When the last wave had finally ebbed, Hannah opened her eyes and sat up on her elbows to discover her betrothed sitting a few feet away with his back facing her, shoulders rigid beneath the sharp line of his jacket. She bit her swollen lip, wanting to say something…anything, really, to break the awkward silence that had fallen between them. But just what did one say to a man who had been a stranger two days ago, a fiancé yesterday, and today – well, she didn’t know what he was today.
“I apologize,” Wycliffe said without looking at her. “That should not have happened.”
“It’s all right,” Hannah said, for surely something that had felt so wonderful couldn’t possibly be wrong. Mayhap in the eyes of God since they were not yet technically husband and wife, but given they were engaged He couldn’t be that displeased with her. Lust may have been one of the seven deadly sins, but surely it paled in comparison to gluttony, greed, and wrath. Unfortunately, Wycliffe did not seem to be on the same mindset.
“No,” he said flatly, “it’s not. And it will not happen again.”
A flicker of panic unfurled in Hannah’s chest when he stood up. Pushing down her skirts, she hastened to do the same. “What do you mean? Are we – that is to say, have you…”
“Called off the wedding?” Dark gaze unreadable, he turned to face her. “No. As I said, Miss Fairchild, I am a man of my word.”
Her lips curved in a hesitant smile. “Given what just happened, I – I think we can use our Christian names. Don’t you?”
“I do not. You may refer to me as Your Grace or Wycliffe, I have no preference. And I shall continue to call you Miss Fairchild.”
“Even after we’re married?” she asked, her brow furrowing.
“Especially after we are married.”
A loose coil of hair tumbled into Hannah’s eyes as she shook her head in bewilderment. “I am afraid I do not understand.”
“It’s quite simple, really.” His gaze flicked to the flattened section of goldenrod before returning to her face. For an instant his countenance seemed to soften…and then his jaw clenched and his emotions were once again hidden behind an impenetrable wall of ice and stone. “This marriage is not a love match, Miss Fairchild. It is a means of convenience. A business transaction, if you will, in which both parties benefit equally. There is no reason to bring love into it, or intimacy for that matter. If the time comes that I desire an heir, I shall make the necessary arrangements. Until then, you need not fear I will come knocking at your door in the middle of the night.”
How clinical he made it all sound. Frowning, Hannah tucked her hair behind her ear. Maybe she should have been grateful that Wycliffe was all but insisting their marriage be in name only. And a tiny part of her was. But a much bigger part – the part that had just been rolling about in wanton abandon – wanted more. “What if we come to care for one another in time?”
“We won’t.”
“But if we did,” she persisted, “what would be the harm?”
“The harm?” he repeated, looking down at her as if she’d just suggested the earth was flat or the sun was green. “The harm is that love is for fools, Miss Fairchild. And while I may be many things, a fool is not one of them.”
But as the duke walked away, Hannah couldn’t help but think that someone who did not believe in love was the biggest fool of them all.
Chapter Five
They were married two weeks later on a rainy autumn day with only the priest, Elsbeth, and Peterson in attendance. Hannah had written to her family to tell them of her engagement, and while they were thrilled for her – Cadence in particular – they’d been unable to make the long journey due to the Season having just begun.
While she did wish her parents could have been there to see her married, Hannah was equally glad they had remained in London as the entire ceremony lasted less than ten minutes. There had been the reading of the vows, a few readings from the bible, one chaste kiss on her cheek, and then it was over. In the blink of an eye – or so it seemed – she was the new Duchess of Wycliffe. Although truth be told she neither felt like a bride or a duchess.
After the wedding, which had taken place in a small church on the outskirts of the nearest village, she and Wycliffe returned to the estate where he promptly disembarked from their carriage and retreated into his study.
For the next several days the only time Hannah saw her husband was when they dined together in the evenings. Even then there was little conversation as it was rather difficult to converse with someone when separated by a fifteen foot table, although she did try. Unfortunately, all of her efforts were rebuked and after it became clear that the duke was more interested in his soup than his duchess, she stopped trying.
After dinner Wycliffe usually went on a walk and Hannah went to her bedchamber where she pretended everything was going to be all right.
Every marriage started off a bit rocky at first, she told herself as she worked on her embroidery or tried to read a book. Particularly ones where the bride and groom were veritable strangers. Wycliffe would come around eventually. Their marriage might not have started off as a love match, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t become one with a little time and understanding…no matter what her husband had said to the contrary.
Where there was passion, Hannah reasoned, there could be love. And there had been plenty of passion to be found in their kiss. Wycliffe’s words may have said one thing, but his body – and the dark desire in his eyes as he’d pinned her to the ground – had said quite another.
He wanted her. She was sure of it. He just didn’t want to want her.
And therein laid the problem.
Hannah would be the first to admit that when she first set off for Wycliffe Manor love was the furthest thing from her mind. She wanted first and foremost to save her family. Everything else was secondary. Then she’d met the duke…and then he’d kissed her…and suddenly love hadn’t felt secondary at all.
