A Heart of a Duke Regency Collection : Volume 2--A Regency Bundle

by Christi Caldwell

  A shuddery groan escaped him as he poured himself inside her and then replete, he collapsed against the edge of the door, catching himself at his elbows. His heartbeat pounded loudly in his ears as his wife ran her long fingers up and down his back.

  “That was wonderful,” she said, a wistful quality in those words coming faintly out of breath, as though she’d run a long distance.

  It had been wonderful. It had been the mindless act he’d performed too many times to remember, but her release, in its purity and newness, roused a masculine sense of pride. Except, as Cedric drew back and removed the kerchief from his pocket then proceeded to clean her, an uncharacteristic awkwardness he’d never before known, descended. Why did he not know what to say? Hell, why was there even a need to say anything? They’d both had their pleasure and now could go about their own affairs. As he adjusted his garments, his skin pricked with the intensity of Genevieve’s eyes on him as she righted her nightshift. She sought words from him. What were they? His feet twitched with the need to flee the unrestrained emotion spilling from her too-honest eyes.

  “Will you join me?” she asked, a veritable Eve before him. Genevieve motioned to the books on art resting on her nightstand and he blankly followed her gesture to the stack.

  This question she put to him, this intimacy, was far greater than the passionate explosion between them moments ago. He cleared his throat. “I’ll not interrupt your plans for the evening.”

  She snorted. “My plans, Cedric? I’m not going anywhere. I haven’t been anywhere since we were married.” She arched an eyebrow; her meaning clear. His wife wished to accompany him out.

  He straightened his cravat, adjusting the slightly wrinkled knot. Beyond a place in his bed, ladies didn’t ask for much from him. That this one did roused a greater terror than facing down the Queen’s regiment without a weapon in hand. Cedric started for the door. He’d just grabbed the handle, when Genevieve called out.

  “What are you doing?” his wife spoke in clipped tones.

  He wheeled slowly around and then sighed. Genevieve stood with her arms folded at her chest. Of course, a lady of her spirit wouldn’t take to being summarily dismissed. Through her thick, strawberry lashes, fury sparked in her eyes. When he remained silent, she drummed her fingertips on her arm. “Are you leaving?”

  By the fiery glimmer in her direct gaze, he was one erroneous word away from a display he’d rather do without. He tugged at his neck piece. “I pledged to meet Montfort.” For years, he’d never accounted for his actions or decisions and he squirmed, discomfited with her show of spirit and the questions she’d put to him.

  Silence reigned, punctuated by the ticking of the clock. “Montfort,” she said at last, and by the way she managed to stretch those syllables into forever, hinted at her slow-building fury.

  “I never presented myself as something other than I am, madam,” he said dragging a hand through his hair. He’d not led her into this union with the promise of anything beyond security and freedom. Her words and actions these two days were those of a woman who expected more…nay, desired more. Nor did it truly matter what she did hope for or expect of their union. Or it shouldn’t. Perhaps he was not as much a heartless bastard as he’d believed these years. He captured her delicate chin between his thumb and forefinger and tipped her head up. “You do not understand,” he said quietly.

  “Then make me,” she said with a steely insistence.

  “This is who I am.”

  She planted her hands akimbo. “That isn’t an answer, Cedric.”

  Ultimately he’d fail her. His blood was his father’s and she would invariably become the same broken figure in the gardens below that his own mother had been. And he’d rather she hate him now and retain her spirit than see her turned into that empty creature at his hands. He tried to make her understand. “I visit my clubs and attend mindless ton amusements and—”

  “And you come in here, make love to me, and leave.” Crimson suffused her cheeks and she jutted her chin up. “You’ll give me your body, but that is all, like I am nothing more than the whore Society purported me to be.”

  A thick curtain of black fury fell over his vision. At the ton who’d so condemned her and himself for this vitriolic rage at the word she ascribed to herself. “You are no whore,” he bit out. “I’ll not continue this discussion,” he muttered and made to leave once more.

