This Duke is Mine
Page 32
They were both breathing hard, but his father was puffing like a bull, the purple stain on his cheeks vivid against his white neckcloth.
The duke’s fingers flexed around the silver piece.
“Touch that candlestick and I’ll throw you across the room,” James said, adding deliberately, “Your Grace.”
The duke’s hand fell to his side and he turned his shoulder away, staring at the far wall. “And what if I lost it?” he muttered, belligerence underscoring his confession. “The fact is that I did lose it. I lost it all. The canal was one thing, but I thought the vineyards were a sure thing. How could I possibly know that England is a breeding ground for black rot?”
“You idiot!” James spat, and turned on his heel to go.
“But you must save the estate,” Ashbrook hissed. “The Staffordshire estate’s been in our family for four generations. You must. Your mother would be devastated to see Ryburn House sold. And what of her grave . . . the cemetery adjoins the chapel, you know.”
James’s heart was beating savagely in his throat. It took him a moment to come up with a response that didn’t include curling his hands around his father’s throat. “That is low, even from you,” he said finally.
The duke paid no heed to that weak rejoinder. “Are you going to let your mother’s corpse be sold?”
“I’ll think about marrying some other heiress,” James said. “But I will not marry Daisy.” Theodora Saxby—known to the family as Dora and to James alone as Daisy—was his dearest friend, his childhood companion. “She deserves better than me, than anyone from this family.”
There was silence behind him. A terrible, warped silence that . . . James turned. “You didn’t. Even you . . . couldn’t.”
“I thought I would be able to replace it in a matter of weeks,” his father snapped, the color leaving his cheeks so that he looked positively haggard.
James’s limbs suddenly felt so weak that he found himself leaning back against the door. “How much of her fortune is gone?”
“Enough.” Ashbrook dropped his eyes, finally showing some sign of shame. “If she marries anyone else, I’ll . . . I’ll face trial. I don’t know if they can put dukes in the dock. Probably be the House of Lords. But it won’t be pretty.”
“Oh, they can put dukes on trial all right,” James said heavily. “You embezzled the dowry of a girl entrusted to our care since the time she was a mere infant. Her mother was married to your dearest friend. Saxby asked you on his deathbed to care for his daughter.”
“And I did,” her father replied, but without his usual bluster. “Brought her up as my own.”
“You brought her up as my sister,” James said flatly. He forced himself to cross the room and sit in a chair opposite his wretched father. “And all the time you were stealing from her.”
“Not all the time,” his father protested. “Just the last year. Or so. The majority of her fortune is in funds and I couldn’t touch that. I just . . . I just borrowed from . . . well, I just borrowed some. I’m deuced unlucky, and that’s a fact. I was absolutely sure it wouldn’t come to this.”
“Unlucky,” James repeated, his voice liquid with distaste.
“And now the girl is getting a proposal or two, I don’t have the time to make it up. You’ve got to take her. It’s not just that the estate and the townhouse will have to go; the name won’t be worth anything either, after the scandal. Even if I pay off what I borrowed from her, it won’t cover my debts.”
James didn’t reply. The only words going through his head were flatly blasphemous.
“It was easier when your mother was alive,” the duke said after a minute or two. “She helped me, you know. She had a solid head on her shoulders.”
James couldn’t bring himself to answer that either. His mother had died five years earlier, and in a mere half-decade, his father had managed to ruin an estate stretching from Scotland to Staffordshire to London. And he had embezzled Daisy’s fortune. And . . . “Bloody hell.”
“You’ll make her love you,” his father said encouragingly. “She already adores you; she always has. We’ve been lucky so far that Dora is so homely. The only men who’ve asked for her hand have been such obvious fortune hunters that her mother wouldn’t even consider them. But that’ll change as the season wears on. She’s a taking little piece, once you get to know her.”
James ground his teeth. “She will never love me in that way. She thinks of me as her brother, as her friend.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’ve got my profile.” A glimmer of pride underlaid his words. “Your mother always said that I was the most handsome man of my generation.”