But what to do? Better yet, how to do it? That, Hannah decided as she wandered aimlessly around the manor on a self-guided tour of her new home, was the question.
Rain pattered against the windows as she walked through the library, a parlor with all of the furniture covered beneath large white sheets, and a drawing room without any furniture at all. Everything was buried underneath a thick layer of dust and there were heavy drapes on all of the windows. The drapes, combined with the flickering candlelight and pitter patter of rain on the glass, gave the manor a dark, grim tone that lifted the tiny hairs on the back of her neck as she walked from one room to the next. Yet the manor wasn’t completely hopeless. Beneath the dirt and behind the shadows was a house with good bones just waiting to be brought back to life. Removing those awful drapes, polishing the woodwork with a bit of beeswax (all right, a lot of beeswax), and putting fresh paper-hangings on the walls would go a long way towards making the old house shine like new again.
If only a jaded duke was so easy to fix, Hannah thought with a wistful twist of her mouth as she climbed a spiral staircase to the second floor. She walked slowly down the hall, her gaze drawn to the faded rectangles on the wall where she could only assume portraits used to hang. But of whom, and why had they been taken down? She doubted she’d get an answer from her husband. Maybe Peterson, although he struck her as the loyal sort who wouldn’t divulge any information without his employer’s consent. She had hoped to encounter a maid prone to gossip, but aside from the cook, a Frenchman who spoke very little English, Peterson was the only servant she had met.
Protocol dictated she receive a personal introduction to the household staff. Particularly since, as the duchess, she would be in charge of their daily tasks and schedules. But if Wycliffe had any intention of such an introduction, he had failed to mention it. A man of few words, her husband. And even fewer emotions. But like the house he had allowed to fall into neglect, he wasn’t hopeless. There was more to him than the surly façade he presented to the world. Hannah was certain of it. His past experiences had made hi
m hard and bitter, but even the hardest clay could be softened by the right hands.
The hall came to a dead end with one door on the left and another on the right. The door on the left opened to reveal a broom closet poorly stocked with supplies (unsurprising, given that the cleanliness of the house left much to be desired) and the door on the right refused to open at all. Wondering if it was locked or merely stuck, Hannah turned the knob and gave it a hard push. With a loud creak and a protesting groan the door swung inward to reveal a room so dark it was impossible to see more than a few inches in front of her face.
She would have thought it was another closet, except it was much too big. Stepping back out into the hallway, she retrieved a candle from one of the sconces on the wall and returned to the mysterious room. Mindful of the dripping wax, she held the candle high above her head, sending a spill of weak light across old wooden floorboards that were covered in dust and – she shuddered at the sight of them – rodent droppings.
There were no windows in the room and no furniture either save a single bed pushed up against the back wall. The mattress still had linens on it, although it was clear it had not been used in years, if not decades. It was also small, the size of a child’s bed, although who would put a child in such a dark room so far away from all of the other bedchambers?
A floorboard creaked beneath the heel of her shoe as her curiosity drove her further into the room. She lifted her arm higher, sending light flickering up towards the ceiling. It was then she saw the most peculiar thing yet: two metal hooks that had been drilled into the middle of the ceiling. Spaced approximately two feet apart, each one had a small pulley with a rope attached to it.
“What in the world…” she breathed.
“They called it my rehabilitation room.”
With a loud shriek Hannah spun around and nearly dropped the candle when she saw her husband looming in the doorway, his large frame casting a long rippling shadow across the floor. “You – you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that!” she cried, flattening her palm against her chest where her heart was pounding against her ribcage. Wycliffe lifted a brow.
“And you shouldn’t be sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Who told you that you could come up here?”
“No one told me I couldn’t.” She took a deep breath. “What – what do mean, this was your rehabilitation room? I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t either, at the time. Then again, I was just a young boy.” He looked past her, the distant look in his eye revealing he wasn’t seeing the room as it was now but as it had been. “My father was determined his one and only heir would not grow up to be a cripple, so he had this room constructed. I fell off a horse,” he explained when his gaze shifted to Hannah and he saw her confusion. “One I never should have been riding, but I was an impulsive lad. The horse bolted across an open field and tripped in a hole. I would have been fine if I’d been thrown clear. A few bumps and bruises, perhaps a broken arm. But my foot caught in the stirrup iron.”
Hannah muffled a gasp behind her hand. The corners of her husband’s mouth lifted in a grim smile before he continued speaking in the flat, monotone voice of someone who was remarking on the weather instead of recalling a terrible childhood memory.
“I do not remember how long I was dragged. Honestly, I don’t remember very much about the incident at all. Most of my recollection has come from what others have told me. When they found me I was unconscious. My right leg had been broken in three separate places and the horse’s shoe had given me a nasty cut that eventually turned into this.” He tapped the puckered scar on the side of his face. “For a while the doctor was convinced I was going to die. I was in so much pain I wished for death.” He glanced up at the hooks. “But I didn’t know what pain was. Not yet, at least.”
