Heart of a Duke 04 - Loved By a Duke

by Christi Caldwell

  Daisy drew in a slow breath and stared up at the white stucco structure and then continued forward, up the handful of steps. She rapped once.

  The door opened immediately. Frederick looked at her a moment, his mouth agape and then colored. “Your Grace,” he swept aside, allowing her entry.

  Daisy tugged off her gloves. “There is no need for such formality, Frederick,” she said gently to the servant who’d looked after her with far more care than even her own parents had over the years.

  He widened his eyes as though she expressed her intentions to lob off the Queen’s head and make off with her crown.

  She started toward the stairs and then began the slow climb. “I’ve returned for something,” she explained and marched upward, fearing if he asked questions or said even a word, her resolve would desert her. She reached the main landing and then continued down the corridor, finally stopping beside one familiar, long-closed door.

  Knock three times…

  But what if you are not around…

  I’ll always—

  Daisy pressed the handle and stepped inside. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkened chambers. The emerald velvet curtains still drawn as they’d been seven years ago. She pushed the door closed and the soft click thundered through the hallow space.

  She lingered at the door. She closed her eyes a moment and drew in a breath seeking a hint of Lionel here. She didn’t know what she expected. A trace of the sandalwood scent he’d favored, perhaps? Or the echo of his laugh. Nothing but dark, empty silence met her. Daisy tossed her gloves onto a small side table and wandered the perimeter of the room. She trailed her fingertips along the plaster walls and stopped beside the mahogany armoire.

  Unthinking, Daisy opened the doors. Immaculate, white shirts and sapphire and emerald waistcoats, those dark hues always favored by Lionel, hung perfectly within. But for the slightly out of fashion lines of the breeches, the garments may as well have belonged to a man still attending ton functions and visiting his clubs. She reached a reverent hand out and stroked the white linen of one shirt.

  Then she gave her head a slow, sad shake and closed the door. She rested her forehead against it. “You silly, silly man. Why would you go to that place?” Silence met her pained question. She knocked her head against the wood panel. “You didn’t allow anyone to drag you anywhere, ever.” As the sister who’d dogged his steps, she knew he’d never alter whatever path he’d set.

  Daisy stepped away and moved over to the untouched bed. She hesitated, afraid to disturb the coverlet he’d once lain upon and steal the ghost of his memory. With a quiet sigh, she sat on the edge. A hint of dust drifted from the fabric, the silver specks danced in the air. Auric hadn’t forced Lionel there. He had gone of his own volition. Just as Marcus and Auric had. Blame was useless and futile and wouldn’t right the past. Daisy lay down. Only, she wished they’d made altogether different decisions, for then Lionel would now live and there would still be the uncomplicated laughs and smiles they’d all once shared. She rolled onto her side and stared at the nightstand alongside Lionel’s bed. When all she craved was a tangible memory of him, something she could cling to, the mahogany piece may as well have belonged to any other young man and any other chambers, just as the armoire and garments.

  “You’re gone,” she whispered. Not gone. “You died.” Those two words, unspoken until now, sucked the breath from her lungs. Through the years of listening at the keyhole to her parents speak of Lionel’s murder no one had dared utter the words, as though in speaking them, they became true.

  Only, they’d always been true. There could be no undoing. Whatever guilt carried by Auric would not bring Lionel back. A sob escaped her. She sat up and drew Lionel’s pillow close to her chest and rocked back and forth, crying so hard her chest hurt. He was gone and it was not Auric’s fault. And then she cried all the more, the sobs threatening to tear her in two at the guilt she’d thrown upon his already weighted shoulders. She wept until she thought she might break and then there was nothing left but a shuddery, wet hiccough. None of them had truly lived these seven years. Not her mother, not her, and not Auric, and she’d venture not Marcus. Even though she’d put forth a fine act of laughing and attempting to enjoy life, she never really had, truly, deeply. Rather hers had been a carefully constructed façade of a woman who sought to prove to her family and Society that her heart was healed and there was no need for pitying stares and whispers.

