The Duke of Hearts

by Jess Michaels

  Isabel swallowed. Thus far no one had been so direct about their hesitations. She found she almost appreciated it, though the confrontation was not a pleasant experience. At least it was straightforward.

  “I understand your hesitation,” she said. “And I know my words will mean little if I do not match them to action as time goes by. But I will tell you that I do not want to hurt Matthew. Right now you may not believe that, but in time I hope you will.”

  Helena tilted her head, and some of the hardness went out of her face. She let out her breath slowly. “So do I, Isabel. So do I.”

  Matthew stepped onto the terrace and came to a stop. Isabel was there, starlight falling over her like she had been conjured from some fairy story. Or a gothic tale like the ones they had discussed together at Mattigan’s.

  But with her was Helena. And by the way the two women were looking at each other, there conversation was very intense, indeed.

  “Ladies,” he drawled.

  Helena backed away a step and turned to him with a smile. “Matthew.”

  “The others have left and I believe Baldwin was just saying farewell to my mother.”

  Helena nodded. “Then I should join him.” She faced Isabel again. “Thank you for your candor. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Isabel whispered, her voice barely carrying.

  Helena walked away, toward him. She caught his hand as she passed by and squeezed it gently. “Good night.”

  He kept his eyes on Isabel as Helena went inside and shut the door behind herself. At last they were alone. Alone for the first time since that night when their future had been sealed.

  He should have wanted to pepper her with a thousand questions and accusations. But that wasn’t what came to his mind at all. No, watching her standing at his terrace wall, her hands shaking, her eyes not meeting his, what he wanted was to fold her into his arms. Comfort her. Touch her.

  He shook his head. “You survived the night,” he said.

  She jerked her face to his. “There were times I wasn’t certain I would,” she admitted. “There are half a dozen friends of yours ready to place a knife between my ribs if I dare to ever hurt you.”

  He pursed his lips. “They are protective. I’m sorry.”

  She looked back over his garden. “You ought not to be. It’s nice to have friends with such loyalty.”

  “You do,” he said. “Sarah Carlton seems to be such a friend to you.”

  There was a shadow of a smile that crossed her lips. “Yes. And I suppose one benefit of our union is that I would be able to help her.”

  “Help her?” Matthew repeated, fascinated by the moonlight dancing off her dark hair.

  She faced him. “Yes. She’s in a dire state. Once her mother is gone, she will likely be forced to go into service. And perhaps with the influence of your title, I can help her a little as she transitions.”

  Matthew wrinkled his brow. His friends had their own ideas about this woman’s ulterior motives when it came to their marriage. But here was one, and it was something he could not fault. He had the same instinct to help his friends at all costs. To use what influence he had to improve the lives of those he loved.

  Another thing they had in common.

  “I think we could be of help when that time comes,” he said. “I hope you’ll turn to me for assistance.”

  Her expression softened a bit. “If you would be willing, I would greatly appreciate the help.”

  He reached out, for he could no longer resist it, and touched her cheek with his bare fingers. She sucked her breath in through her teeth and leaned into his hand as her eyes fluttered shut.

  “Isabel,” he whispered, just to hear her name out loud.

  “Matthew,” she murmured back.

  He leaned in and kissed her. Her hands trembled as she lifted them to cup his cheeks and draw him even closer. Her lips parted beneath his and he took what she silently offered. The kiss deepened, grew more heated. He knew where it was headed.

  He couldn’t allow it. Yet. Not yet. Not here, not with his mother just through a door.

  He pulled away reluctantly and she sighed out a tiny sound of displeasure.

  “You and Helena had a talk?” he asked, searching for a topic that would distract him from the very hard cock rubbing the front of his trousers at present.

  She nodded. “She is certainly protective,” she murmured. “But I suppose she would be. She—she told me you once offered to marry her to save her from a bad position.”

  Matthew jolted. He had not expected Helena to share that particular tidbit. It had been a year before, a moment that felt worlds away now. “Not because I cared for her. At least not beyond friendship,” he said, feeling he should explain himself. Not certain why.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” she whispered.

  He shook his head. “We are to marry. Tomorrow. So I think I do. Baldwin was in a bad situation. So was Helena. They believed they couldn’t be together and so I offered to marry her myself, to save her. I mostly did it to make Baldwin wake up to what he truly wanted. He did, they married and all is right between them.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Indeed, it is. All your friends are remarkable in that way. Those that are married appear deeply in love. Powerfully.”

  He turned his face, for this felt like a dangerous topic. Very dangerous, indeed, considering how many of those same friends had struggled just as he was struggling. Many of them had experienced a reluctant courtship, driven by desire. A blossoming of feelings that not a one of them expected. And then…the magic of the lives they now shared.

  That was not his path, but he found he increasingly envied it, especially as he looked at the beautiful woman before him.

  “I will have to prove myself with them,” Isabel said. “To prove I am not in league with my uncle. I suppose I’ll have to prove that to you, as well.”

