoy the meal Mrs. Kettle has prepared.”

  “For once, we are in agreement.” Vane gestured, indicating that she should sit, and followed her. The heat from the fire warmed his back and shoulders, relaxing him instantly. He did not miss, however, when Sophia discreetly scooted her chair so as to add several more inches of space between them.

  The old woman straightened the tablecloth, fussed over the dishes, and issued orders to her husband to fill their glasses with claret.

  “And a cup of negus, as well, for you both.” Mrs. Kettle settled two more glasses onto the table.

  “Mrs. Kettle, you ought not to have gone through all of this trouble.” Even as Vane said it, his cheeks flushed with pleasure. The housekeeper’s did as well, pleased by his compliment. Mrs. Kettle had always been a marvelous cook and her meals the stuff of his non-Sophia-related fantasies.

  Beside him, Sophia sat small and elegant. His blood thrummed, his every sense heightened with her nearness. But that was not all. He felt pride that she was his wife, that she sat beside him so appreciative of the Kettles’ simple gift.

  When her small hand touched his arm, something in his gut twisted, bending him to her will before even hearing her request. With a tilt of her head, she directed his attention to the window, with its intricate tracery of frost, where Mr. Kettle silently fretted.

  “It will be dark soon,” she murmured intimately. “Tell them to go home.”

  Ah, yes. He ought to have noticed.

  Vane stood. “I’ve been so distracted by the gift of this wonderful meal that I’ve forgotten the time and circumstances of the weather outside. I really must insist that the both of you return to the village.”

  That would leave him alone with Sophia again, an inevitability that should not fill him with such wicked anticipation, but did.

  Mrs. Kettle clasped her hands at the front of her apron in the pose of a dutiful servant. “Sir, we are more than prepared to remain in residence to attend you for the duration of your stay.”

  Though her eyes remained warm, a faint tension worried her brow and thinned her lips. He read her expression easily, recalling it from his youth.

  “Nonsense,” he answered. “Those young women and their unborn babes need you more than we do. And I insist, you must take the sledge.”

  “Oh, sir.” She bent her head in servile deference. “How kind of you to think of them, but my primary duty and loyalty lies here with you and with the memory of your dear mother. Their families will come for me if needed—”

  “Dearest, don’t argue with his Grace,” said Mr. Kettle quietly from his place at the window.

  For a moment, the housekeeper appeared to take offense at her husband’s rebuke, but then she broke into a wide smile.

  “What was I thinking? You and her ladyship are still newlyweds and by nature crave your privacy. That is why you came to Camellia House, is it not? To be alone.”

  Vane suffered a heated flash of regret that things were not so between him and Sophia. Sophia, for her part, bit her lip and focused renewed interest on the bounty of the table.

  “Before I forget.” From under her apron, the housekeeper produced a small ring, selecting a narrow brass key from the others. “This one for the linens, and the one beside it”—her smile held a flash of wickedness—“is for the cellar, if you’d care for another bottle of claret, or perhaps, Madeira. The attic, and so on.” Though Claxton extended his hand, she gave the keys to Sophia.

  And just like that, Vane found himself alone again with his estranged wife.

  For the longest while, they ate in silence, each cutting their food into ridiculously small bites, chewing without the slightest sound and displaying the utmost in culinary manners, as if they sat in the presence of His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent himself.

  “This stew is delicious,” she murmured.

  “Indeed.”

  “And the silence between us completely ridiculous,” Sophia said, cutting two portions from a small plum cake.

  Vane paused, midchew. “Pardon?”

  She deposited the larger of the two slices on his plate. “Even if we plan to separate, we ought to be able to talk with each other.”

  Separate. The word became no less offensive with repeated use. He flinched as if she’d struck him with the flat of her knife.

  “What sort of talk? Inconsequential and meaningless talk?” The question came out sounding surlier than he intended.

  He examined her face, always so expressive. She had never hidden anything from him. Never stretched the truth or told him only what he wished to hear. When they’d lost their child, he had shunned that honesty, not wanting to face what she must think of him, for certainly her sentiments could be no worse than his own. But in recent months, he’d come to crave that honesty. He wanted it now—an authentic conversation between them.

  She tilted her head and then nodded. The firelight reflected off her dark hair and the softly rounded curve of her cheek. “There is value in polite conversation.”

  “Not to me.”

  She drew back defensively and sniffed. “Very well. If you don’t want to talk—”

  His first instinct at having offended her was to grab her hand and pull her closer for another kiss as the last had been cut so appallingly short. But he had no right, not after what they’d decided last night.

  “I did not say that,” he said. He shifted toward her and rested his arm along the upper frame of the chair. “I only said I don’t want to talk nonsense.”

  “Well,” she began hopefully. “I like horses and know you do as well. Why don’t we talk about horses?”

  “No.”

  Sophia scowled and her green eyes flared. “No need to be peevish. You choose the topic.”