  “No, you’ll run, instead,” she said quietly, those words more powerful than had she roared them from the top of her lungs. “Just as you do every night.” She twisted that dull-blade of truth inside, like a dagger that carved away at years of indifference.

  His entire body jerked. She’d accuse him of cowardice? But then, aren’t you? Have you ever met anything or anyone more terrifying than Genevieve and her hold over you?

  “A whore is what you’d have me be, Cedric.” Her words echoed around the room. “I am nothing more than a mistress who shares your name.” She turned her palms up. “I married you, for what? My financial freedom? My own security? How does that not make me a whore?”

  He snapped his teeth so hard, pain shot along his jawline. “Do not say that,” he said sharply. We had a bloody goddamn arrangement. This probing had never been part of it…

  He braced for her additional fury, welcomed it. But alas, she proved as unpredictable as she’d been since his father’s ball. “Those…amusements where you find your…pleasure,” she began unexpectedly. “You have attended them since you were in university, no doubt.”

  Earlier. He’d had his first whore at thirteen. He’d not taint her ears with that ugly truth.

  “Do you enjoy going to them?” Her softly spoken question cut across his silent musings.

  He considered her question. Did he enjoy them? She nodded. Cedric started, not realizing he’d spoken aloud. “It is what I know,” he said with a frown. Feeling burned, he released his gentle grip on her chin and took a hasty step away from her.

  Genevieve wandered over to the nightstand, drawing his gaze to her every slow, deliberate movement. She perched on the edge of the mattress and picked up the top copy of her books. “I used to love London,” she said softly. “I thought it was very grand and romantic and exciting.”

  He curled his hands. Her former betrothed. Why should it matter that she’d thrilled at the gentleman’s presence?

  “Yes, how very grand it all seemed.” She absently fanned the pages of the book. “The orchestras and scandalous waltzes.” Genevieve lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. Once more with her unwitting words, she proved the depth of her innocence. “I do love to waltz, you know.” Actually he hadn’t. What else did he not know about the woman he’d married? “The evenings that seemed unending. The magnificent gowns. I thought how much I loved the thrill of it all.” She lifted her gaze from her book. “Until I was sent away to the country and came to find a freedom that existed outside the confines of London. Joy driven by your own interests and not what Society believes your interests should be. Wagering. Waltzing. Shopping. What is the purpose of all that?”

  Cedric shifted on his feet as the unabashed honesty of her admission shook him. This world he lived in was one he’d been born to; one that, by the very nature of his blood, had become one that was comfortable to him. “There is something to be said for the comfort to be had in familiarity.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. A small smile hovered on her lips. “But the thrill of the unfamiliar…now that is something to revel in.” Silence fell, punctuated by the snapping hiss of the fire in the hearth. “Stay,” she urged.

  His mouth went dry. “I cannot,” he said hoarsely.

  Before he did something borne of madness like join her in that bed to peruse those books on her nightstand, Cedric spun on his heel and marched from the room like the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels—and left.

  Chapter 20

  In the following weeks Genevieve and Cedric settled into a predictable routine.

  She would rise first, and
he, much, much later. During the day, they sketched and read and gardened.

  And if the days were to stop at four o’clock in the afternoon, one would say they were the model of a devoted, loving couple. Which was, of course, madness. There was no love in a formal arrangement such as theirs. But each evening…for seven weeks three days, two hours, and a handful of minutes, if one wanted to be truly precise, Cedric left.

  Oh, there was lovemaking. Scandalously during the day and then sometimes when he returned in the dead of night, from wherever it was he went. Then, the papers had proven quite valuable in indicating just where her husband spent the later part of his days and nearly the whole of his nights.

  On her haunches, Genevieve glanced up from the small hole she now dug to where her husband now sat. With his eyes closed and his head tilted toward the sun, she used the moment to study him. He had the look of a bronzed Apollo; the manner of beauty that still quickened her heart, these weeks later.

