A soft snore escaped Aunt Havens’ mouth.
Indecision paralyzed Kate. This was the fifth time in as many months that Aunt Havens had fallen asleep during daylight hours, right in the middle of doing something else.
Part of her wanted to let her aunt sleep. The other, more frightened part of her wanted to shake her aunt awake and make her promise she wasn’t getting ill. Or growing old. Or anything else that might take her away from Kate.
Cold terror gripped her heart.
What if Ravenwood didn’t want some doddering aunt wandering about his ducal estate? He hadn’t even wanted Kate. He certainly wouldn’t be pleased to discover he’d gained not one, but two unwanted dependents. What if he decided to execute his husbandly right to send Aunt Havens to some far off asylum and Kate never saw her again?
Dizziness assailed her. She rushed over to her aunt and pulled her into her arms. Aunt Havens was Kate’s heart, her family, her lifeline. She couldn’t lose her. She wouldn’t.
“Miss Ross?” Marr, Kate’s butler, stepped into the parlor. “You have a gentleman caller. Shall I show him in?”
Kate glanced up at her butler and swallowed the lump in her throat. “Show him in, please.”
She placed a blanket about Aunt Havens’ shoulders and sat next to her, rather than across from her. Asleep or not, they would present a united front against Ravenwood. Sort of. She took a deep breath to rally her courage.
The Duke of Ravenwood stepped into the parlor looking even more devastatingly handsome than he’d done the night before. His chestnut curls and long-lashed green eyes highlighted without softening his unsmiling lips and regal bearing.
She stood as he sketched a courtly bow, and responded with as pretty a curtsey as she could muster. She would be calm. He hadn’t hoped for this turn of events any more than she had. Churlishness would help neither of them. They would have to make the best of it.
“Have you seen the scandal sheets?” she asked.
He took a seat on the chair opposite. “I don’t need to.”
Kate had felt the same way. For the first time in her life, she had tossed them into the fire without opening them.
Normally, she loved to read each column. To spy her name, or some unmistakable allusion to her, amongst their mindless pages.
Today was different. She pressed her lips together. The rest of her life would be different.
Ravenwood settled back in his chair. He had yet to remark upon their chaperone’s gentle snores, despite the presence of needlework in her liver spotted hands.
Kate wasn’t certain if his failure to acknowledge Aunt Havens made him exceptionally rude, or unexpectedly perceptive. It was not something she wished to talk about. Aunt Havens was just tired. She was going to be fine.
Ravenwood leaned forward. “Do you have a preference as to which church does the reading of the banns?”
He wanted banns?
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. “You’re a duke. Can’t you get a special license?”
“Of course. But our betrothal has been marked with enough ignominy. Banns are what most couples do. A special license is just something else for the gossips to talk about.”
“We’re not most couples,” she said, without heat. Nothing about this was normal.
He knew that. Neither of them had wanted this. He was trying to make it easier. She tilted her head to consider him. Despite the image he projected, he wasn’t an unfeeling automaton. She’d learned that last night when he’d caught her in his arms. He was trying to protect her again now.
His face was impassive. “You object to banns?”
She objected to marrying anyone. But thanks to the compromise, her wishes no longer mattered. She bit her lip. “I don’t see the point to prolonging the inevitable. We have to wed. A special license is the most expedient solution. Banns won’t make anyone believe we’ve fallen in love.”
For the second time in their acquaintance, a smile twisted the Duke of Ravenwood’s lips.
This time, it did not reach his eyes.
“Then there’s no sense playacting.” He drew a small journal from an inner coat pocket and scanned its pages. “Does one week from today fit your schedule? Ten o’clock should do. Ravenwood House has a parlor suitable for a small proceeding, if you’d rather not have the ceremony in a church.”
Kate didn’t have to check her calendar. She rarely scheduled anything before noon.
“Ten o’clock,” she forced herself to agree. Now that she’d talked him out of banns, their impending wedding seemed all the more real. She wrapped her arms about herself. “I suppose I should bring my clothing and other personal items with me?”
He inclined his head. “You can ship ahead anything you like. I have commissioned a new armoire, expressly for your use. It is a husband’s duty to provide a wedding gift for his wife.”
An armoire. She fought to stay calm. She had an armoire of her own. An entire home full of things that mattered. She lifted a palm toward her papyri and painted vases. “As for the rest of my things?”
He drew back slightly. “You would wish to put these…items on display at Ravenwood House?”
She curled her fingers into fists. Of course her collection would not be welcome.
“You would prefer me to hold onto my townhouse and keep them here?” she returned archly.
Something shifted in his eyes. “You may keep your townhouse, Miss Ross. It will remain yours in every way that matters.”
No, it would not. She smiled through clenched teeth. Although it was not his fault, he could not deny the truth.
Nothing would be hers anymore, in any way that mattered. She had spent years building a stable life for herself by investing her modest inheritance in the four percents and her beloved museum. Now, none of that mattered.
One week from today, she would become the Duke of Ravenwood’s property.