  Amazing how a delicious meal and a glass of good wine could bring focus to one’s perspective. He’d been so certain until now that he’d somehow fail as a gentleman or fail Sophia by not following through on her demand for a separation. There had to be another way. An arrangement that could serve both their needs and purposes. He did not want to lose her, and certainly his proper little wife did not want scandal. What sort of negotiator simply walked away, relinquishing territory he so passionately desired to keep?

  “Let us talk about our marriage.”

  Dark lashes lowered against her cheeks, shuttering her eyes. He loved when she did that. She couldn’t know how seductive that small movement was. She poked her fork at the center of her cake. “I don’t know what else there is to say.”

  His heart clenched on the finality of her words. There was so much more to say. He had only to compel himself to say it.

  Tomorrow morning could very well bring a break in the frost, and they would be back where they started this morning, barreling toward separation. Though he might be a fool, he wasn’t stupid. If he wanted to diffuse the present situation and preserve Sophia as his wife, it was he who must make the sacrifice. The cavalry did not win the day by refusing to take the field.

  Vane exhaled. Cleared his throat, which had tightened with nervousness. “I feel as if I owe you some explanation of myself. Not excuses, mind you. I don’t believe in making excuses for imprudent decisions or behavior. But I feel as if last night our conversation ended prematurely
and that you as my wife deserve something more.”

  “I would not disagree.” Her shoulders remained rigid and her gaze guarded.

  “Mind you.” He smiled thinly. “Explanations are not something I’m in the habit of offering. They do not come easily. You see, I have had several years to become quite obnoxiously full of myself.”

  Sophia let out a laugh, a quiet little sound, and appeared surprised by his humor. Yet her gaze met his only fleetingly.

  Her smiles. How he’d missed them. Like sunshine, they’d once fed his soul. When she’d stopped smiling, his soul had withered. He wanted nothing more than to be the reason she smiled again. He wasn’t an idiot. If he wanted to return to her good graces, he would have to regain her trust.

  “As an officer in the army,” he said, “one’s orders are carried out, not questioned.”

  She lowered her fork to the plate. “Yes.”

  “And then of course, once I became duke, every sycophant in London came calling, endeavoring to be my new closest friend.”

  “I know they must have.”

  He surveyed the room about them. Every familiar panel and beam. “It seems so long ago that Haden and I lived here—”

  “You never told me much about your mother or your father,” she responded, rather tentatively, it seemed. “You didn’t seem to want to.”

  He nodded. Touching crystal to his lips, he drained the glass of negus and sat silent for a long moment, allowing the resultant languidity to suffuse through his limbs until he felt numbed enough to continue.

  “My mother, Elizabeth, had a gentle and loving spirit.” Just speaking his mother’s name reopened a wound that had only scarred over, but never fully healed. “Her illness came upon her suddenly. In a matter of days, she was gone. The Kettles were a great comfort to my brother and me, and very naïvely, I expected that life would go on with them acting as our surrogate family.” He grinned, seeking to assign a lightness that did not exist to the memory. He turned the empty glass in his hand so that the cut crystal caught the firelight and reflected like an illuminated diamond against her skin. “They had always been here, you see, every day, and had no children of their own.”

  “It’s obvious that they hold you very dear.” Speaking of the Kettles, her demeanor softened.

  He rubbed a hand over his upper lip, bristly from a day’s growth. “I ought to have come back before now. It was wrong for me to have waited so long.”

  “Go on,” she urged quietly.

  “On the morning of my mother’s funeral a conveyance came up the drive. There were footmen and outriders and, of course, a driver, all in full, glorious livery. They were the most magnificent things I’d ever seen. I remember Haden shouting that the king himself had come to pay his respects to our dear mother.” Vane glanced at the portrait over the mantel. He breathed through his nose, subduing a low tremor of rage. “But, of course, it wasn’t the king.”

  Beside him, Sophia straightened in her seat, her hands curling into fists upon her lap.

  “It was your father,” she whispered.

  Claxton was silent for several moments before he continued. “What I wouldn’t discern until later was that Camellia House, the home I considered a happy paradise, had been intended as my mother’s prison. He’d exiled her here years before as punishment for some perceived betrayal. He was like that, you see, his behavior marked by constant paranoia, always accusing those closest to him of offenses and treachery where there were none. Forgiveness was a word of which he had no comprehension. As my mother had no family or protector to prevent this, she remained here at his discretion, virtually imprisoned in near poverty for the remainder of her life.”

  Sophia whispered, “What could she have done to deserve that?”

  “He told Haden and me before the carriage ever left the property that she was a whore.”

  Sophia’s face flushed with sudden fury. “No child should have to hear such an ugly accusation about his mother, especially when the mother is no longer there to defend herself.”

  “You must understand that she was not a—” he said, his voice suddenly thick.

  “Of course she wasn’t,” Sophia assured.

