Who Wants to Marry a Duke

by Sabrina Jeffries

  “I’m sorry, dear brother, but I’ve reached the end of my twin-sisterly ability to deduce the truths of your relationship. You alone can figure that out. You’ve already asked her to marry you, and I assume you’ve told her you love her—”

  He groaned.

  “You haven’t told her you loved her, you dolt?” She dropped her hand from his back. “God, men are so stupid.”

  With a frown, he straightened in his seat. “She hasn’t said she loves me, either.”

  “Then I take back the ‘dolt’ part.” She tapped her chin with one finger. “On the other hand, she probably didn’t want to tell you how she felt once she discovered you’d essentially been lying to her all this time about who you really are.”

  Olivia had said something to that effect: If you can keep this secret, I have to wonder how many other secrets you’re keeping. For all I know, you have mistresses strewn across London!

  “What if I don’t know if I love her?” he asked. “I’m not going to lie to her about it.”

  “Good Lord, of course you love her. Would you be in this agony right now if you didn’t?”

  “This agony is why I pray I’m not in love. After spending the years since I met her sure that our father didn’t truly love our mother, no matter what we’d been told, I—”

  “Why?”

  Damn. He’d forgotten Gwyn didn’t know about the blackmail. And since it probably wasn’t based on anything real, he wasn’t about to tell her and prejudice her against Lady Norley for no good reason. “Something I heard through gossip. It doesn’t matter. I’ve since heard evidence it might be false. My point is I’ve spent years hardening my heart against love, sure that those who feel it are either deluding themselves or asking for trouble by giving their hearts to someone who invariably doesn’t appreciate it.”

  “My, my, you are cynical about love.”

  “But with Olivia . . . I don’t know.”

  “Well, you have to decide that before you do anything. There’s almost no point in mending fences if you can’t say you love her. Women want that. Actually, men generally want that.”

  Olivia’s final words to him rang in his memory: It’s clear I will never gain your respect, much less your love. And I find I require both of those for a marriage after all.

  “She wants my love,” he said. “She told me that much.” His love . . . and his respect. She already had the latter, whether she knew it or not.

  “It seems to me if you’re asking how to fix things, then you don’t want to let her go.”

  “You deduced that, did you?” he said, now a bit embarrassed by his show of emotion. Except that if he couldn’t show emotion to his twin, he had the feeling he would be truly lost. He’d be confirmed as an arrogant arse undeserving of any love.

  “You’ll know for yourself soon enough. But promise me that if you do feel love for her you won’t fight it out of some determination to be a world-weary rakehell. Because that will only lead to more heartbreak.”

  “Speaking from experience, are we?” he asked.

  “Well, not the part about the world-weary rakehell. But the fighting love? Perhaps a bit. Love is funny that way. Embrace it with someone who loves you, too, and it’s the most beautiful, wonderful experience imaginable. But try to fight your feelings? It’s like . . . like trying to push the needle of a compass away from magnetic north. You can push it all you like, but the moment you let go, it will swing back to magnetic north. Unless you break the compass entirely. And a broken compass isn’t useful to anyone, is it?”

  No. He should know. He’d been a broken compass for a long time. And protecting his heart had only been . . . numbing.

  He didn’t want to be numb anymore. He didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  So now he would have to decide what to do about that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Olivia stared out the window blindly. She’d had her fit of temper, then had a cleansing cry, and now she felt the way an element must feel when it couldn’t bond to any other element: alone and useless.

  Deluded.

  No, an element would never feel that. Just her.

  Mama had remained quiet while Olivia cried, save to give her soothing pats and soft “there, there, now” comments, rather like what one would give a child. Olivia didn’t feel like a child right now. She felt very much like a woman wronged. And she had the wet handkerchief to prove it.

  “Do you feel better now, dearest?” Mama asked.

  “I suppose.”

  “Do you mind telling me what you and His Grace quarreled about?”

  “It will anger you,” Olivia warned.

