Darling Duke

by Scarlett Scott

Bo returned to Boswell Manor to the greeting of the domestics, sans the pained face of her mother-in-law and the bitter quietness of her brother-in-law, who were thankfully nowhere to be found upon their arrival. A week had passed since she had left, somewhat in shock and quite nervous to be the new Duchess of Bainbridge. In the intervening time, so short and yet so transforming that it might have been a lifetime instead, much had altered.

  She had fallen in love with her husband. Headlong, deeply, and unabashedly. Stupidly, foolishly, and perhaps even wrongly. The latter because, for as much as had changed for her and as much as she had thought Spencer had changed as well, during the last twenty-four hours, she had witnessed his slow reversal. Before her eyes, he had withdrawn.

  As she stepped back into the familiar entryway of what was to be her new home, the portraits of the illustrious members of the Marlow line confronted her, some of whom bore a marked familial resemblance to her handsome husband. She cast him a sidelong glance, wishing she could read his thoughts. The trip back to Boswell Manor was eerily similar to the trip from it a week before, and it was almost as if they had gone back in time, all the advancements and connections—all the pleasure and joy and tenderness—of the last week, had been nothing more than a daydream.

  When she had woken yesterday morning to find him gone, the bed smelling of his pine and musk, his side rumpled and yet empty, she had known an initial spear of concern. She’d lingered in bed, waiting, hoping he would return and make love to her. When he had not, she’d reluctantly risen, dressed, and descended for breakfast. Still, no sign of him.

  Finally, he had returned from what she learned had been a lengthy ride—the first he had taken without her since their honeymoon’s onset—moody and quiet. At dinner, he had not spoken unless she required it of him. The entire affair had been staid and forced, before an audience of servants. Bo had grown tired of asking him questions and they had finished the final courses in stilted silence, she drinking too much wine and he frowning with an alarming frequency.

  She had not been able to escape the thought that the specter of Marlow Manor had already leached into their happiness, sucking it dry. She wondered now, as she walked by his side through the dimly lit, cavernous hall with its monuments to the past, whether it was going back to the place where Spencer had experienced so much upheaval and despair that altered him, or whether it was something else.

  And she did not know which would be worse.

  He stopped at the foot of the grand staircase with its intricate carvings and gothic ornamentation, and caught her hand in his, bringing it to his lips for a chaste kiss. He met her gaze for a moment before fixing his stare upon something behind her, as though she were not interesting or important enough to hold him. “I imagine you would like to rest and refresh yourself following our journey, Duchess, while I have many obligations awaiting me.”

  His tone was formal. Cold as marble. Detached as he had been ever since his ride.

  She looked up at him, studying him, noting the flush on his cheekbones, the stiff manner in which he held himself. Something was amiss with her husband. Where was the man who had shown her the surprising depths of his passion, who had awakened her body in a way she had never known possible, who had laughed with her, bathed with her, tasted every inch of her body? Where was the man beneath the Duke of Disdain?

  “Obligations?” she forced herself to ask, cursing the emotions rising within her that affected a slight tremble in the lone word.

  “Correspondence. Estate matters.” His gaze darted back to her, the ghost of a smile flitting about his lips. “Nothing to concern yourself with, my dear. Shall I see you at dinner?”

  Dinner was hours away. She could not hide the dismay roiling through her. Why did he insist upon creating this chasm between them? She did not like it any more than she liked the condescension in his tone when he said nothing to concern yourself with, as though his obligations were far too complicated for her feeble female mind to comprehend.

  “I do not want to take dinner,” she announced, feeling mulish. If he wished to impose a distance and coolness between them, he could suffer dinner with his harridan of a mother and his beastly brother on his own. “Perhaps I shall see you tomorrow at breakfast. Though, perhaps not, as I too have important obligations to attend to. Lady Ravenscroft is returned from her honeymoon now, and we are eager to get to work.”