James bit back a comment that wouldn’t help the situation. He was beginning to feel an overwhelming sense of nausea. “We could simply tell Daisy about what happened. What you did. She’ll understand.”
His father snorted. “You think her mother will understand? My old friend Saxby didn’t know what he was getting into when he married that woman. She’s a dragon, a positive dragon.”
In the seventeen years since Mrs. Saxby and her infant daughter had joined the duke’s household, they had managed to maintain fairly cordial relations—primarily because Ashbrook never threw anything in the widow’s direction. But James knew instantly that his father was right. If Daisy’s mother got even a hint that her daughter’s guardian had embezzled her inheritance, she would be battering on the door of a high judge before evening fell. Nausea drove James’s stomach into his throat at the thought.
His father, on the other hand, was cheering up. He had the sort of mind that flitted from one subject to another; his rages were fierce but short-lived. “A few posies, maybe a poem, and Dora will fall into your hand as sweetly as a ripe plum. After all, it’s not as if the girl gets much flattery. Tell her she’s beautiful, and she’ll be at your feet.”
“I cannot do that,” James stated, not even bothering to imagine himself saying such a thing. It wasn’t a matter simply of not wishing to say such inanities to Daisy herself; he loathed situations where he found himself fumbling with language he found tedious in the extreme. The season was three weeks old, but he hadn’t attended a single ball.
His father misunderstood his refusal. “Of course, you’ll have to lie about it, but that’s the kind of lie a gentleman can’t avoid. She may not be the prettiest girl on the market—and certainly not as delectable as that opera singer I caught sight of with you the other night—but it wouldn’t get you anywhere to point out the truth.” He actually gave a little chuckle at the thought.
James heard him dimly, concentrating on not throwing up as he tried to think through the dilemma before him.
The duke kept talking, amusing himself by laying out the distinction between mistresses and wives. “In compensation, you can keep a mistress twice as beautiful as your wife. It’ll provide an interesting contrast.”
There was no human being in the world he loathed as much as his father. “If I marry Daisy, I will not take a mistress,” he said, still thinking frantically, trying to come up with a way out. “I couldn’t do that to her.”
“Well, I expect you’ll change your mind on that after a few years of marriage, but each to his own.” The duke’s voice was as strong and buoyant as ever. “Well? Not much to think about, is there? It’s bad luck and all that rot, but I can’t see that either of us have much choice about it. The good thing is that a man can always perform in the bedroom, even if he doesn’t want to.”
The only thing James wanted was to get out of the room, away from his disgusting excuse for a parent. “I will do this on one condition.” His voice sounded unfamiliar to his own ears, as if a stranger said the words.
“Anything, my boy, anything! I know I’m asking for a sacrifice. As I said, we can admit amongst ourselves that little Dora is not the beauty of the bunch.”
“The day I marry her, you sign the entire estate over to me—Ryburn House and its lands, this townhouse, the island in Scotland.”
The duk
e’s mouth fell open. “What?”
“The entire estate,” James repeated. “I will pay you an allowance, and no one need know except for the solicitors. But I will not be responsible for you and your foolish schemes. I will never again take responsibility for any debts you might incur—nor for any theft. The next time around, you’re going to prison.”
“That’s absurd,” his father spluttered. “I couldn’t—you couldn’t possibly—no!”
“Then make your good-byes to Staffordshire,” James said, rising to his feet for the last time. “You might want to pay a special visit to my mother’s grave, if you’re so certain she would have been distressed at the sale of the house, let alone the cemetery itself.”
His father opened his mouth, but James raised a hand.
“If I let you keep the estate, you’ll fling Daisy’s inheritance after that which you’ve already lost. There’ll be no estate within two years, and I will have betrayed my closest friend for no reason.”
“Your closest friend, eh?” His father was instantly diverted into another train of thought. “I’ve never had a woman as a friend, but Dora looks like a man, of course—”
“Father!”
