What I Did For a Duke

by Julie Anne Long

  Moncrieffe neither confirmed nor denied this. Because he was, at heart, a strategist. He wasn’t in the habit of enjoying bosom chats with anyone, let alone drunken lordlings, and he sensed he might learn something that could get him precisely what he wanted.

  “Many a life has been made or broken on a misfortune of timing. I cannot be responsible for yours.”

  “The timing was perfect until you arrived. I had a plan. I needed a plan, because I’m not a bloody duke,” Harry pointed out bitterly. “I cannot simply buy her with money and a title.”

  “Have a care, Osborne. You’re enjoying my hospitality on sufferance at the moment. I do hope you’ll arrive at a point soon.”

  Harry jerked his head up in surprise at the tone, sobered. And then he looked about him as though he found the “hospitality” bafflingly wanting.

  “I thank you for hearing me out, then, Moncrieffe,” he managed with sodden dignity, even if it was an afterthought. “As I said, I had a plan. For you see, I never could quite read her heart. I thought . . . I thought she loved me, too. But I never dared propose because I hadn’t enough money to suit her father. I’ll inherit a title but I’ve no home to give to a wife. Not yet. I’ve tried to earn money on my own, but I thought, well, if she loves me I might very well chance it; if I knew for certain that she loved me her parents might be persuaded to allow us to marry. And how I want her in my . . .”

  He was stopped from finishing that sentence by something dark and dangerous glinting in the duke’s eyes. Because that last word was going to be bed.

  “But I didn’t know whether she did. You see, she never showed it in a way that convinced me. I had to be certain. And sho . . . so . . .” He sighed. “I told her I intended to propose to Millicent. To see what she would say or do. To watch her face. To force her hand.”

  Moncrieffe was difficult to shock. But the potent cruelty Osborne had perpetuated in the name of love speared him motionless.

  He leaned slowly back in his chair, and then froze, staring at the young man. He looked at handsome Harry and saw Genevieve’s white, hunted face, sick with misery; saw her entire being aglow at the very idea of Harry, and because he knew—he alone knew, of all the people in the world, not her family, not this idiot before him—the depths of her passion, her feeling, and ability to love. . . . He knew this boy had nearly killed her.

  Out of cowardice.

  He’d never known such purifying rage. It was a sour, metallic taste in his throat. He could scarcely speak.

  He stared at Osborne so long and so silently that Harry finally turned his head. He flinched at the black, scathing glare he intercepted.

  “Just to be very clear . . .” Alex managed slowly, his voice thrumming with suppressed violence. “ . . . in order to force a confession of love from her, you thought you might frighten her into showing her feelings? You thought you might break her heart in order to win her heart?”

  Osborne met his gaze. Chin up, his own eyes suddenly ablaze.

  “What the hell kind of man are you?”

  “You can’t understand, Moncrieffe. How would I know? How would I know if she did? She’s so . . . serene. So self-contained and so kind. To everyone. I knew we were special friends. And yet I couldn’t be certain she felt more than that for me.”

  Serene. He thought of the nude girl flying at him, of savage kisses that rocked him to his viscera, of her body submitting to his, of her quickness in putting him in his place.

  He wouldn’t curl his hands into fists. But he did press them flat against his knees. He had not invented this part of her, her passion. It was already a part of her.

  But Harry . . . peace and conversation and friendship. That was part of her, too.

  “And I have naught to offer her but myself. I would simply propose this instant if I had property. And this is why I know you can’t understand. Haven’t you ever been afraid? Haven’t you ever wanted something so badly you can’t imagine your life without it, but you can imagine the devastation and pity that will follow if you spill your heart and she has to tell you, oh so kindly—because she’s kind—that she doesn’t love you in that way?”

  Fear. Alex knew he was a fine one to pontificate about fear. He’d issued the world’s most tepid, careful marriage proposal. Because he’d been afraid to tell Genevieve he loved her.

  Not that it would have made much of a difference.

  She loved Harry.