  Mama shrugged. “But at least then I would know how to help.”

  Olivia didn’t want to be all alone in her misery, but some sense of discretion kept her from revealing what Thorn’s family didn’t even know. Instead, she decided to give Mama a slightly modified version of the truth.

  “You know those Juncker plays we like so much? Well, Mr. Juncker is a friend of Thorn’s. Years ago, the duke revealed to Mr. Juncker his version of what happened that night at the Devonshire ball. Then Mr. Juncker created Lady Grasping and Lady Slyboots out of that. Those two characters we laugh at so much? They’re supposed to be us.”

  “You don’t say!” her stepmother exclaimed. “But we’re nothing like that!”

  “He thinks we are.”

  “Mr. Juncker? Or the duke?”

  “The duke. Well, both men, I suppose.”

  She could feel Mama’s eyes on her. “I don’t think the duke thinks we’re like that,” Mama said. “At least not anymore.”

  Dear heaven, Mama was practically saying what Thorn had said. It was eerie.

  Olivia twisted her handkerchief into a soggy ball. “For a woman who was irate over me marrying him, you’ve certainly changed your tune.”

  “I’ll admit, I didn’t approve of him when I first came rushing to Berkshire. But then I saw how he was with you and how he looked at you.”

  “You mean, with calculation and disrespect?”

  “With affection, perhaps even love.”

  She stiffened. “Mama, I don’t know what you think you saw, but that wasn’t it.”

  Mama laid a hand on her arm. “Weren’t you the least bit softened when he insisted on sending his own footmen to protect you? And arming them, too?”

  “He was just . . . trying to impress you.”

  “Why would he do that? You’d refused him—again— and he had every right to throw you out of his house. Instead, he didn’t want you to go.”

  That was true, though she hated to admit it. “Thorn doesn’t know what he wants. It’s part of his mercurial nature.”

  “Last night, he told you to plan whatever you wished for the wedding, and he would go along with it.” She snorted. “I daresay there isn’t another man alive who would do so.” When Olivia had no answer for that, Mama asked, “Why does it bother you so much that he told his friend about that night at the ball, and his friend created characters out of what he said?”

  “Thorn knew we were being mocked—by his friend, I mean—and he did nothing to stop it. He just let his friend keep putting those characters in situations where people could laugh at them.”

  Mama shrugged. “They were meant to be funny. Perhaps they started out as us, but I daresay his friend made them into something wholly different. I’m told that writers do those things. Especially playwrights. They need amusing bits for the audience, so people don’t get bored. Besides, the duke had a right to be a little angry back then. I did blackmail him, after all.”

  “You were looking out for me,” Olivia said. But her stepmother had a point. “The thing is, he had no reason to be angry at me. I did nothing to him, except remove a stain from his waistcoat and engage in a kiss with him.”

  “True. But you have no idea how much mothers are encouraged, by everyone around them, to snag a duke for their daughters. There are few enough eligible dukes around, and three are in Thornstock�
��s family alone, so he’s probably been warned many times that young women and their mothers are lying in wait to trap him into marriage, just for his title and wealth.”

  “I’m not,” Olivia said stoutly.

  “How could he know that? Admit it, until you learned that Grasping and Slyboots were based on us, you thought them enormously amusing. That’s because you’ve met many a lady like those two. It’s why they’re funny—we all know someone they resemble. And Thornstock probably knows more people they resemble than most. I’m rather surprised he didn’t do more than tell his playwright friend about us. Thank goodness Mr. Juncker never put in his plays the real tale of what happened that night. Thornstock must have put the fear of God into him.”

  Olivia stayed silent. If she opened her mouth at that moment she would spill the truth about everything, and that still seemed wrong. For all she knew, Thorn had some other, more important reason for keeping his writing secret from even his family.

  All of a sudden, she remembered how she’d teased him about being jealous of Mr. Juncker. Embarrassment heated her cheeks. It was odd how he’d behaved at those times. He’d been grumpy, annoyed. Not because he was jealous, but because he was having to hide something he was surely proud of. He didn’t need whatever money he got from his writing—that much was clear. He did it for pleasure. And because he obviously had a passion for the theater.