  “I want to live again,” she said softly into the empty chambers. “I think you would want that, too, Lionel.” Reluctantly, Daisy sat up and remained perched at the edge of his bed. Loathe to leave for this felt more a parting than she’d ever truly had with Lionel. She ran her palm over the surface of his side table and absently pulled out the drawer. From within the darkened confines of the compartment, a stark, white kerchief embroidered in the bold, black letterings of Lionel’s name, snagged her notice. With trembling fingers, she withdrew the cloth. Something slid to the floor and landed with a metallic clang upon the hardwood. Daisy dropped her gaze to the floor and her heart stopped. A daisy pendant attached to a gold chain lay in a sad little pile upon the floor. Emotion clogged her throat and she swiftly retrieved it, involuntarily crushing the delicate piece in her hand.

  Her gift.

  I’ve gotten you something special, Daisy-girl…

  I don’t need anything special…

  You deserve something special because you are special…but you’ll have to wait to see, my girl…

  Daisy stood, cradling the piece close to her. It was time to go home. Both of them—she and Auric. She crossed to the chamber door, pulled it open, and stepped out into the hall.

  “Daisy.”

  She started and then turned.

  Her mother stood in the corridor, her head tipped in consternation. As though she sought to make sense of her daughter’s presence outside the sacred door, she alternated her gaze between Daisy and Lionel’s chambers.

  “Hello, Mother.” They studied each other a long while until Daisy spoke, breaking the silence. “He is gone.”

  She furrowed her brow. “Who is—?”

  “Lionel.” The woman aged by grief jerked as though she’d been struck. Daisy walked over to her mother. She took in the wrinkled lines of once smooth, elegant cheeks. “He is gone, Mama,” she repeated words that had needed to be said by all of them some years ago.

  “Wh-what are you on about?” her mother squawked, clutching her neck.

  “Lionel is—”

  “Of course I know he’s gone,” she snapped with more force of emotion than Daisy recalled, more than she imagined the broken woman capable of. “Do you think I can forget that?”

  Daisy shook her head. “Not forget. You should always remember him, but he’d not have wanted you,” Nor me, or Auric, “to become this.” With her free hand she took her mother’s cold fingers in her free one. “Let go of your grief, Mama. It is time.”

  Her mother wrenched her fingers free and spun away. “How dare you, Daisy?” she hissed. “You’d come here and berate me for loving my son. You’d have me smile again? What is there to smile for?” The halls echoed with her cry.

  There is me. There is me to smile for.

  And standing there, amidst the sad, quiet corridors with her mother’s chest heaving with the force of her angry, shallow breaths, Auric’s silence all these years at last made sense. She took in her mother’s tightly drawn features and the bitterness seeping from her blue eyes. Pain pulled at her heart as she imagined the guilt and responsibility her husband must have felt through the years coming here, brave enough to bear witness to her mother’s and when he’d been alive, father’s, agony. Of course Auric would live with the guilt of Lionel’s passing. How could he not have felt the weight of it pressing down on him?

  He’d kept his secrets from her because he’d feared she would react—precisely as she had. Daisy closed her eyes and shook her head slowly, back and forth. When she opened them, she looked at
her mother and truly saw her. The older woman stared at her with fire snapping in her eyes. Mama could never be free and if Daisy held onto the pain and bitterness, then she too would become no different than this woman she no longer recognized. “Goodbye, Mama,” she said softly. She walked over and placed a kiss on her cheek. Her mother stiffened. “It was not my intention to upset you.”

  The truth would have never given her parents any form of solace. Auric had known that and it likely accounted for his silence. “I love you.” Daisy started down the corridor, ready to put the sadness of these years behind her and attempt to set her world with Auric to rights. He might not have wedded her for love, but their relationship had been forged on something so much deeper than most all other wedded couples. He was her best friend. And that had to mean something.