  Harry in his youthful innocence had put his finger right on it. And Moncrieffe pushed the realization away. He took in a sharp breath.

  Harry took Moncrieffe’s silence as a reason to go on.

  “God help me, it was only because I was afraid of losing her. And I honestly didn’t feel I deserved her, for I had nothing to give her. I simply needed to know whether she loved me. I’m not proud of it, but I have never loved anyone more.”

  Moncrieffe could still scarcely get the words out.

  “I just can’t believe you would do such a thing to someone you . . . loved.”

  Osborne was very, very drunk, but he wasn’t stupid. “But I couldn’t hurt her, could I, if she didn’t love me?”

  And now Harry’s blue eyes fixed on him almost searchingly.

  Moncrieffe couldn’t believe he had almost shown his hand.

  “You just said you weren’t certain whether she did love you. And if she does love you anywhere near as much as you claim to love her, imagine the pain you may have caused her with your whole charade.”

  Harry looked up at him and blinked. And as he thought about it, his face slowly went white.

  After a moment he swallowed.

  “Gallant of you,” Moncrieffe drawled, twisting the knife.

  Moncrieffe knew a surge of hatred for himself for saying it. But he wanted Harry to feel what he’d done to Genevieve.

  Haven’t you ever been afraid? The words still echoed in his ears. He remembered taunting Genevieve: You can demand from me what you want but you can’t tell Harry what you want.

  He knew Genevieve felt safe enough to be honest with him, to be real with him, to be abandoned with him . . . because she wasn’t afraid of losing him. And she wasn’t afraid of losing him . . .

  Because she didn’t love him.

  In other words, she could imagine forever without him.

  Stupid. How stupid men were. He, and Osborne, and bloody Ian Eversea . . . the havoc they caused. To themselves and to others.

  He was momentarily paralyzed by the rush of realizations.

  “And so that’s what I came to ask. Do you love her, Moncrieffe? Does she love you?”

  He should not allow silence to go by.

  He could have answered in any number of ways. He was, in some ways, no braver than Harry. Because if he was he would have encouraged Harry to tell Genevieve the truth about what he’d done and get a proposal over with, just to see what transpired. It would be the honorable thing to do. May the better man win, and all that.

  He was still the stronger man. The wiser man. He was not a kind man.

  And he was definitely not a martyr.

  What he said was:

  “And what do my answers matter to you?”

  “Because if you don’t love her, you should step aside. Because I do love her. And I will make her happy.”

  And Alex’s senses tingled. Naïve Osborne had spilled into his hands unimaginably valuable currency: his trust. And he could tell him anything at all: Yes, Genevieve had agreed to marry him. Yes, she loved him. He could send Osborne on his way, call a carriage for him. Perhaps he’d go off to fight a foreign war to forget his heartbreak.

  In all likelihood he wouldn’t go mad from grief and attempt to shoot him. The poor young devil possessed honor.

  But he doubted Harry would ever quite be the same.

  He recalled the look on Genevieve Eversea’s face that first morning he’d walked with her. Pale, lightless. A shell of herself.

  Genevieve loves this person, he thought. Which—and this was the most pervers
e realization of all—made him want to protect Osborne, if only a little. So what he said was, “I must advise you against telling me what I should do, Osborne. It has never ended well for anyone who has attempted it.”

  Harry’s head jerked up. He stared at Moncrieffe, searching for some better answer in his face.

  Moncrieffe met his gaze evenly. He felt the weight of the hour, of his years, of his own damn nature, of, in truth, the last hour’s worth of lovemaking, because taking the woman in question in a standing position wreaked havoc on a man’s thighs, regardless of years of horseback riding.

  Harry at last sighed and sank his head in a nod. He got to his feet—soberer now than he’d been when he arrived, though it was doubtful he’d achieve true sobriety until he’d slept until noon. He shuffled a little to find his balance when he was upright. And the first shadows of desolation showed in his face. Imagining what was to come.

  He already looked older.

