The Duke's Disaster

by Grace Burrowes

  “I am not in readiness.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  Oh, damn him. Noah claimed to know nothing of wooing, and that was a lie. “You shouldn’t have to help. Dukes don’t help with house parties.”

  His embrace was gentle and absolutely safe. “Husbands do.”

  Good husbands. He was determined to make Thea cry. “You know this how, Anselm?”

  “Sweetheart, shall we debate something of parliamentary importance so I can put a little fire into my defense, or shall we bat domestic shuttlecocks between us for the next week?”

  Thea heard the weariness in Noah’s voice, not only of the body, but also of the state she was in. She was weary of it too. Sick to her soul of it.

  “I am…anxious.”

  “Scared, you mean,” Noah said easily. “I was scared I’d have to shoot my horse.”

  Thea had been frightened he would too. “This is different.”

  Noah studied her in the mirror for a long time, wound up the music again, and drew her to her feet.

  “May I have the honor?” In his dressing gown, he swept her a courtly bow, holding her hand high, as if they were at a grand ball.

  “Noah, this is…” Silly. Ridiculous. Also precious.

  He assumed the waltz position and slowly twirled Thea around the room. She was stiff at first, his folly was ill timed, and her mind was still stuck on nothing more than a few guests for a few days. Then Noah held her closer, the music slowed more, and thinking became less compelling.

  “I haven’t known quite how to go on with you lately,” Noah said when they were merely swaying to the last few notes. “I had the great, profound, and brilliant insight on the way home from Town that perhaps I ought simply to ask.”

  Thea had come to associate lavender and roses with Noah, with a sense of homecoming, and he’d called Wellspring home.

  “I wouldn’t know how to answer.”

  Except Thea would, if she had the courage, know how to tell Noah she’d missed him in bed at night. Not only the marital relations—that was a whole different kind of complication. She’d missed him.

  “Then let me make this simple for you, Thea: I’d like to sleep with my wife tonight. What would you like?”

  What was Noah asking? What was he saying?

  He shifted, as if to step back, and involuntarily, Thea’s arms tightened around him.

  His chin came down on her crown, and his hand splayed across the middle of her back.

  “Can you find the words for me, Wife? My manly insecurities are at spring tide of late.”

  “Would you please stay with me tonight, Husband? I have…”

  “Yes?”

  “You want more?”

  “I am a lot of duke to be wrestling insecurities on such a late and lonely night.”

  “I’ve missed you.”

  Noah didn’t make her repeat it, for which Thea silently thanked him. Instead, he kissed her sweetly, at length, though he remained only moderately aroused. She kissed him back, trying to tell him she really had missed him, really, truly, even if she couldn’t be gracious with the words.

  When they went to bed, Noah loved Thea slowly, almost reverently, and then held her in the darkness, while Thea found the first decent rest she’d had in a week.

  * * *

  “I am surrounded by shameless laggards,” Noah announced as he stirred sugar into Thea’s tea, took a sip, and passed her the remaining half cup. “And you.” He glared at the cat. “Don’t be eyeing the cream pitcher, shameless wench. Your figure is showing alarming signs of your weak morals, and you do not deserve cream.”

  “For God’s sake, hush.” This from Thea, who was clutching her teacup with bleary-eyed desperation.

  “A sign of life, God be praised for His endless miracles.”

  “Now you think to offer prayers, Anselm. Pray silently until I’ve finished my tea.”

  Noah gave the cat a scratch under the chin and busied himself pouring a dish of cream and placing it on the hearth. Bathsheba washed her paws, her ears, and her whiskers before deigning to break her fast. By then, Noah had the second cup of tea ready, and cinnamon toast liberally buttered as well.

  “You really ought to rest more, Wife.” Noah had assayed a few exploratory caresses and provoked not even a sigh from his duchess.

  “You woke me up to tell me I should rest more?”

  Her Grace was speaking in complete sentences before the second cup of tea. Noah took encouragement from that.