  Then from the corner of her eye, Lionel’s grinning visage stared back at her and she stopped suddenly. Drawn to the portrait of her brother forever frozen as the lighthearted, loving, young man he’d been, Daisy wandered over. The painting, once hung on the walls among the marquesses of Roxbury, was to have been the last one of Lionel until he ascended to the title. Instead, it had been his last sitting ever.

  “Auric petitioned the current Marquess of Roxbury for it.”

  Daisy spun about. “Wh—?”

  “The day of your wedding,” her mother murmured.

  Emotion clogged her throat, making speech difficult. This was the man Auric was. As long as she’d known him, he’d been one to always consider the happiness, well-being, and feelings of others. That was the man she’d fallen in love with, and he was the only man she would ever love. Reluctantly, Daisy drew her gaze away from the image of Lionel and forced her legs into motion.

  “Daisy?” her mother called out, staying her movement.

  She turned around.

  “I love you, too,” her mother whispered.

  Daisy gave her a smile. “I know, Mama.” With that, she took her leave. It was time to find her husband.

  Chapter 22

  Auric sat in the library, head buried in his hands. The half empty bottle of brandy he’d lost himself in for the better part of the day lay forgotten at his feet alongside the open journal that had both saved him these years and had now destroyed him before the woman he loved.

  Daisy’s accusations and words echoed around the chambers of his mind, just as they’d done since she’d taken her leave of him yesterday afternoon, with loathing teeming from her once loving brown eyes.

  He dragged his hands through his hair and swiped for his glass of brandy. He downed the remaining contents in a long, slow swallow, grimacing as it burned a fiery path down his throat. Had he expected a different reaction from her? And more, was he deserving of an altogether different reaction?

  And the worst part of it all was there had been a hideous truth to those charges she’d leveled at him. All these years, he’d thought there was something honorable in his dedicating himself to Lionel’s family. In actuality, those things hadn’t been for Daisy, or the Marquess and Marchioness of Roxbury—they had been for him.

  He swept the book up and stared at those words that had forever killed the love Daisy had carried in her heart.

  I killed her brother…

  Auric crushed the leather book in his hand. Daisy had the right of it, however. There was no absolution. There was no forgiveness. But now there was truth between them. Yet, he’d not been freed by those truths as all those great tales told. Instead, it had shackled him into a loveless marriage, with the sin all the blacker for his role in Lionel’s death and in his deception.

  He wished the lies remained between them. For then, at least those untruths would continue to eat away at him, but Daisy would remain untouched by the vileness of that night. Now she knew things no young lady had a right to know, and saw him for the self-centered bastard he was, and always had been. Auric fanned the pages of his journal, his finger stopping randomly upon a page.

  Lionel,

  Daisy requires a husband…I shall see she wed an honorable, respectable, resolute gentleman as she desires and deserves…

  Just one more lie. For knowing Astor or another would have made her a better match, giving her freedom from the pain of her past, Auric had gone and wed her anyway. Their marriage would forever remind Daisy of what she’d lost and what he’d cost her. He slammed the pages closed. Thwack. The echo of that gave him little satisfaction. Auric surged to his feet with the damning pages in his hands and stalked across the room to the hearth. A soft fire cracked and snapped in the metal grate, casting off warmth from the low, orange flames. Odd, he could be so warm on the outside and yet frozen cold from within.

  He fixed upon one flame that reached above the others. All these years he’d fought for some semblance of peace and normalcy in his life. From the moment of that great mistake, he’d devoted his life to being a man who might be respected for the moral and proper life he led. Every part of his life after Lionel had been a carefully orchestrated façade, meant to deceive—polite Society, Daisy, her family, himself. He’d always known as much and the guilt of even that deception ate at him. Auric turned the journal over in his hands and studied the warm, familiar pages of a book that had been more friend and confidante to him. When his life had been crafted of lies, these pages had known truths. When the nightmares had threatened to consume and destroy him, this book had kept him from falling over the precipice of madness.