  His expression remained smooth, unperturbed. “Of course, my dear. Whatever you require. Indeed, perhaps you ought to spend some time with her ladyship so that the two of you can organize yourselves. Will the earl and countess be in residence in the country, or will they return to London?”

  She blinked, not liking the polite manner in which he spoke to her one whit. Why, it was almost as if they were strangers. As if he had never gifted her a bawdy book or acted out some of its wicked illustrations with her. “She writes that they are to be in residence in London for some time, since Ravenscroft’s country seat is undergoing extensive renovations.”

  “Hmm.” His tone as well as his air were distracted. “Perhaps you would be well served to spend some time with her. I do not object to you joining her there. I will have the townhouse readied and refreshed for your use.”

  For her use. Meaning he would not accompany her. They had been married for a week, and he was suggesting she go to London without him. But of course he would not travel to London, would he? He had not been to town in years. He was as well-known as a recluse as he was an ice block.

  How had she been foolish enough to hope that he could change?

  Bo reeled. “How…kind of you.”

  He flashed her a tight smile. “I know how important your Lady’s Suffrage Society is to you. Perhaps it would do us both some good to refocus and spend some time apart.”

  To refocus.

  Spend some time apart.

  How could he be so cool and detached, so polite and reserved, as though they were strangers? As though the last glorious week had never happened? The urge to lash out at him, to force him from whatever had descended upon him, was strong within her.

  She could not resist tilting her head, considering him in a mocking fashion. “By refocus, do you mean forget we are husband and wife?”

  He clenched his jaw, a scowl darkening his features. “Of course not. We are linked, inextricably.”

  Why did he make it sound as if it were a sentence? Why did he insist upon undoing all the advancements they had made together? They had ridden, laughed, made love, bathed, had shared every intimacy, reached the heights of pleasure. And yet he dared to stand before her now, shrugging her off as though she were an irritating spinster aunt who had outstayed her welcome rather than the woman he had made blistering love to.

  “Are we?” she asked, considering him. “If you have tired of me after a mere sennight, I do wonder at the longevity of our union.”

  “The servants are about,” he clipped.

  “Yes,” she agreed, unmoved. “But not your mother or your brother. Little wonder the dowager did now await me with a sharpened dagger. Perhaps she will wait until I am asleep and attempt to extinguish me with a pillow.”

  “Jesus, Boadicea.” He caught her elbow, hauling her into a nearby parlor and slamming the door behind them.

  Naturally, this parlor—a study in shades of vivid orange—was as ghastly as every other chamber his mother’s questionable taste in decorating had blighted. The dark oil landscapes on the wall contrasted in bilious fashion against the bright paisley wallpaper.

  Lip curling, irritation surging, she spun on her heel to face him. “Perhaps you are right to object. Poison, I should think, would be more of a weapon of choice for Her Grace. Would she deliver a fatal dose all at once, do you suppose, or would she make me suffer slowly over the course of many days, going mad from it?”

  Spencer’s eyes darkened, his fists clenching at his sides, sensual lips tautened into a long, mirthless line. He was livid. “Do you dare to suggest that my mother was responsible for my former du
chess’s madness and death?”

  Ah, there it was. The ghost that would not leave.

  Millicent, and how she resented that woman now, for all that she could help and even for all that she could not—madness, death, every bit of it. She resented her for having known Spencer before he had been touched by the ugliness of life. She resented her for having come first.

  It was small, and it was futile, but there it was. She was a weak and imperfect creature, jealous of a dead woman. She loved her husband with a vehemence that almost obliterated her, and he had taken that love as his due and promptly returned to being the Duke of Disdain.

  “I would never suggest such a thing,” she said honestly, “for I was not thinking of your dead wife, Spencer. Though apparently you were.”