  “How else was the message to be conveyed,” he asked, “when you sleep like the dead? We have business to conduct today.”

  “You have business.” Thea accepted the second cup of tea, which was also not quite full. “I have a nattering magpie for a husband.”

  “Who has brought you a present from Town.”

  “Another horse?”

  “Must you sound so hopeful?” Noah tore off a corner of toast, then passed Thea the rest. “My womenfolk are equipped with mounts. This is a present, just for you.”

  Thea was grouchy and slow about it, but Noah could tell he’d piqued her interest when she made short work of the toast and her third half cup of tea.

  “I might sew you a loincloth if I like this present,” she allowed as Noah did up the hooks at the back of her dress ten minutes later. “Or if I don’t.”

  “Have some faith, Wife.” Noah escorted his duchess through the house at a decorous pace, though their objective made him a trifle nervous.

  For her part, Thea was getting better about coming along peaceably, or perhaps she was keeping her powder dry.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Noah led her down the stairs and out the back hallway, pausing only long enough to fling her old cloak over her shoulders, for the morning was blessedly cool. Out on the back terrace, a box sat on a chair, the box wrapped in decorative blue paper.

  “Have you done something I won’t like, Noah?”

  “Many things,” he said. “You make your displeasure evident when I transgress. This is a gift, Thea. A present, a token, from your husband to you.”

  “You are doting?”

  Noah gave her credit for courage, and himself too. “I am doting shamelessly, and you will endure this hardship like the duchess I know you to be. Now open your gift, and I’ll show you how to use it.”

  Thea eyed him dubiously, eyed the package just as carefully, and picked it up.

  “Before noon, if you please,” Noah said. “The day will grow too hot to gallop.”

  Thea shook the box, and sniffed it, and as Noah watched her, he gained a new appreciation for how reticent his wife had become regarding the joys of life.

  “How long has it been since you had a present, Wife?”

  “My husband gave me a lovely mare only a few weeks ago,” she said, untying the ribbon around the package.

  “Before that?”

  “My music box, I suppose. We weren’t much for presents, growing up, except at Yule, and those were either silly or practical.”

  Thea unwrapped a wooden box, and shot Noah a puzzled glance.

  “Sweetheart, the box is not the present. The box holds the present, and I can assure you what’s in there is neither noisome nor wiggly. If you don’t like it, you can simply thank me for the thought and hit me over the head with the box.”

  For Thea’s sake, Noah had kept his tone light, but his heart had begun to beat harder against his ribs, almost as if he were afraid, or very nervous.

  “A knife?” Thea held up the elegant little dagger, and Noah was pleased to see it fit her hand beautifully. “A knife, and what’s this? I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before.”

  Thea was…smiling, at Noah’s gift, then at him. Not a smile he could parse. Perhaps she thought him daft.

  “The blade is Italian,” Noah said, because Thea apparently hadn’t any more words for the occasion. “They take their weapons seriously, and their women to
o. You buckle the leather sheath about your leg under your skirts, if you don’t want to tuck it into your bodice. Shall I show you?”

  Thea nodded, saying nothing, and Noah wasn’t sure if she was humoring him, horrified beyond words, or maybe—God help her—pleased. She took the chair and daintily held her skirts up past the ankle. Noah reached the rest of the way and affixed her weapon snugly below her right knee.

  “Nobody will know it’s there, but you might want to get used to wearing it,” Noah said, sitting back on his haunches. “I’ve tied it on the right leg, but you might prefer it on the left. It all depends on how easily you can unsheathe it.”

  Thea stared at him, an utterly unreadable stare that ought to be forbidden to any female bearing the status of wife.

  “What made you do this, Husband?”

  Noah studied Thea’s hem, because he couldn’t meet that stare. Whatever else was true about Thea’s expression, her gaze held a desperation he’d never seen before, and a vulnerability he’d sensed even before they’d married.

  Noah had done this because he could not abide that his duchess be either vulnerable or desperate.

  “That regret you mentioned befell you at a house party, didn’t it, Thea?”

