The Duke

by Kerrigan Byrne

  The silence stretched until she felt her nerves would break. She handed him a dry cloth with which to clean the blood from his blade.

  Finally, he asked, “Are you not … horrified at what I’ve done?”

  She should be. She knew that. But …

  “Those men were evil. They thought nothing of prostituting children and beating a woman half to death. They deserved what you did to them, and worse.”

  His shoulder jerked as a sharp exhalation of amusement left him. “And here I thought you nothing but a bleeding heart with a sharp tongue. I didn’t realize how fierce you were, my lady.”

  “There is much you do not know about me,” she challenged gently. “Even the moon has an entire side we never chance to see.”

  “The dark side.” His words were quiet and smooth as velvet.

  “Indeed.”

  “I didn’t think you acquainted with darkness.” Though she couldn’t see him, she heard the humorless smile in his voice. “I’m beginning to find that I was wrong.”

  “I know the darkness all too well,” she admitted as she blotted at the blood that was beginning to slow. “I know there’s a place, a solitary place deep within. One where you, alone, can go and carry those thoughts, fears, and memories you can share with no one. Even you rarely visit, because it is a place from which it is difficult to return…”

  He shifted on the bench, his hand curling into a fist. Less, she realized, from the pain in his shoulder and more from the impact of her words. “I lived in that place while they…” He broke off and the tendons in his jaw flexed. “Sometimes I fear I never escaped it. That this reality is a construct and I’ll wake to find myself back in prison.”

  Swallowing a lump in her throat, she checked to find that the bleeding had been sufficiently controlled for her to stitch. Turning away from him, she silently threaded the needle and then returned to apply it. He sat motionless as she pierced his flesh and pulled the thread through, bringing the edges of the wound back together. He’d need at least seven stitches, maybe more. While she worked, Imogen glanced often at his profile. Jaw tight, veins twitching at his temples. The hair at his nape was damp, though whether from a recent bath, exertion, or pain, she couldn’t tell.

  “What happened to you in Constantinople?” She whispered the question that had haunted her for nearly three years. The moment she blurted it, she wanted to take it back. She was already causing him physical pain. Must she pick at his mental wounds as well?

  Something told her she had to know. That he needed to share. That whatever torment had turned her gentle lover into this hard, compassionless man was worth unburdening.

  His voice was deceptively light as he answered. “If I told you, you’d never sleep quietly again.”

  “I don’t sleep quietly now,” she confessed.

  Air compressed out of him in a scoff. Though whether amused or bitter, she couldn’t tell without seeing his features.

  “You are nocturnal, then?”

  “I suppose you could say that.” Imogen hesitated, and then decided that perhaps a revelation about herself would help him along. “The sun goes down and my mind seems to come to life. Sometimes for the better when I’m filled with artistic inspiration and can paint until dawn. And other times, I’ll construct scenarios and anxieties that are pure foolishness. I’ve taken up brooding of late, usually whilst raiding the kitchens or the liquor cabinet. The Brontes would be very proud.” She paused. “About the brooding and the drinking, not the snacking.”

  “What does a woman like you brood about, I wonder?” he asked, with no little interest.

  “Oh, lots of things. My mother’s health, my sister’s future, and the women I’m trying to protect. The recent murder in my garden…” The secrets I’m keeping, she thought to herself.

  “Not the past, then?” he stated tonelessly. “Not a man?”

  Only you, she wanted to say.

  “Sometimes, I see light burning at Trenwyth at all hours,” she hedged, not wanting to discuss the past, lest she confess something she was not ready to reveal. “And I know that we are awake together, and I’ll sip my gin and wonder if you are drinking, as well.”

  “Gin?” This was the first word he’d said with inflection, and it was that of distaste. “You can afford the best sherry, port, wine, and brandy money can buy and you sip gin?” He turned his head to spear her with a dubious look.

  She shrugged, careful not to tug unduly at the stitching in her hand. “I know it’s not considered in good taste for our class, but I’m a little fond of it, all told.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” he muttered, facing forward again.