  “She was kind and loving and devoted to Haden and me. The rumor about her running away with a lover and dying in Italy all started with my father. I heard him repeat the same contrived story, over and over, to anyone who would listen. When I contradicted him—well, I did not contradict him again.”

  That particular whipping had sent him to his bed for three days.

  Sophia’s face paled. As if she knew. As if she could read the truth of his father’s cruelty on his face. How he’d always admired her softer nature and her caring sympathies toward those less fortunate. He did not, however, rest comfortably as a beneficiary of those sentiments himself.

  “You were just a boy,” she murmured.

  He could not stop there. He had to explain himself. Not his father. It’s just that one explanation could not come without the other.

  “Not for long. Needless to say, having been raised by this so-called whore, I was considered by my father to be completely and utterly lacking in every way. Within days after our being collected from Lacenfleet, he sent Haden to Eton, and I did not see my brother for some years after that.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “The duke preferred that I travel with him from estate to estate, or wherever else his whim took him, and that I learn from private tutors, hand selected by himself. I received an immaculate education worthy of the duchy. But my father took upon himself the duty to educate me to be a man. His sort of man.”

  “His sort of man,” Sophia repeated with a frown and dread in her eyes. “What did that mean, Claxton?”

  Vane chose his words carefully, wanting Sophia’s understanding but not wishing to reveal the true magnitude of darkness his sire had instilled inside him.

  “It means that my first visit to a brothel occurred when I was not yet eleven.”

  “Vane.”

  He could not look into her eyes until he was done, not yet. “It means that because violence and the shedding of blood so amused him, he paid the largest and meanest of his servants to challenge me in pugilistic matches, for the enjoyment of him and his friends. I got the living hell beat out of me until I grew strong enough and angry enough to beat the living hell out of them instead.”

  Sophia shook her head.

  Now her hand did go to his arm. He stood from the table, as if unable to bear her touch, not wanting it this way.

  “It means that when he discovered I was sneaking away to Lacenfleet to visit the Kettles, he whipped me for, as best as I can determine, humiliating him by preferring the company of lowly country servants to his unquestionable magnificence. To punish the Kettles, he terminated their employment and shuttered this house.”

  The fire shifted. Sparks burst out, fledgling embers. Realizing the room had grown colder, he took up the poker and with its curled tip pushed the smoldering mass to the center of the grate. Before he stepped away, he added another log.

  “That’s why you haven’t come back before now, isn’t it?” said Sophia. “You felt responsible. Claxton, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Don’t pity me,” he answered in a low voice. “By that time, I’d already become just like him.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “If I told you the rest”—he lifted his gaze to hers—“you would.”

  “Then tell me.”

  Claxton felt the blood drain from his face. He poured the remainder of the claret into his empty glass. “No.”

  Sophia stared at him with wide, somber eyes.

  He eased back into his chair. “Living such a…debauched life, at some point shocking things cease to shock. Things that once had meaning became meaningless. When I think back, I can barely remember my time here. Those days when I was a child. A boy. He is someone I don’t know anymore.”

  “You’re the same person. It’s just that he
hurt you—”

  “What I’m trying to explain in the most delicate way possible is that after leaving Camellia House, my occupations, whether in study or recreation, even later after I went into the army, were those of a man without thought of the future or concern for who my way of life might hurt.”

  “Oh,” she said simply and looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap.

  He emptied the glass of claret. “It is that reckless past that intruded upon our marriage, or the remnants of it. For that, I am sorry.”

  A long moment of silence passed.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He flinched. “God, don’t thank me. That isn’t why I told you—”

  “But I do thank you,” she said solemnly. “I want to understand and now I believe I do.” He did not like her expression, the one that pitied the person he used to be. He wanted her understanding, her forgiveness. Not her compassion.

  Frustration fueled impulse and he grasped her hand, leaning close. “My past is enough to get me into hell a thousand times over, but I swear by all that is holy, indeed, on my mother’s name, that I have never shared intimacies with another woman after marrying you. And goddamn it, I do not want a separation and certainly not a divorce.”

  Sophia’s eyes widened, and she inhaled deeply, clenching his hand as tightly as he clenched hers.

  “I want us to remain married and have another child.”

  His words echoed in his ears, so he knew he’d gotten them out. God, he’d never talked so much at one time in his life, let alone revealed so much of his soul. He felt naked and ugly and exposed. Would she recoil? Would she throw it all back in his face?

  She released him and stood suddenly, going to the window, where she grasped the drapery and peered out.

  “I need more time to think.”

  His soul shrank back into darkness. It was not the response he’d expected.

  “Why, when this seems the perfect solution for both of us?” he demanded.

  “I’m not certain, not anymore.” Sophia walked past him toward the fire and stared into the flames. “While I am grateful that you shared these details with me, because they help me to understand and to forgive, I’m not naïve enough to believe they change our future.”