  Matthew shifted at that particularly unpleasant thought. The one that had been haunting him for days. He cocked his head. “Speaking of your uncle…”

  “You want to know why he did not come tonight?” she asked. Her cheeks darkened. “He made a show of getting ready, rubbing his hands together, talking about making scenes. And then, just as suddenly, he said he would not come. That he did not want to step foot into your home until it was absolutely necessary.”

  She let out a long sigh, and in that moment he saw how exhausted she was by this exercise. By her uncle’s swinging pendulum of moods and what it had wrought on her life. He also saw her fear, the same one she had expressed to him the night they had been caught together. What he didn’t see was any kind of deception. Perhaps he couldn’t fully trust himself, but he didn’t think that Isabel was lying to him.

  “If he could have come here and caused trouble, but didn’t, that must give you some modicum of relief,” he said.

  Her eyes widened. “It doesn’t.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “His eyes are still so wild, Matthew. I feel him plotting with every turn, muttering beneath his breath about having you close enough to hurt. Why don’t you take it seriously?”

  He reached out and caught her hand. They both looked down at their intertwined fingers. Watched as he lifted her hand and pressed it to his chest. Her fingers tightened there, like she was trying to hold his heart. For a wild moment, he wished she could.

  “You’ve lived with him a year, yes?” he asked. “Well, I’ve endured this behavior from him three times that long. He blusters, but he does not act. Right now he’s reveling in how he created a scandal surrounding my name. Perhaps that will finally be enough for him.”

  She didn’t look certain, so he leaned forward, sliding his fingers along her jaw once more. Whatever words she’d been going to say fell away as her breath caught and her eyes fluttered shut.

  He brushed his lips to hers, gentle this time despite the animal instinct that rose up in him once more. He drew her closer, a
gainst his chest, folding his arms around her. She shivered as she settled there and in that moment he felt something entirely new. Entirely unexpected.

  He felt peace.

  She pulled away and looked up at him, expression bleary and almost confused. Like she, too, had felt that shift and it took her off center just as it did him.

  “We marry tomorrow,” she whispered. “I can hardly believe it.”

  He nodded. This would be the perfect time to pull away from her embrace, but he didn’t. He continued to hold her as he said, “It’s happened very fast.”

  “And what will happen…a-after?” she asked.

  His jaw tightened at the question. It was one he had been pondering himself. That vast blankness of what their relationship would be as husband and wife was troubling to say the least. And now she had asked him to put voice to it.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what will happen, but I know what I want when you’re near me like you are right now. Despite everything.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “Despite,” she repeated, and there was no mistaking the faint hurt in her tone. He wished he didn’t cause it, but didn’t see a way not to. Not right now, at least.

  “Despite is all I have, Isabel. You cannot fault me for that, can you? After all the lies and manipulations that brought us here.”

  It was she who pulled away, taking a step back from him as she stared at her hands clenched in front of her. “No, I cannot fault you. If I were to believe you were a villain bound to trap me, perhaps all I would have is despite, as well.”

  He frowned. She acted as though she felt something deeper for him. Worse, the idea that she did was not the anathema it should have been. He didn’t want her heart, of course. That was not something he had ever expected to desire again from a lady.

  But if he held it…that was certainly a gift.

  “Tomorrow will come soon enough, Isabel,” he choked out. “Why don’t we just see what it brings rather than wrapping ourselves in knots wondering about it?”

  Her lips pressed once more and then she nodded. “That’s a fair suggestion, Matthew. I can’t say otherwise.”

  “Good.” He held out his elbow. “Why don’t you let me take you back to your carriage then?”

  She stared at the outstretched arm for a beat, then slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. He found himself drawing a breath of relief as she did so. He led her from the terrace, back into the house and toward the foyer where he was certain his mother was waiting to say goodbye to Isabel. His fiancée.

  Tomorrow, his wife.

  And once that happened, everything would change.

  Despite a long drive across the darkness of a London night, Isabel’s head was still spinning as she arrived at her uncle’s home half an hour later. She stared through the carriage window at the house, just another in a row of the same houses, and sighed.

  Inside was a man she loved. Still loved, despite his wild accusations and even wilder actions. And he was bound and determined to hurt Matthew. Despite what her fiancé thought, she still believed Fenton had deeper plans than a mere scandal and a forced wedding.

  And she was terrified of them. Determined to do anything she could to protect Matthew. Because…

  Well, she wasn’t going to say the because. Not to herself and certainly not out loud. Her feelings for the man had increased since that first shocking moment he had appeared out of the crowd at the Donville Masquerade and stepped between her and her attacker.

  It seemed she was destined to break her heart over him. And sooner rather than later.

  The footman opened the door and she climbed out into the cool night air, drawing a cleansing breath before she walked up to the house and into the foyer. Hicks asked about her night as he took her things and she smiled through it, ready to just go up to her room and go to sleep. If she could with the knowledge that in a few short hours she would be Matthew’s wife.

  “Goodnight, Hicks,” she said with a smile for the butler as she moved toward the stairs. She had not yet reached them when she heard her uncle from across the foyer.