“Is this where they kept you? After – after the accident?” Hannah couldn’t imagine condemning a child to such a bleak, windowless room. Particularly one who was so severely injured. Sunshine may have not been medicine for the body, but surely it was medicine for the soul.
“Not at first.” Wycliffe’s gaze lingered on the ceiling before it flicked to the bed. His jaw hardened. “But when my screams began to distract my father from his work, they moved me in here. It wasn’t just enough that I survived, you see. The duke did not want a cripple for his heir. He was determined I would return to the way I’d been before the fall. It did not occur to him, or perhaps he simply refused to acknowledge, that once bones have broken they can never be placed back exactly as they were. Although he did try.”
Wycliffe looked at Hannah then, and the bleakness she saw in the depths of his eyes made her heart ache. Without thinking she reached out and took his hand. For an instant his fingers entwined with hers and she felt the steady beat of his pulse before he abruptly yanked his arm away.
“Do not come in here again.” Any softness she might have glimpsed was gone, replaced with an icy indifference so cold she felt the chill of it beneath her clothes. He turned on his heel and limped away, leaving the door open behind him. After a few moments she followed and watched from the bannister as he walked stiffly down the stairs, her expression thoughtful.
For all his bristle and bluster, her husband had just revealed something that filled her with hope.
A crack in the ice around his heart.
Chapter Six
Wycliffe could not remember the last time he’d spoken about his accident, and it infuriated him that he had revealed so much to Hannah. Particularly when he’d glanced up and seen the pity in those quiet gray eyes.
He did not want her pity. He did not want anything from her.
Except another kiss.
He stopped short, hands curling into fists as he closed his eyes and tried to banish any memory of their kiss from his mind.
It was a futile endeavor.
Try as he might (and he had tried) he could not forget the taste of her lips, or the satiny velvet of her skin, or the raspy mewling sound she’d made in the back of her throat when she came. Just thinking about it – the sight of her head thrown back in wild abandon, the sound of her desperate cries, the sweet scent of her desire – was enough to give him a bloody cockstand right there in the middle of the foyer. His raging arousal wasn’t helped by the fact that he hadn’t touched a woman in five years, and he’d never touched one he wanted as much as Hannah.
His gray-eyed, mousy little wife had gotten under his skin like no other woman since Lady Portia, and the knowledge both thrilled and terrified him.
Before Hannah showed up on his doorstep he’d been content in his life of solitude. Not happy – who needed happiness? – but content. Then she’d come barging in with her ridiculous proposal and instead of sending her away as he should have done, he’d invited her into the parlor. A fatal mistake, it seemed, for the instant she had revealed that if he did not marry her she would simply find someone else he’d been overcome with jealousy.
Marry someone else? He still bristled at the thought. Lord knew he hadn’t been keen on the idea himself, but he’d be damned if he let another man have her. The foolish chit would have ended up getting herself hurt or worse going from door to door like some sort of common gypsy.
A chill racing down his spine as he imagined what might have happened if she’d knocked on the wrong one, Evan crossed the foyer and went into his study, closing the door firmly behind him.
He’d saved her. And how did she repay him? By stirring up old memories and feelings long believed dead.
Sitting behind his desk, a twin pedestal mahogany piece that had once belonged to his father, he began to blindly flip through a stack of unopened letters, many of them dated months earlier. Peterson knew he never responded to mail, but the stubborn valet kept bringing it to him anyways in the hopes that the right correspondence might spark a renewed interest in returning to London. Evan snorted at the thought. He may have taken a bride, but if there was one thing he never had any intention of doing it was wading back into the swamp of hi
gh society.
“Tell the groom I will be there in a minute, Peterson,” he said without looking up when he heard the door open. He’d planned a morning ride on his trusty old gelding (the only horse he knew with absolute certainty would never throw him, and one of only a few that tolerated his stiffness in the saddle), and had nearly been out the door when he’d heard the soft pitter-patter of footsteps in the east wing and had gone to investigate.
“Get off your lazy arse and tell him yourself.” Sauntering into the study as if it were his own, the Duke of Colebrook winked one bright blue eye before collapsing onto an oversized leather chair and kicking his heels up on a corner table. “Darker than a witch’s tit in here. Would it kill you to open a curtain and let in a little light?”
“You’re welcome to leave if my choice of décor offends you,” Evan growled. Colebrook’s impromptu visits had long been a point of aggravation, but short of keeping the exterior doors locked at all times he had no way of preventing the duke from dropping in whenever he pleased.
“I came to offer my congratulations.” Colebrook gave a winning smile. As fair as Evan was dark, his sandy blond hair was always expertly combed away from a face that could have made an angel swoon. Side by side, the two dukes could not have been more different. Colebrook was handsome, charismatic, and sociable. Evan was…none of those things. And yet for reasons that baffled Colebrook continued to stop by, seemingly determined to create a friendship that, if Evan had his way, would never exist.
“You’ve offered them.” Shoving the stack of letters aside, Evan fixed his fellow duke with a frosty glare. “Now go away.”
A Duchess for all Seasons: The Collection Page 30