Chapter 5
Ravenwood glared at the blank page mocking him with its unblemished purity.
He was alone in his office, seated behind his father’s stately escritoire. When he was a child, he would often climb up into the thick leather chair and scrawl a few lines in his journal.
During his adolescent years, particularly after the loss of his parents, those scrawled lines had ceased being a recapitulation of his day. He didn’t wish to dwell on his grief and anger; he longed to escape it.
And so he had turned to poetry. Expressing things he wished would happen, rather than life as it really was. It was an escape, yes, but it also provided a brief moment of hope in days that otherwise would have none.
Days like today.
He was about to wed a woman he didn’t even know. A woman who didn’t know him—and perhaps never would.
The boy who had scribbled in his journal, the man who anguished over every dissonant couplet, that wasn’t the Duke of Ravenwood. It was Lawrence Pembroke. A man with dreams and sorrows, fears and fury, apathy and abject love. ’Twas the secret side of himself he only allowed to breathe for a few moments every morning before carefully locking it away in a hidden drawer within his desk.
Today, even his recklessly romantic side had run out of hope. There was nothing left to write. The dreams inside those worn journal pages were destined to remain just that. Empty dreams.
A knock sounded upon his office door.
Ravenwood closed the stubborn journal and locked it inside its secret panel. “Come in.”
Mrs. Brown, the housekeeper, cracked open the door but did not venture inside after her curtsey. “Pardon the interruption, your grace. Just wanting to see if you had any additional requirements for the wedding breakfast. There’s still time to send Martha on another run to the market.”
Ravenwood rubbed his face. What did he know about planning wedding breakfasts?
He’d already changed the menu twice. Even though a love match was not his fortune, he wished the breakfast to at least be tolerable to the bride.
Yet the only meal he’d ever seen M
iss Ross consume was what his sister Amelia had served at her dinner party—namely, Ravenwood’s favorite foods, because she’d intended to manipulate him into attending that cursed charity gala.
He would no doubt look like a perfect cad by featuring his own favorite supper dishes at a wedding breakfast, but it was the best he could do. He would not write to his bride—or worse, his sister—in search of advice. His was not a love match, and he refused to look like a romantical fool.
“Perhaps some canapés,” he said at last. Footmen had been serving trays of them at the auction. They might be one of Miss Ross’s preferred appetizers, or they might simply be the easiest thing to have on hand at her gala. In any case, at least it was another option. “That will be all.”
“Yes, your grace.” Mrs. Brown bobbed her respects and quickly closed the door.
Her footsteps were soundless on the carpet in the corridor, but Ravenwood had no doubt she was moving with all haste to inform Martha of her impending return to market.
Such was the power and the curse of being duke. Everyone did everything with all haste in their eagerness to accede to his commands. Had he proclaimed, We shall serve worms in mud sauce, such a menu would have been executed without question.
His title was not solely to blame. Being the sort of duke that he had become also had much to do with the matter.
Inheriting at a young age meant he’d had to try that much harder to live up to impossibly high expectations. To be taken seriously. To be respected.
Since then, he’d been called many things. Cold, proper, haughty, imperious, dismissive. These were not insults. They were character traits of a man who appreciated order. It was all he knew. He had perhaps grown into an outwardly hard man, but not, he felt, an unworthy one.
Until last night.
He pushed to his feet and strode from his office to an unassuming little sitting room on the opposite wing of the manor. The room was empty, save for a single gilded portrait upon the far wall. No one entered this room but Ravenwood.
No one was allowed to.
He assumed his customary position before his cherished painting and stared into its dry, cracked depths. When his uncle Blaylock had become guardian to two orphaned siblings, the man had rolled up this canvas and tossed it into a dark closet so that he could use the magnificent frame to showcase his own family.
The rescued painting contained the only family portrait of Ravenwood, his sister, and their much-loved parents.
It was an unusual piece because the artist had captured more than the family—he’d included the entire room in the background. From the vase of roses on the windowsill to the one-of-a-kind furniture before the fire, every aspect had been faithfully represented.
Ravenwood had been young at the time it had been painted, but he remembered why they’d chosen this small sitting room to star in such a portrait. The little parlor had belonged to his mother. She would invite her children into it every evening, to listen to her read aloud for an hour before the nursemaids packed them off to bed.
The duke would complain good-naturedly that listening to his wife’s voice was ever so much slower than simply reading the book himself—but he never once missed an opportunity to sit in his brocade hand-carved chair before the fire, listening along with his children.
Uncle Blaylock had sold that chair, and everything else depicted in the portrait. He’d turned the cozy sitting room into a showcase for hunting trophies. Instead of housing memories of the best years of Ravenwood’s childhood life, the room became a shrine to death. To loss.
The moment he reached his majority, he’d banished his uncle and the animal carcasses from Ravenwood House forever.
He hadn’t been able to locate the one-of-a-kind furniture pieces the room had once boasted, nor recreate the sense of love and family it had once had. He and Amelia had been alone against the world back then.
After she’d married, it was just Ravenwood.