  Then again, it was three o’clock in the morning. He might in fact be growing a beard. Unlikely as it seemed.

  “They say you’ve no heart,” is what he said.

  To Alex’s shock, the barb landed. Brutal as a wasp’s sting straight to the organ in question.

  It took a tick of the clock to compose himself, because it had stolen his breath.

  “Believe what you will,” he said calmly.

  “You won’t tell her I was here?”

  He shook his head. “You have my word.”

  Harry was at the door when he paused and asked, “What do you plan to do, Moncrieffe?”

  Alex almost smiled, albeit decidedly bitterly. Echoes of Ian Eversea, speaking to him from beneath the sheets of his erstwhile fiancée’s bed. Another man who had deprived Alex of what he’d wanted. What do you intend to do, Moncrieffe?

  When it came to love, everyone became brand-new and stupid and lost, he supposed. Including him.

  Nevertheless, he still planned to get what he wanted. But first he had to do what was right, for there was no other way to get it.

  “I plan to bid you good night, Osborne.”

  This, at least, was one plan that didn’t fail.

  Chapter 25

  Later, when they spoke of the grand convening of the men of Sussex that Saturday over five-card loo at the Eversea house, they spoke of it in shocked, gleeful, rueful tones. No one could recall just how the play had got so deep, except that the Duke of Falconbridge was present and everybody wanted to impress him and he kept winning.

  Nobody set out to lose thousands of pounds.

  But it happened.

  Eversea knew to invite only men who could afford to lose, but inevitably others who simply wanted to win joined the game. The instructions were to bring only cash and things you wished to wager.

  The women of the house were all but ordered to stay away, and they did so mostly gratefully, if nervously. They played the pianoforte. They embroidered. They tried to ignore the gleeful shouts and the opening and closing again and again of the great main doors as all the wealthiest men within fifty miles arrived. Some even came in from London.

  Coats came off. Sleeves were rolled up. They’d said three footmen hovered near with decanters, and the glasses were never empty. Cigar after cigar was lit and smoked and lit and smoked; smoke formed a second ceiling, and eyes reddened from it, and the servants would complain for weeks after of the futility of ridding the curtains and carpets of the stink and entreat Mrs. Eversea to replace them. She did, because Jacob won as much as he’d lost, so it was almost as though he hadn’t played at all.

  Though his nerves took some time to recover.

  The atmosphere went from bonhomie to intensity to something . . . less friendly.

  And one by one men lost their nerve and their money and pushed away from the table in blustering, nervous good humor and backed up to line the walls and watch, seek out the billiard table, anything to find safety away from the game, which seemed to have acquired an unstoppable momentum.

  Until only a few remained.

  Falconbridge was one of them, of course.

  Falconbridge was doing more than his share of winning. Again and again his hand raked the shillings and pound notes toward him. He began accepting vowels for a time from sweating men, and then politely, regretfully refused them with a hike of a brow that indicated he knew more about their finances than they ever dreamed. Ice in his veins, they’d said. But this was why he was wealthy.

  The cards were too afraid of him to do anything other than align in winning configurations, they said.

  But Falconbridge was simply observant and clever and a good deal more sober than anyone present.

  Harry had lost nearly everything, only to win half of it back.

  And Moncrieffe had taken the lad’s money.

  “I could use a partner in billiards, Osborne,” Ian said pointedly, nervously.

  But Harry wouldn’t push himself away from the table.

  And at last, with a face as solemn as any vicar presiding over a funeral, he bet every last penny he had.

  The duke’s head went back, impressed. Then came down hard.

  He was silent for a moment. He sucked at his cigar, thoughtfully, before speaking.

  “Well, Osborne,” he drawled. “I’m near out of loose blunt here at the moment. I’ll take everything you have, no doubt. So, if you’re set on doing this . . . I’ll put up the deed to Rosemont. I own it outright. I can spare it.”

  They thought the boy would faint, witnesses said afterward. Though ultimately he held up admirably. It was something about the greenish tinge his pallor took on at the duke’s words, and the beads of sweat dotting his hairline.