  She nodded once and turned her face away, and Noah was still at sea, wondering if he’d offended her, if he’d offended some rule of husbandly behavior no one had thought to tell him. He was already devising James’s punishment for that sorry oversight when Thea’s arms vised around his neck, and she pitched into him.

  “Thank you. Thank you, Noah, thank you, thank you.”

  By sundown, Thea could throw the damned thing with deadly accuracy. At bedtime, she asked if Noah would mind if she slept with it under her pillow every night.

  He assured her he would not.

  * * *

  Noah looked his brother up and down, trying to pinpoint what exactly was wrong. “You’re home a bit early.”

  “By one day,” Harlan replied, leading his gelding into the stable yard.

  “You can let the lads see to him,” Noah said. “I’ll not tattle to the great and wonderful Greymoor.”

  “Greymoor is wonderful,” Harlan said, “or his riding is, and his countess knows how to keep her guests in victuals. She also introduced me to Heathgate, and to Moreland’s heir.”

  “She’s a conscientious hostess, or perhaps she enjoyed showing off her handsome young guest,” Noah said, taking the reins from Harlan’s hand and passing them to the waiting groom. “In truth, I am glad to see you, and not only out of fraternal sentiment.”

  Had Harlan filled out in the mere days he’d been gone? Grown taller too?

  “What did you mean, Lady Greymoor was showing me off?”

  The gelding was led away, swishing its tail against Harlan’s side, an equine comment on the owner’s mood, perhaps.

  “I meant nothing,” Noah said, walking off in the direction of the house. The heat had driven his entire family daft. “You up for a quick swim?”

  “No, thank you.” Harlan’s tone would have frozen the entire lake, complete with swans. “A bath will do. A tray in my room will suffice thereafter.”

  Harlan was a ducal heir, and for the first time, he sounded the part.

  “You’ll have to tell Thea your preferences,” Noah said as they crossed into the garden. “Mind you tread lightly with my duchess. She’s planning a house party, but you must not call it that.”

  “Where will I find her?”

  Noah glared at the vast facade of his smallest country house. “Hell if I know. Raising Cain somewhere in there. You might ask the girls when you make your bow to them. They tend to keep watch over us all. But, Harlan?”

  His brother stopped mid-charge for the back terrace. “Noah?”

  “Whatever burr is under your saddle, I’d as soon you have it out with me now. Thea is struggling, and I’d spare her the family dramatics if I could.”

  Or perhaps Thea was practicing with her knife, which seemed to soothe her nerves.

  “Dramatics.” Harlan’s dark brows, so like their father’s, went crashing down. He looked like he wanted to say—or possibly bellow—a few unrefined sentiments, but he instead extracted a folded piece of foolscap from his waistcoat pocket.

  “Perhaps this is dramatic enough for you.” Harlan passed the paper to Noah and half turned, gaze on the distant paddocks.

  You are a harlot, Noah read. Your uncle is a harlot, and your brother married a harlot—or was that your father who married the harlot?

  Noah turned the note over and saw no identifying marks. He wanted to tear the paper into a thousand tiny pieces before setting fire to it and stuffing the ashes up somebody’s…

  “You received this while at Greymoor’s?”

  “One of the grooms said a fellow at the local posting inn asked him to pass it along to Greymoor’s guest,” Harlan said. His voice bore the studied casualness of the violently furious. “The note was folded and sealed, but had no franking, no address, and the groom didn’t recognize the man who gave it to him.”

  Harlan’s gaze remained on the far paddocks, a muscle twitching along his jaw.

  “Could he describe that man?” Noah asked.

  They were in a knot garden, a tidy arrangement of symmetrical green hedges and raked white stones, all of which Noah wanted to rip into permanent disarray.

  “A town swell on a big bay horse,” Harlan said. “This happened late in the evening, and I gather my postboy was in his cups.”

  “Probably chosen for being in his cups. How long ago did you receive this?”

  “Three days. And, no, I did not mention it to Greymoor. He was my host, but this is…personal.”