For another hour, anyway. He consulted his pocket watch to be certain, then sent one final gaze toward the painting.
The last people to see him as Lawrence and not the Duke of Ravenwood gazed back at him from the scarred canvas. The last people to truly know him.
All anyone saw now when they looked at him was what he allowed them to see.
He wished he could be more. He appreciated being a duke—it made him feel close to his father, who had been the most exemplary duke of his time—but he wished it didn’t preclude him from also being a man. From having conversations deeper than “Yes, your grace” and “As you wish, your grace.”
He wanted love. He wanted a family. He wanted warm nights before a crackling fire, reading aloud with his wife as they took turns cuddling their squirming children in their arms.
Not the lonely, loveless upbringing he and his sister had endured after their parents died. He wanted the warm, joyful days of love and laughter. Of family.
He didn’t want a house he merely owned. He wanted a home where he belonged.
And yet, in an alarmingly short period of time, Ravenwood House was about to be invaded by yet another stranger. Someone else would live within these same walls, her very presence ensuring he would never be able to fully put down his guard, even in his own home. He would no longer feel comfortable.
He stalked from the sitting room toward his dressing chamber. He might not have planned to marry her, but he would not dishonor Miss Ross or his duty as a duke in any way. In half an hour, he would be ready and waiting beside the altar.
And his life would never be the same again.
Chapter 6
The Duke of Ravenwood stood in the blue parlor in the rear of his estate awaiting the arrival of his bride for the second time this year.
On the previous occasion, he had been about to marry his dead friend’s paramour…until the very-much-alive brigadier returned against all odds to stop the wedding.
Ideally, Miss Ross would have no such skeletons in her past.
Edmund and his wife were seated in the front row to show their support. They were even more in love now than they’d been when Edmund had first gone off to war. When all of them had gone off to war. Every single one of the childhood friends that Ravenwood cared about most.
Everyone but him.
He’d felt like a failure at the time. As if he were hiding behind his title rather than putting his loyalty to the Crown first.
But managing a dukedom was no small responsibility, and Ravenwood had no heirs. If he were felled by an enemy rifle, the title would pass to none other than his Uncle Blaylock.
Ravenwood would die before he let that happen. And he’d take Uncle Blaylock down with him.
An emotional reaction to the rules of primogeniture? Absolutely. One of the few Ravenwood had ever allowed himself.
He was furious at his sister for having manipulated him into attending that ill-fated charity gala, but of course he had still invited her to the wedding. She was his sister. The only person who ever came close to knowing the true him.
As much as Ravenwood disliked time spent with most people, these past long months had been lonely without his sister.
The elder by a few years, Amelia had managed the daily minutia of Ravenwood House from the moment their parents had died. Aunt Blaylock might have thought she was pulling the strings, but even an adolescent Amelia had been a force of nature.
It was likely because of the Blaylocks’ presence in their lives that Amelia had learned to pay close attention to every detail, to rule with cunning rather than commands.
The best thing about having a sister like Amelia was that she managed to handle everything Ravenwood hated in such a way that he didn’t even need to know about it, much less deal with it. He was not required to mediate drama amongst the staff or attend public events where he would be forced into awkward conversations with people he didn’t even know.
Amelia was always so good at her job that it had been easy to forget it wasn’t her job. Until the day she’d met her husband
and left Ravenwood House behind.
It had felt empty ever since.
He broke his fast alone. Lunched alone. Took tea alone. Dined alone. Sipped his port alone. And then began his day all over again.
All that, however, was about to change.
Probably.
He would not impose mealtime regulations upon a duchess. If Miss Ross wished to take her meals in the privacy of her bedchamber, he would not deny her.
No matter what he might have wished his marriage to be like.
Movement in the corridor caught his eye. He held his breath. His bride had arrived at last.
She was beautiful.
Her eyes were clear and bright. She wore a long, intricately beaded gown of pale blue silk. He had no idea if it had been commissioned for this purpose or if it was a gown she’d worn to hundreds of less-than-respectable soirées.
It didn’t matter, he reminded himself. From this moment on, she was his duchess. He would treat her with the respect she deserved. She was attractive and interesting. They would get to know each other eventually. It would be fine. He would make their marriage succeed.
His bride’s long blond hair was twisted into some sort of complicated French style, with a plethora of pearl combs holding up all but a few artful ringlets.
That was new. Her hair had been arranged much more casually the night of Amelia’s dinner party, and even during the night of the charity gala. Which meant, regardless of its provenance, she was viewing their union with at least some degree of interest. Perhaps she, too, wondered what might have happened if her aunt had not interrupted them in the storage room.
Arm in arm, Mrs. Havens walked her niece all the way to the clergyman, her strut pleased as a peacock.
“Kate is going to be a duchess,” she whispered to Ravenwood when they reached the altar.
“So I heard,” he replied, careful not to betray his startlement at the proclamation. “I may even be the duke in question.”
“I hope so. You’re a handsome one.” Mrs. Havens gave him a coquettish wink.
The Dukes of War: Complete Collection Page 81