  Perhaps it was horrid of her to make such a cutting comment, but she had lost her ability to blunt her tongue with her emotions running rampant. His sudden reversal had shocked her. That, coupled with his refusal to fully confide in her about his past, suggested he had no wish to heal. Indeed, his every action and word in the last day bespoke a man who was firmly lodged in the grief and desolation of his past. A man caught up so deeply in what had come before that he had lost sight of what was to come.

  It broke her heart.

  “Of course I think of her. She was the mother of my child,” he bit out.

  Boadicea absorbed those two sentences as if they were a blow. They may as well have been, for they possessed every bit as much force. They hurt even more. His former duchess had born his child, a right he now withheld from her each time he spent his seed into the bedclothes.

  He had had a child. A child who was obviously no longer living. How had she not known? Why had he never told her? It made so much, horrible sense. All the pieces of him that she had come to know seemed to fit together at last, and the picture it presented was awful. He had suffered even more than she had realized.

  She raised a hand to her mouth, stifling whatever would have burst forth. A sob? A gasp. She didn’t know. What she did know was that he did not wish to have another child, and that his dead wife and his dead child haunted his thoughts. How could there ever be room for her, for a life together, when he was so mired in old tragedies that they consumed him?

  The vow she had made to herself not many days before to give him as much time as he needed to heal was moot. She realized the gravity of her situation now, and it was dreadful and bitter.

  “Your child,” she managed to repeat.

  “My son,” he elaborated. “Stillborn. He is buried alongside his mother.”

  Tears stung her eyes. He had lost a son. The full, gut-wrenching impact of his revelation descended upon her. Dear God, he had lost a child and his wife, both in traumatic fashion. And she had not known. He had never said a word. How had she not known?

  Her muddled mind sifted through the events of the last week, his refusal to get her with child. His adamant vow that he needed no heir. He was still mourning the babe he had never gotten the chance to know. She gazed at him, stricken.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” she said, meaning every word of it. “Why did you not tell me?”

  “It doesn’t signify.” His tone was aloof.

  But she could sense the emotion he hid so well. He was not a stranger to her any longer, though perhaps his need to gird his heart convinced him that he ought to be. “Of course it does.” She went to him, taking his hands in hers, squeezing them in reassurance. “I want you to share everything with me.”

  He withdrew from her touch, his expression harder than ever, lips firmed into a grim frown. “Did it never occur to you that there are certain things I have no wish to share with you, Boadicea? But of course it would not to a girl like you, who is without boundaries and has never known a modicum of pain in her sheltered life.”

  She flinched, the combination of his rejection of her touch and his dismissive response making her feel as if he had slapped her. “A girl like me?”

  “You are twenty years old to my thirty-three,” he said coolly. “Forgive me if that distance seems apparent when you pry where you are not wanted.”

  A humiliating sting of tears burned in her eyes at his deliberate cruelty. “I’m beginning to think I have never been wanted, aside from my body. Tell me, is that all I am to you, Spencer? A naïve girl to warm your bed, one who is not worthy to access your mind and heart?”

  “I do not have a heart,” he growled, stalking away from her and plowing a hand through his hair before pivoting to face her once more. “Do you not see? You are expecting things from me that I cannot give. Emotions that I do not have the capacity to feel. Everything I once had, the man I once was, part of it died with my son, and the rest of it died the day Millicent took her life before me. This is no bloody fairy tale, Boadicea. What do you want from me, damn you?”

  “I want you to be honest with me.” Her hands trembled, and she thrust them into the folds of her traveling skirt to hide her distress. “Will this marriage ever be more than sharing a bed?”

  He stared at her, his gaze as inscrutable as his expression, every bit as obdurate. “What am I meant to say, Boadicea?”

  That you might love me back one day.

  That you return even a fraction of the feelings I possess for you.

  That you will not break me.

  A sick sensation fluttered through her, and she said none of those things. None of what she longed to utter. “You are meant to say the truth. I thought the last week brought us closer together. And yet, before we even returned to Boswell Manor, you withdrew from me. Since yesterday, you have kept me at a distance. Now, we return here and you cannot wait to be free of me, to send me away. Why, Spencer? What changed?”