  “How was it?”

  She froze, hand hovering above the banister. She did not wish to discuss her night with him. Her anger and resentment toward him was growing exponentially and she had no interest in engaging in a row with him.

  “Answer me, Isabel,” he said, his tone sharpening.

  She spun toward him, and the anger she’d been trying to keep in check now bubbled to the surface. “If you’re going for humiliation, you have hit your mark. Everyone is talking.”

  Her uncle’s face lit up in triumph and she took a long step toward him.

  “That makes you happy, does it? Well, it shouldn’t. No one is talking about him. They’re talking about me.” She folded her arms. “From strangers in the shop to his own friends and mother. They all look at me like I’m a snake who slithered into their flowerbed. And the reason? Because I am. Because of you. And he—”

  She cut herself off, for the last thing she wanted was to debate the topic of him with her uncle. Not when her feelings for Matthew were so tangled and powerful and painful.

  “He?” Uncle Fenton encouraged.

  She shook her head. “Do you want me to say he’s miserable? That he’s broken?”

  “Is he?”

  “He isn’t exactly dancing in the streets over our union,” she said, thinking of Matthew’s offer that he could want her despite. Despite. Fenton’s lip curled up in a sneer, and she shook her head. “You are happy about this.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? He’s created enough misery, why should he not feel even a fraction of the same?”

  “Good, then you’ve succeeded,” she said, moving forward to catch his hands. “Celebrate as you’ve always wanted to do. It’s time to let this go.”

  His face twisted. In that moment she saw all his grief, all his deep and abiding pain, all the loss that had piled up on his shoulders and weighed him down. Changed and warped him into the person who stood before her today. And though she feared that person…she also pitied him. And longed to help him see that revenge and rage were not the answer.

  “You never lost a child,” he spit, his voice shaking as he yanked his hands from hers. “You have no idea what it feels like. So you have no quarter to talk to me about what I should let go or not let go.”

  He pivoted and walked away, back down the hall. She heard the door to his study slam, loud enough that the pictures hanging in the hallway shook with the force.

  She bent her head as tears gathered in her eyes. And this was how she would marry. As a tool for one man’s revenge. A tool for another’s desire.

  And there was nothing she could do to stop either of them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Matthew looked down the long table filled with friends and family. The servants were just drawing away the last of the dishes for a lavish wedding supper and the group talked softly together.

  Only it wasn’t his friends who drew his eye. It was Isabel, down at the end of the table. The position of honor. The place that had been his mother’s up until that very afternoon.

  The place of the duchess. Because that’s what Isabel was now, thanks to a few murmured promises in the garden hours before. She was his wife. And that fact jolted him every time it was mentioned.

  She was seated with his mother on one side and her friend Sarah on the other. Occasionally he saw Sarah take her hand, speak softly to her. Comfort her, it looked like. And Isabel seemed to need the comfort. She was nervous and agitated, her gaze a bit too wide, her hands shaky when she sipped her wine or ate a bite of food.

  He wished he could be the one beside her in that moment. That he could rest a hand on her knee beneath the table and meet her eyes as he whispered that all would be well. Even if that was a lie.

  His gaze slid farther down the table to where her uncle sat. Fenton Winter had been remarkably quiet during the day. He had given aw
ay his niece with only the slightest of snide comments and had been calm for the rest of the afternoon. But now the man downed what had to be his fourth glass of wine in the last hour. His gaze was becoming dazed and narrowed every time he looked at Matthew.

  At last Winter rose, that same glass still in hand. He speared Matthew with a look, pointed and ugly. Slowly, Matthew pushed back from his place at the head of the table. He needed to be on his feet for the barrage clearly to come. At least it was being done in front of only friends, rather than the public displays of vitriol Winter usually displayed.

  “Killer,” he hissed, wine sloshing from his glass.

  James threw his napkin on the table and moved to rise, but Matthew held out a hand, motioning for him to stay put. The last thing he needed at present was for anyone in his large group of friends to call this man out. Deserved or not.

  “Oh, you aren’t going to say anything, are you?” Winter continued, looking around the table at the outraged faces of dukes and duchesses alike. “Mark that, Your Graces. Would an innocent man not come to his own defense? Ask yourselves why he doesn’t do so.”

  “You’ve had enough, Winter,” Matthew said softly. “Perhaps it’s time to go. Go home and sleep this off.”

  Winter pushed his chair back with a screech that made every single person in the room flinch. He staggered as he came away from the table. “Sleep off what? The truth? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If I would go away and stop reminding you of your guilt.”

  Matthew shook his head. “Trust that I am perfectly capable of remembering my guilt without your help, Winter.”

  “Well, now you have a new bride,” Winter said. “Perhaps you can find some new guilt there. You’ll take my niece like you did my daughter.”

  “That’s enough!”

  Matthew jolted as Isabel threw her chair back. It flipped and skidded away. She crashed toward her uncle, an avenging angel with her eyes lit up with emotion.