  He opened his eyes and not wanting to be caught gaping like a fawning schoolgirl, she quickly devoted her attention to the moist soil. Genevieve reached her fingers into the soft patch to remove a large rock and her fingers collided with a fat, slimy earthworm. She gagged, nausea broiling at the back of her throat, and quickly yanked her hand back.

  “Never tell me you’re squeamish, love,” her husband’s gentle teasing brought a smile.

  She furrowed her brow. Squeamish? She’d taught her sister to bait hooks as they’d fished on their father’s country lake. She’d named spiders she’d found in her schoolroom. No one would ever accuse her of being squeamish. “Oh, hush,” she teased. “It is quite easy to make light of one working in a garden while sitting in the sun, soaking up the sun’s rays like a fat cat.”

  “Fat cat, am I?” he waggled his brows.

  There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his muscle hewn frame. “La, are you searching for compliments, sir?”

  “Mayhap a bit.” He winked, eliciting a laugh.

  Her bonnet tipped over her brow and she brushed it back. Returning her attention to the soil, she withdrew the other pebbles and stones littering the space, taking care to avoid the… She gagged again and swiftly pulled her hand back. Good God, what was wrong with her?

  A wave of nausea assailed her, just as Cedric’s booming laugh echoed around the gardens. She concentrated on her breathing to keep the nausea at bay. It was on the tip of her tongue to point out that she was very near to casting her accounts up in the blasted hole she’d just dug when he shoved lazily to his feet and strode the small distance between them. But he yanked off his gloves and tossed them aside. “Here,” he murmured, sinking to his haunches beside her.

  Her breath caught hard in her chest at the sight of him, bent over the slight hole, and she concentrated on her view of him. He’d earned the reputation as a rake. But how many gentlemen would sit beside their wives in this domestic tableau, staining their hands with dirt?

  He handed over the thin branch with its exposed roots. Together, they planted the small bush, shoveling dirt back onto the roots. Genevieve dug a slight circle about the base. “My grandfather gardens,” she said. “One would never expect it of him.” Of any earl, but especially not the Earl of Hawkridge. Just as they’d, no doubt, never expect Cedric Falcot, the Marquess of St. Albans, would spend his early afternoons in the garden with his wife. “He taught me to build the earth up in a small circle about the base of the tree or bush and then it helps bring moisture to the roots when it rains.”

  “Is that where you went when you were gone from London?”

  His question brought her head up. For everything they did speak about since their marriage, the personal stories of their life had remained closed between them. Since she’d challenged him in her bedchambers weeks earlier, they’d discussed and explored the safeness of shared interests…but never the parts of their earlier years. “It was where I was sent,” she corrected. Genevieve dusted her palms together and then settled onto the ground. “The Kent countryside.” She drew her knees close to her chest and dropped her chin atop the mud-stained apron wrapped about her. “I was so fearful when they first sent me to my grandfather. My memories of him were of a gruff, often scowling, old man.” Having gone to live with him, she’d learned in short order that there was so much more to a person than the world saw of the surface. “He taught me that there is more to people than the thin layer Society sees and judges.”

  Cedric remained squatting, his gaze fixed on that slight circle. “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” she said automatically, bringing his gaze to hers. “I know that,” she said. Genevieve laid her cheek against her skirt. “Society saw in me, nothing more than a shameful wanton.”

  His mouth tightened. “They are bloody fools, the whole of them.”

  She winked at him, warmed by his fury on her behalf. “Yes, well that is really the point, isn’t it? I believe there is more to everyone.”

  “Aumere?” he asked, without malice, a challenge there.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Well, mayhap not Aumere.” That man had shown enough ugly in his soul to prove that there was nothing but blackness there.

  Cedric pushed to a stand, unfurling to his full six-feet, four-inches. “That is true in some cases, but not all, Genevieve.”

  She’d have to be deafer than a post to fail to hear the cynical resignation in his protest. He spoke of himself. A frown pulled at her lips. “Do you think there is nothing more to you than the image you’ve crafted for the world?”