  Odd, the book that had brought him comfort and solace these years had inevitably destroyed him. He caught his visage in the reflection of the gold mirror. A hard, bitter smile twisted his lips. This journal hadn’t destroyed him. He’d destroyed himself, because that is what he always did. Lionel’s life, his own, Daisy’s, her parents’.

  Auric held the edge of the book to the fire. The crimson flame licked at the corner, smoldering the edge black. He fixed on that rapidly growing charred mark, expanding, until it sparked orange. With a curse he tossed it to the floor and stomped the small flame out with the heel of his boot. He stared blankly down at his journal. Burning the book would never manage to undo everything that had been done.

  A knock sounded at the door and his head shot up, his heart suspended in hope. Then, his butler stepped through the door and the organ fell.

  The old servant widened his eyes at catching a glimpse of his employer. “The Viscount Wessex,” he murmured, studiously avoiding the gaze of his disheveled employer. He admitted the viscount and scrambled from the room, hastily pulling the door closed behind him.

  His lips twisted in a wry, mirthless grin. Ah, yes, the servants, just as all of polite Society still saw the polished, refined Duke of Crawford. They didn’t see this drunken, unkempt, rumpled, pathetic figure of a man.

  Where the servant had looked away in horror, Wessex ran a cursory glance over him. He took several steps toward Auric and then jerked to a stop. “Good God, man.” He wrinkled his nose. “You smell as though you’ve been bathing in spirits.”

  Brandy and whiskey to be precise.

  “What do you—?” His words trailed off as Wessex’s gaze fell to the floor and the burnt journal at Auric’s feet. When he looked back to Auric, his expression was carefully blank.

  The viscount wandered to the sideboard and sifted through the crystal decanters. He held them up, one at a time, as though studying their color and quality, and then settled on Auric’s oldest, finest French brandy. Wessex grabbed a glass and then the tinkle of crystal touching crystal sounded as he poured a glass to the brim. He turned back to face Auric and propped his hip on the edge of the Chippendale sideboard. “You look like hell,” he said without preamble, his words an observation more than an accusation.

  Well, looking like hell was appropriate for a man living in hell and as there was no question there, he bent down and retrieved the book. He carried it to his desk and tossed it atop the otherwise immaculate surface. All the while his skin burned under the other man’s scrutiny. Auric sat.

  “She knows,” Wesse
x murmured without preamble.

  He gave a terse nod.

  “How—?”

  “She discovered my journal.” He’d been careless. Not that such a detail should matter. What was contained within the pages of the journal mattered less than the fact that he’d kept secret the details within those pages.

  Wessex said nothing for a moment, merely sat there so casually, sipping his brandy, when Auric’s entire world had tumbled down around him. “She loves you,” he said at last.

  The loathing teeming in her gaze and the sneer on her lush, full lips all alluded to the truth—she’d once loved him—but no longer. He shook his head again. “Quite the opposite,” he managed. “She hates me.” I love you… Hated him, when there had once been love in her eyes and heart and on her mouth with those three words that had breathed life back into him and made him believe that he could be happy. That they could be happy.

  Fool. Fool. Fool.

  His friend shoved off the sideboard. “Come now,” he scoffed. “Surely, you know the lady has loved you for years. That night at Lady Harrison’s ball, she searched the crowd for a certain gentleman.”

  Auric tightened his fingers painfully upon the arms of the chair. She would have been better off with any one of the gentlemen on the damned lists comprised by both he and his friend. His stomach tightened and he raised his eyes to meet the other man’s curiously blank stare. “I believed her wedding another would destroy me.” He trailed his palm along the black leather book. “How could I have failed to realize that wedding her would destroy the both of us?”

  A sound of impatience escaped his friend and with his free hand, he jerked out the leather, winged back chair and sat on the edge. “She was upset, Auric.”