The duke harrumphed. “Can’t say I like the way you’ve taken to interrupting me. I suppose if I agree to this ridiculous scheme of yours, I’ll have nothing to expect but humiliation.”
It was an implicit concession.
“You see,” his father said, a smile spreading across his face now that the conversation was over. “It all came well. Your mother always said that, you know. All’s well that ends well.”
James couldn’t stop himself from asking one more thing, though God knows, he already knew the answer. “Don’t you care in the least about what you’re doing to me—and to Daisy?”
A hint of red crept up his father’s cheeks again. “The girl couldn’t do better than to marry you!”
“Daisy is going to marry me believing that I’m in love with her, and I’m not. She deserves to be wooed and genuinely adored by her husband.”
“Love and marriage shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath,” his father said dismissively. But his eyes slid away from James’s.
“And you’ve done the same to me. To your son. Love and marriage may not come together all that often, but I have no chance at all. What’s more, I am beginning my marriage with a lie that will destroy it if Daisy ever finds out. Do you realize that? If Daisy learned that I had betrayed her in such a callused way . . . not only the marriage, but our friendship, will be over.”
“If you really think she’ll fly into a temper, you’d better get an heir on her in the first few months,” his father said with the air of someone offering practical advice. “A woman scorned, and all that. If she’s disgruntled enough, I suppose she might run off with another man. But if you already had an heir—and a spare, if you can—you could let her go.”
“My wife will never run off with another man.” The words growled out of his chest from a place he didn’t even know existed.
His father heaved himself out of his chair. “You as much as called me a fool; well, I’ll do the same for you. No man in his right mind thinks that marriage is a matter of billing and cooing. Your mother and I were married for the right reasons, to do with family obligations and financial negotiations. We did what was necessary to have you, and left it there. Your mother couldn’t face the effort needed for a spare, but we didn’t waste any tears over it. You were always a healthy boy.” Then he added, “Barring that time you almost went blind, of course. We would have tried for another, if worse came to worst.”
James pushed himself to his feet.
“Neither of us raised you to have such rubbishing romantic views,” the duke tossed over his shoulder and left the room.
Having reached nineteen years of age, James had thought he understood his place in life. He’d learned the most important lessons: how to ride a horse, hold his liquor, and defend himself in a duel.
No one had ever taught him—and he had never imagined—how to betray the one person whom you truly cared for in life. The only person who has truly cared for you, other than his mother, and she’d been dead for years. How to break that person’s heart, whether it happened tomorrow, or in five years, or ten years in the future . . .
Because Daisy would learn the truth someday. He felt it with a bone-deep certainty. Somehow, she would learn that he had deliberately set out to make her marry him, that he had pretended to fall in love . . . and she would never forgive him.
About the Author
ELOISA JAMES is the author of twenty award-winning romances. She’s also a professor of English literature, teaching in New York City, where she lives with her family. With two jobs, two cats, two children, and only one husband, she spends most of her time making lists of things to do—letters from readers are a great escape! Connect with Eloisa on her Facebook page (www.facebook.com/EloisaJamesFans), through her website (www.eloisajames.com), or through e-mail at eloisa@eloisajames.com.
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By Eloisa James
The Duke Is Mine
When Beauty Tamed the Beast
Storming the Castle (a novella)
A Kiss at Midnight
A Duke of Her Own
This Duchess of Mine
When the Duke Returns
Duchess by Night
An Affair Before Christmas
Desperate Duchesses
Pleasure for Pleasure
The Taming of the Duke
Kiss Me, Annabel
Much Ado About You
Your Wicked Ways
A Wild Pursuit
Fool for Love
Duchess in Love
Coming Soon
The Ugly Duchess
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from The Ugly Duchess copyright © 2012 by Eloisa James
THE DUKE IS MINE. Copyright © 2012 by Eloisa James. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062096364
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062021281
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Eloisa James, This Duke is Mine