  His body stiffened and just like that, for the first time in the nearly eight weeks since they’d been wed, she’d moved their conversation away from the light, gentle teasing and into the solemn realness they danced around. “I haven’t crafted any image,” he said flexing his jaw. “I’ve told you before, this is who I am.”

  “I know that because you make it a point of saying it, frequently.” As though in saying it, he’d convince himself of the truth.

  He hardened his mouth and gone was all hint of the affable charmer who could tempt and tease. “Do you want to know the manner of youth I was?”

  More than anything. “I’d venture you were quite mischievous and grayed the hair of your nursemaids.”

  “My father brought me a whore when I was thirteen,” he said bluntly, startling a gasp from her. “I seduced my last governess soon after, before I went off to Eton. Is that the manner of wicked you’d been thinking?”

  Genevieve opened her mouth. And then closed it. She opened her mouth again. She’d been imagining a rapscallion who poured ink in tea and snuck spiders into the family home. Not…this… By the tight lines at the corner of his mouth and the derisive glitter in his eyes, he expected her shock. But…there was more than shock. Pain stabbed at her heart. She’d long believed her father was a monster, but this was the kind of evil and ugly that made her father look like a loving, doting papa. No wonder Cedric had grown into this jaded, cynical rake.

  “Nothing to say?” he taunted, a hard edge to his words.

  Slowly Genevieve pushed herself to her feet. “I am horrified,” she said, giving him the truth. As she came forward, his body went taut. “I am horrified that as a child, your father subjected you to that baseness. Where was your mother?” she asked quietly. If they were ever blessed to have a babe, she’d protect it, keeping it from this vile depravity.

  A humorless laugh spilled past his tight lips. “They lived two very separate lives.” Unlike the manner of comfortable existence she and Cedric had settled into. Mostly. “After my sister’s birth, my mother quite easily handed me over to my father’s tutelage. No doubt, she’d quickly gleaned the manner of son she had.”

  Is that what he believed? That his mother had seen ugly in his soul and left him to his father for it? Genevieve held her palms up. “I do not know the manner of woman your mother was.” She chose to believe that she’d defend her own children, fighting even the king himself, if it meant their happiness. “But I cannot believe she saw anythin
g but her son, when she saw you.”

  With a dismissive noise, her husband scrubbed a hand down his face, leaving an endearing trail of dirt.

  Footsteps sounded at the entrance of the garden and she wanted to stamp her foot in annoyance at the interruption. Of all the words they’d exchanged since their marriage, in this she’d learned more about Cedric than she’d ever known before. And now it was not enough. She wanted to know all of the past that had shaped him into the man he’d become. Even the dark, painful parts he, no doubt, had buried these years.

  “Miss Cornworthy arrived to see you. I took the liberty of showing her to the parlor and having refreshments brought.”

  Disappointment filled her. “Thank you,” she murmured. As much as she looked forward to her frequent visits with the fun, eccentric Francesca Cornworthy, she’d learned much in this short exchange with Cedric and was reluctant to abandon this moment. “You have plans for this evening?” she asked, after the butler had taken his leave.

  “I intended to meet Montfort at our clubs.”

  She didn’t wish to be that wife who frowned on disreputable company for her husband, but just once she wished her husband chose to stay in with her. “Of course,” she said quietly and annoyance stirred at the attention he devoted to that blasted timepiece.

  “I shall leave you to your company.”

  Just as you always do…

  And she stood in watch as Cedric retreated with the speed of Boney marching through Russia in the dead of winter.

  With his wife’s words echoing around his mind and that damned optimistic, hopeful glimmer in her eyes, Cedric strode quickly through the corridors. He’d not spoken of his mother in years…

  Nay.

  Never. He’d never spoken of his mother, or that long ago night in the schoolroom, or his seduction of the governess to anyone. He was not the type of man who spoke to another person on things of import. He spoke of spirits and wagering and whores and his own material comforts.

  Cedric strode across the opposite corridor and collided with his flushed, slightly out of breath butler…and…