  Silence came and lay over the room like another layer of smoke.

  And then through it they heard the rustle of prayers by men who weren’t religious. The ruination of a young man was never a pretty thing to witness.

  One of Harry’s fists formed a white knot against the table. The other held his cards as though it were a pistol that may or may not have a ball in the chamber.

  Handkerchiefs came out to mop brows until the room looked white with surrender flags.

  All the Eversea men made a mental note to lock up all the firearms out of fear of what a ruined Harry might do to himself.

  And then Falconbridge sighed, and all of the faces followed, slowly, slowly, in astonishment and rank disbelief, as time slowed, and with one sweeping motion the duke turned his cards . . .

  . . . facedown.

  And the breeze from the collective exhales in the room nearly served to clear the cigar smoke.

  “I fold, Osborne,” Moncrieffe said quietly. “You’ve got me. I’ve no choice but to cede the deed of Rosemont to you.”

  Harry was frozen. He stared, a faint frown on his face, at the hand of cards facedown. The words hadn’t seemed to register yet.

  “I regret its loss. But I trust you’ll put it to good use.”

  The duke watched him carefully, his own hands flat against the table.

  Harry closed his eyes and his head fell back limply, as one killed. His sigh gusted up his blond hair.

  The room erupted in roars and cheers. Everywhere were hands jostling him, slapping him in masculine congratulations.

  The duke was still a moment longer, watching. His expression inscrutable. His eyes red-rimmed with smoke, sagging with fatigue. Cigar dead between his fingers.

  And as the crowd massed around Harry, no one noticed when he slipped from the room.

  That night it rained. Hard.

  Pity it couldn’t have rained in the game room, the maids thought the next day, as they encountered the morning-after stink.

  All the Eversea men seemed to have stayed in bed, because none of them appeared at the breakfast table at the usual breakfast hour. Nor did the duke.

  But Harry did.

  He intercepted Genevieve near the kippers on the sideboard. And Genevieve’s eyes were ringed in red, too, but it was because she hadn’t slept at all.

>   She would never tell a soul it was because she’d spent a futile two hours roaming the house, from room to room in search of the duke.

  And she’d never found him.

  “How was the game, Harry?” she asked dully. “When did it end?”

  “God knows. I think the sun was coming up, but that could have just been the light from all the cigars. The game was . . . remarkable.”

  So perhaps the duke hadn’t even gone up to bed. And then she spent a moment wondering how on earth cards could surpass the pleasures of her body.

  And Harry looked downright disreputable this morning, she noticed on second glance. But he seemed to be nervous again. Almost . . . no, not diffident. There was something determined about him along with the nervousness.

  “I’ve something I wish to discuss with you, Genevieve,” he said suddenly. “Will you go for a stroll with me?”

  She stared at him. Surely he hadn’t just said what she thought he’d said. She was whipsawed by a very unpleasant sense of déjà vu.

  “No,” she was tempted to say emphatically. Alternatively: “Beg me.” Or “Where’s Millicent?”

  She regarded him contemplatively. He must have seen doubt and resistance in her eyes.

  “Please . . . Genevieve.”

  So he was begging. Interesting.

  And yet . . . What now did he intend to tell her? That he’d gotten Millicent with child and he wanted her to be the godmother? she thought sardonically.

  He was sweating, just a little. She saw the sheen of it on his face. And it wasn’t warm in the kitchen. His fingers were curled into his palms. Nerves. But his jaw was resolute. He looked . . . older.

  It struck her that Harry had undergone a thorough emotional buffeting this week, too. His jaw was likely weary from clenching and tensing more this week than he’d clenched it in an entire lifetime.

  “It just rained. There might be mud,” she pointed out.

  She realized she’d acquired a layer of protective ambivalence, and she was afraid, loath to let him through it. This is what he had done to her this week.

  But her heart was beating a little faster now in a peculiar recognition, as though Harry was a soldier coming home from a long war and it was becoming reacquainted with how it felt to love him.