  “Viciously so.”

  “You aren’t asking why I’m referred to as a whore.”

  “You aren’t a whore,” Noah said, shoving the note into Harlan’s outstretched hand.

  “At school—”

  Noah took a turn studying the peaceful acres beyond the garden. “Do you think I care what you did in the dormitories when the candles were doused and the door locked? There’s a reason you had tutors until you were big enough to hold your own in a fight.”

  “It was my nickname, Noah,” Harlan said, shoving him hard in the chest. “I was called Harlot.”

  Harlan’s voice, which had changed more than a year ago, held a hint of youthful tremolo. Anger could do that to a young man, or heartbreak.

  Despair dealt Noah a hard blow, for this was the Winters legacy. Foul names, anger, innuendo, and drama. He shook the despair away and applied his mind to the situation.

  “Is that why you resembled the losing half of a prize fight for most of your first Michaelmas term?”

  Harlan nodded, folding the note with shaking fingers.

  Between Noah and the house lay the rose garden, most of which was past its prime and blown to thorny stems. Thea would see it all trimmed to tidiness before the first guest arrived.

  “Christ in a boat, Harlan, I’m sorry.”

  “You dealt with it,” Harlan said. “You came up to school, nosed about, and it stopped.”

  “Nobody told me,” Noah said, though something had prompted him to look in on his brother. “My nickname was Flood, and I couldn’t be seen around livestock without somebody making a lewd comment regarding long sea voyages and procreation.”

  Harlan gestured with the note. “What about the rest of it?”

  The fighting? The juvenile politics, the teachers who turned a blind eye because a ducal heir could always benefit from a gratuitous beating?

  “What rest of it?”

  “Are you…” Harlan paced off, shoulders hunched, the gesture reminiscent of a child’s defensiveness.

  “Am I what? I am most assuredly not married to a harlot, and neither was our papa. Not at any point.” Though as for Papa himself…

  “That note implies something else.”

  Noah mentally revisited the words, a right proper rampage boiling up under his self-discip
line.

  “The note implies somebody wants to breathe their last facedown in grass and sheep shit one morning here directly,” Noah said. “You feel this as an attack on you, Harlan, but it’s an attack on the family—you, Meech, Thea, me, on all of us—and thus it’s mine to resolve.”

  Preferably with violence, because this was a sneak attack on a woman who’d been defenseless prior to her marriage, and a boy not yet come into his majority.

  “You can’t blame somebody for commenting on the truth.” Harlan’s fists were clenched at his side, and his expression was…tormented. Purely, simply, tormented.

  “What do you think this says?” Noah asked, snatching the note back. “It’s malicious tripe, Harlan. A little fact mixed with a liberal portion of rumor and a greater portion of spite.”

  A very great portion of spite.

  “Are you my father?”

  “Your—what?”

  “It says, ‘or was it your father who married the harlot?’ As if you might be my brother, or you might be my father. Which is it, Noah, and so help me, if you say you don’t know…”

  Harlan’s expression said he’d cry or beat Noah half to death.

  “I am your brother,” Noah said calmly. “I am not your father. I could not be your father. Think, Harlan. You were born the twenty-third day of August. I would have been off at university the previous autumn, and not on hand for your conception.”

  “Mother might have visited you.”

  Harlan had apparently been tormenting himself with this possibility for days. Working out the details, lashing at his dignity, his sanity, his concept of himself. His mood now resembled the spent rose garden, all thorns and rotting blooms.

  “Your mother was the last woman to bestir herself to travel,” Noah replied. “Once Papa died, she’d barely leave the house, and received only family, the minister, her physician, or the solicitors. She did not hare up to Oxford to call on her stepson, for she was already several months gone with child.”

  Thus did a woman grieve the loss of her opportunity to become a duchess.

  “So is Meech my father? Is that why it says Papa married a whore? Uncle is a whore?”

  Harlan wasn’t stupid, and he had more courage than Noah had given him credit for. “Why do you think that?”