  “Nothing changed, and that is the bloody problem.” He strode toward her, anger flashing through his eyes, tightening his jaw. “I cannot escape who and what I am. I have not made a secret of my expectations for this union. Ours is not a love match. We married to blunt the scandal we created.”

  He stopped just short of touching her, so near that she could smell his woodsy scent. So familiar and yet so stark and strange. The need to step forward and throw her arms around his waist rose within her, but she remained still. His ice had returned. Indeed, perhaps it had never left, and she had been a fool to think she could ever melt it. His words of two days before returned to her then, taunting.

  And then he knew he had somehow found the only duchess in the world who could ever suit him.

  She swallowed hard against a sudden rise of misery. “Of course, I am aware of the actions that necessitated our marriage. How could I forget?”

  His nostrils flared, as though he was having a difficult time marshaling his emotions into order. Or mayhap that was her wish. “We have mutual desire and respect, and that is more than many husbands and wives share.”

  The desire was there, as ever. There was no denying that he had shown her a deeper part of herself, that he had introduced her to not only the pleasures she’d read about but to her body and its responses. With him, she could be fearless and bold.

  But there remained another side to him, dark and foreign and hard, like uncharted land. A side he kept to himself. It was as if he were a garden she could only admire from the other side of a fence. And she wanted in. She wanted to pick the lock, break through to him. If she had thought that pleasure and the easiness they’d found during their honeymoon would be enough to see her through their life together, she could easily see now that it would not be so. If he remained unyielding, she did not think she could bear it.

  She took a deep, steadying breath. “How dare you pretend to respect me when you just told me I’m naught but a girl who has led a sheltered life? When you won’t be honest with me, when you won’t share any part of yourself with me beyond your body?”

  “I respect every bloody thing about you,” he growled, catching her arms and hauling her into his chest. “Never doubt that. But I cannot give you more than I have already done. I wish I could be the ma
n who would love you and give you half a dozen pretty flame-haired girls, but I cannot.”

  “You mean to say that you will not.” She pushed free of his grasp with little effort but a heavy heart. “The choice is yours, Spencer. You can let the past dictate your future, or you can free yourself.”

  With that, she turned away and left him standing in the parlor, watching her go. She could not stay a moment more, or she would risk breaking down before him. Holding her head high, she fled to the inauspicious confines of the duchess’s chamber.

  In the center of the gaudy room, her legs gave out and she sank to the rug, feeling like an interloper in this cavernous home, far away from everyone who loved her.

  And then he broke her heart.

  he soup course was laid before Bo’s nose the next evening at dinner. She did not even need to make a discreet sniff of the air to know that what swam in her bowl was not anything she wished to eat. No amount of sherry could mask the distinct, unwanted scent of haddock and oysters.

  Apparently, the headache that had kept Spencer’s mother abed for most of the previous and present days combined had not impeded her ability to oversee tonight’s dinner.

  Bo clutched her spoon and met the triumphant gaze of her mother-in-law across the finely set table. How had she forgotten to consult with Chef Langtois regarding the menu? In the whirlwind idyll of her honeymoon followed by the manner in which her marriage had seemed to fall apart upon their return to Boswell Manor, she had overlooked the dowager’s evil plot to poison her by poisson.

  Between that, Lord Harry’s harsh mien, and Spencer’s frigid politeness followed by his glaring absence altogether, including a lack of appearance at first breakfast, then luncheon, and now dinner, her ignominious homecoming was complete. But then again, if she required any more proof that this sprawling edifice, adorned in garish color and reminders of the impeccable Marlow lineage, was not her home, she would be as mad as the duchess who had preceded her.

  “What a splendid welcome home,” she drawled to the table at large—all two occupants besides herself—but to the dowager in particular. “I must confess, I had quite missed it here.”