  “But Mr. Juncker’s shenanigans aren’t the only reason you’re angry at Thornstock, are they?” Mama went on. “Surely something more is upsetting you.”

  She sighed. Mama might not understand her stepdaughter’s chemistry work or how Olivia thought or even what she wanted out of life, but Mama could always tell when Olivia was upset.

  “I’m just . . . worried about his reputation,” Olivia said. “What if he means to keep on bedding married women?” And then lying to her about it as he’d lied all this time about being her favorite playwright. “Or going to his club every night after spending all day in Parliament? Or—”

  “Being like your father.”

  Reluctantly she nodded. “I . . . I love Thorn so much, Mama, that I don’t think I could bear knowing he was doing such things. This betrayal already hurts almost too much to endure.”

  Her stepmother kissed her cheek. “Dear girl, marriage is no guarantee of a happy life. It’s rather like . . . like playing billiards. You strike a ball with your cue, intending for the ball to go one place, and instead it careens in another direction entirely. But that doesn’t mean you stop playing billiards. We have to try. Heartache is what we risk.”

  Mama clasped her hand. “So don’t let your father’s behavior convince you to give up on your dreams, whether they be to succeed as a chemist or to succeed at love or both. Your father made his choice, and I made mine. You must make your own based on your hopes for your life. Sometimes, we get lucky.” She kissed Olivia’s hand. “I certainly did.”

  Tears stung Olivia’s eyes as she squeezed Mama’s hand. She didn’t believe in luck. So she had to figure out how to make her own, whether by burying herself in her work for all time or taking a chance on marriage to Thorn.

  Or, as Mama had said, “both.” She wanted both. And she began to believe that Thorn was the only man in England who could and would give her that.

  * * *

  The next day, Thorn accompanied Gwyn to her Mayfair town house. While there, he told Wolfe he’d spoken with the coachman injured in his father’s accident. It was a difficult endeavor given the state of the man’s mind, and Thorn had only gleaned one bit of useful information. The coachman had said he’d seen a stranger walking away from the coach on the day Thorn’s father had left, but given the number of guests in the house and the hooded cloak the person was wearing, he couldn’t say for sure if the person was a man or a woman, or even if the person had fooled with the carriage. Since it had been raining that day, he hadn’t thought the hooded cloak odd at the time.

  Then Wolfe and Thorn discussed how to convince Elias to reveal who’d paid him, but the truth was it might be easier to check those guest lists from the two house parties and see who was at both. That meant talking to Mother. Thorn wasn’t sure how much to tell her, but he had to tell her something.

  Unfortunately, out of concern that Mother might hear of his engagement before he could share the news in person, he’d sent a hasty note to her as soon as Olivia had accepted his offer. Now he ought to tell her the wedding was off. But if he asked for the guest lists without giving her a good reason for wanting them, she would try to get the truth out of him, and he wanted to consult with his siblings before he told her about their investigation. So he was just going to pretend he was still engaged, ask for the guest lists, and pray that Mother believed his explanation for why he needed them.

  When he reached Armitage House, he paused only to doff his hat and greatcoat. Wolfe had already told him Mother was here and not in Lincolnshire. She had elected to stay in London because Sheridan was in town, and they were attempting to unravel the tangled business affairs of Thorn’s stepfather, Sheridan’s father. Not that Mother had much to do with it, but apparently she wanted to be around in case Sheridan had questions.

  As Thorn passed through the foyer, he glanced at the salver with its pile of calling cards. That stopped him short. William Bonham’s card was on top. Perhaps Mother had another reason to be in town. He released a long breath. Gwyn approved of the friendship between Mother and their stepfather’s man of affairs, but Thorn wasn’t sure it was a good idea. After three marriages, surely Mother was ready to be done with the wedded state.

  Not if she’s in love.