  “This is going to sound silly, but it’s the juniper, I think. You know that delicious smell of a freshly cut Christmas tree? Juniper reminds me of that, a little, and so gin makes me feel like I’m tasting Christmas.”

  He let out a grunt, though she again had a hard time telling if it was born of amusement, derision, or pain as she pulled yet another stitch through his arm.

  “I drink Scotch, mostly,” he said after a time. “Ravencroft’s is a particular favorite, though I had a valet who turned me on to fine Irish whiskey, as well.”

  “O’Mara?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a cheeky sort.”

  “You have no idea,” he commiserated. “Keep him away from your maids.”

  “I have my hands full keeping him away from my sister.”

  “God help you.” The irony in his voice was laced with a thread of humor, and Imogen’s heart lifted a little.

  “Well,” she ventured, now that some of the tension had dispelled. “Now that we’ve established we’re both nocturnal creatures, if you ever need a conspirator with which to brood or to drink, I’ll offer my excellent company in both regards. If I’m not mistaken, you can see my kitchen light from your study.”

  The suggested impropriety of her rash invitation worried her almost as much as the danger of his increased proximity posed to her secrets.

  “You would not welcome my company when I am in such a state.” The shadows had reclaimed him, and Imogen mourned.

  “Do you revisit that place in your nightmares?” she queried, feeling both concerned and bold. “Is that why you do not sleep?”

  “Yes,” he said darkly.

  “You can tell me, Cole,” she whispered, fearing that, even as she said the words, he’d deny her.

  “There are no words to convey my time in that place,” he said after a contemplative moment. “It made Newgate seem like a palace. Filth is too clean a word. Despair is too happy a word. Cruelty is too kind a word. Perhaps if you imagine endless days in a room hot as a furnace, bearing witness to things so unimaginably horrific that you close your eyes hoping to escape into a nightmare … that might begin to convey my time there.”

  Imogen couldn’t think of a thing to say, couldn’t trust her voice past the tight emotions crowding her throat, so she remained quiet and moved on to another stitch. Her silence seemed to encourage him, and he continued in a flat, toneless voice, as though he addressed someone far away, or dictated a letter.

  “I thought I knew grief before then. I thought I knew pain. I was a soldier and a spy, after all. I’d lost my entire family. But I came to understand that before that year, I never knew a man could be broken in so many ways. My captors, they wanted me to beg for the barest scraps of dignity, but I refused and so I was denied even those scraps.”

  Why? she wondered, and didn’t realize she’d breathed the word out loud until he answered her in a hard, mordant tone.

  “I am the Duke of Trenwyth. I beg for nothing. I bend my knee to no one but the queen.”

  “You told them this?” she marveled.

  “Of course I did.”

  “And they didn’t kill you?”

  He lifted his shoulders in a devil-may-care motion, which reminded him of what she was doing to his shoulder, and he stilled. “I’m convinced it is my rank that kept me alive. They were trying to c
oerce Her Majesty and Prime Minister Disraeli into a secret treaty, and I think they succeeded.”

  Imogen had never paid much mind to politics until her acquaintance and subsequent marriage to Lord Anstruther. His fondness for her reading the paper to him not only amused her, but kept her informed as well. Britain had not been a great friend to the Ottomans, though they had been allies against the Russians in the Crimean War. However, that bond was beginning to fray, and both empires had broken faith. The April Uprising had been the proverbial nail in the coffin, forcing the crown and Parliament to withdraw all military and financial support from the Ottomans. The British Navy had sat idly by as the Russians exacted costly revenge on the Ottoman Empire. It seemed that the Duke of Trenwyth had been just the leverage the Ottomans had needed to force Disraeli’s hand. That and the island of Cyprus, granted to England by the Cyprus Convention in secret in 1878.

  “It must have made you very angry,” she supposed aloud.

  He made another sound devoid of any mirth. “You can’t imagine the rage.” His fist tightened, sending a resounding ripple up the muscles in his arm and bunching the shoulder upon which she worked. “It is my only companion these days.”

  She tied off the knot she was working on, and began the final stitch. “Is that why you so value your silence and solitude?” she ventured. “Because you share it with your rage?”

  His chin dipped, though she couldn’t say it was a definitive nod in the affirmative. “Men like me spend our time containing within ourselves the worst of man and nature. All the lusts, the avarice, the fury and the pain; if I revealed them, if I indulged them, I would be weak. I would become the animal they tried to make of me. After dedicating my day to such a struggle, there isn’t much left of me for anything else.”

  Heart aching, Imogen fought the urge to lean in to him, to console him with a press of her forehead against his. Instead she worked on keeping her hand steady as she finished stitching him and reached into the basin of warm water for a cloth to clean the blood from his arm and back.

  “Perhaps you might consider that your pain isn’t weakness,” she posited. Covered by the cloth, her fingers traced the swell of his bicep, the curious indents created by so many muscles working in tandem. “In your particular struggle lies a very unique form of strength.” She dipped the cloth back into the water, which came away pink as she wrung it out. “Sometimes, the widest shoulders carry the heaviest burdens,” she murmured, trailing the cloth along the nape of his neck. His great body shuddered in response, and a different tension seemed to bunch the muscles there. “You’re not an animal, Cole, you’re a hero.”

  His back expanded as he filled his lungs with what seemed to be a painful breath. “You. Don’t. Know. You can’t imagine.”

  “I don’t know,” she agreed. “I do not profess to comprehend your suffering. I simply cannot.” She cast about for an idea and caught one immediately. “Maybe there are those who can. Other wounded soldiers like you. Men who feel broken, who had pieces of their minds and bodies taken from them by their enemies.”

  “They didn’t take my hand.”

  “What?” She couldn’t have heard him right. Perhaps the blood heating her ears prevented her from understanding him correctly.

  “They didn’t take my hand,” he repeated between his teeth.

  Stunned, her cloth stilled upon his back. “Then … who…?”

  “I did.”

  Imogen couldn’t remember another moment in her entire life she’d been more absolutely stupefied.

  “That … you … why?” She wished she could see his face, that she could read his expression, but her body refused to obey any of her commands.

  “At night they’d chain us to the wall so they didn’t have to post guards. These cuffs were no hinged iron, but some Asian steelwork that, to me, seemed like magic at the time. When Ravencroft broke into the prison to extract me, we both worked on unhinging it, but someone saw us and raised the alarm.” He lifted his left arm, holding the cold steel in front of his face as though inspecting a memory. “It was our only chance. Escape or both die in that prison … or worse. We winched my arm, I took the Scotsman’s dirk, and he helped me saw through my wrist.”

  “Oh dear God,” she gasped.

  His head snapped to the side. “I told you not to pity me,” he snarled over his shoulder.

  Imogen snatched her hand from his shoulder, quick as one would from a growling hound. “You can’t command things like that,” she reproached in a quavering voice. “How can I help but feel sympathy for someone who’s undergone such suffering?” She bent to pick up the white cloth, forever stained with his blood, and shook it at him like a scolding nanny. “Pity is not disgrace, it is compassion. And compassion is something that everyone deserves.”

  He stood then, rising to his intimidating height, and took a step toward the door without so much as a by-your-leave. “Not one such as I.”

  “Especially you,” she insisted.

  He whirled on her then, a wolf of wrath and rage. An animal too fierce to be caged. Lord, how did men erect walls thick enough to contain such a man?

  They hadn’t.

  He’d escaped them.

  “Do you know how many people I’ve murdered?” he spat. “How many have suffered because of me?”

  Imogen shook her head, placing her hand to contain a fugitive heart. He thrust his mismatched hands toward her. “When your hands are stained with enough blood, it becomes a part of you. Past your own veins and meat. Past your bones and marrow. It doesn’t stop until it stains your soul.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Imogen said stubbornly. “Not of you!”