  He grimaced. It was such an unequal match she’d have to be in love to pursue it. Her friends would cut her off if she married so far beneath her. Then again, she didn’t seem to care that much about her society friends. Rather like Olivia, actually.

  Ignoring the pain that thinking of her provoked, Thorn joined his mother in the breakfast room, her favorite spot in the afternoon, since that’s when it—perversely—got the best light. Gwyn had always said that whatever architect had deemed it a breakfast room needed to find a new profession.

  “Thorn!” Mother exclaimed. She leaped out of her chair and hurried over to kiss his cheeks. “How was Berkshire?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “And how is your new bride-to-be? I’m so happy for you, though I had no idea you were looking for a wife, let alone one like Miss Norley.”

  The blow to his gut was swift and painful, made all the more so because he had to hide it. “What’s wrong with Miss Norley?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know.” She lifted an eyebrow. “I barely exchanged two words with her at the ball. You never even said you were courting her, so it didn’t occur to me to ask her any questions. She seemed very quiet, that’s all.”

  “She is. But you’ll like her once you get to know her.” If I can ever get her back. “She loves the theater.”

  “Wonderful! Someone who can accompany me to see my favorite plays.” She cast him a sly smile. “And where is she just now?”

  “In Surrey with her mother.”

  “Oh, of course.” Mother tucked her hand in the crook of his arm and led him over to a cozy arrangement of chairs near the windows. “When she’s back in town, you must bring her by so she and I can discuss wedding plans.”

  “You and Olivia and Lady Norley with all your wedding plans,” he grumbled as he settled Mother into her favorite chair. “Between the three of you, you act as if a wedding requires the same strategic planning as a concerted attack on the French.”

  “Speaking as a woman who’s had three weddings, it does. You can trust me on this, son.”

  “I suppose I can.” Taking the chair opposite her, he flashed her a wan smile. “And regarding weddings and such, I was wondering if you happened to have kept the guest list for the house party you threw for Grey’s christening.”

  “What? Why?”

  This was the part where he had to lie to his mothe
r. Damn. “Well, Olivia and I would like to have a very intimate wedding at Rosethorn, with only those people who are closest to you and the family.”

  “The list from Grey’s christening wouldn’t help you,” she said. “Many of those people were your father’s friends, not mine.”

  “That’s why we also want the one for the house party from when you were about to give birth to me and Gwyn. We figure if we compare the two lists, we can weed out those people who were just friends to Grey’s father or mine and Gwyn’s. Anyone who attended both affairs would be family friends. Your friends and ours.”

  “Why not just ask me for a list of my current friends?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, Mother,” he said irritably.

  “Isn’t it always with you?”

  He narrowed his gaze on her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Of all my sons, you have most been the one to keep secrets.”

  “Nonsense. Grey is—”

  “He’s secretive, too, I suppose, but he thought he was protecting me by not telling me what his uncle was putting him through years ago. You’re just secretive in general. About everything.” She eyed him askance. “And now there’s this sudden engagement. Why do I feel there’s more to it than what you’re saying? I know the five of you are up to something, but no one will tell me what it is.”

  “We’re not up to—” He fought for calm. “Can you give me the lists or not, Mother?”

  She smoothed her skirts with a primness that belied her backbone of steel. “I’m sure I have them somewhere. I packed up everything from Grey’s christening and stowed it in the Carymont attic after his father died. Lord knows I didn’t want to keep anything from my wedding to that man.” Her voice softened. “Of course, I kept everything from my wedding to your father and the birth of you two. That’s in the Rosethorn attic.”

  “Then I’ll look for that one there, and Grey can look for the other at Carymont.”

  She got a faraway look in her eye. “I loved your father so much. I want for you and Miss Norley what he and I had. If I’ve learned anything through my three marriages, it’s the importance of trust and affection and real love. Your father meant everything to me. I swear, if I hadn’t had you and Gwyn to cuddle and care for, I don’t know how I would have survived the loss of him.”