  “What do you know about it? Have you ever killed a man?”

  She hesitated. Unable to conjure an honest answer. Because in truth, she didn’t know. She may have. She still might be called to account for it.

  “That’s what I thought.” Eyes narrowed and lips pulled into a cruel sneer, he made a derisive gesture at her. “Don’t turn your compassion to me, woman. I’m beyond your grace, I think.”

  He turned to leave.

  “No.” Something in her voice froze him mid-step. Maybe it was the defiance. Maybe it was the deference. She’d never know, and it really didn’t matter. Squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin, she took a step toward him. “Those men you killed on my porch were beyond grace. But not you.”

  A gilded fire turned his eyes an unnatural shade. “How dare you presume to—”

  “I can presume to do or say what I wish. This is my home and that is my thread in your arm, so you will listen.” Her logic wasn’t sound, but effective, she thought, as his teeth snapped shut with an audible clack. His nostrils continued to flare in warning as he crossed two long, impressive arms over an equally imposing chest.

  Imogen had to admit that his stature and stance stole a little of her bluster, but … as they said, in for a penny …

  She cleared fear out of her throat and pressed on. “You can’t presume to know the fate of your soul. That isn’t for you to decide. All I know is that the blackest of hearts can find grace. You can’t have fought with such ferocity, you can’t have—done what you did to survive if you didn’t believe that somewhere in your heart.” Emboldened by his silence, she took a step toward him, gentling her voice a little. “Life, with all its perils and torments, still belongs to the living. We have a responsibility to live it. You should not waste it by giving over to bleak despair.”

  “Nor should you risk it by being reckless and getting in over your head,” he snapped, staring down his haughty nose at her.

  Imogen flinched. She didn’t want to be cowed or submissive, but the events of the day had her so rattled, she only managed to hold her proud shoulder aloft. “No matter what you do or say, I cannot turn away those who need my help. It is simply not in my nature. Call me a fool if you wish, but I am what I am. And it’s not that I am incapable of change, but unwilling. I know there is more suffering than I could ever contain, but m
y life’s purpose is to save who I can.”

  He stared out at her from eyes ablaze for one moment to many before saying, “So long as you don’t try to save me.”

  She crossed her own arms over her chest. “You are neither above nor below my consideration. I’ll do as I like,” she challenged.

  The air between them thickened and shifted until it sang with violence and expectation. His broad silhouette blocked the only escape, and it occurred to Imogen that she might have spoken too rashly, the moment before he began to stalk closer, closing the distance between them.

  “You should tell me to leave,” he growled from low in his chest. “Order me out, woman. I am not a good man. And I’m tempted to prove it to you by doing a dire thing.”

  She’d like to say that she stood her ground, but suddenly she found herself against the sink, without a memory of retreating the few steps backward. “Being a good man doesn’t mean doing the right thing all the time.” Her voice had taken on a breathy quality she didn’t at all recognize. “There are two halves to our natures, are there not? Light and dark, good and evil, the angel and devil.”

  He kicked the bench aside and prowled closer, pure, wicked intent etched into features made savage by lamplight and lust. “Which one are you?”

  “I am no angel, Cole, of that you can be certain.”

  “Then it seems we are both damned.” In one graceful surge of movement, he was upon her, his lips landing against hers before his powerful body followed suit.

  He crowded and overwhelmed her, taking every inch of space and filling it with himself. His chest crushed against her breasts, his knee forced its way between her thighs. A thick rod quickened where he pressed his hips against her.

  Kissing Cole was like kissing the night. His potent darkness consumed everything as his lips consumed her. His tongue made a conquest of her mouth, tangling with hers in wet, long strokes.

  But his hand … his hand was infinitely more gentle as it cupped the back of her head, still leaving no doubt that she was his prisoner. His fingers laced in her hair, more beseeching and urgent than punishing.