Her heart started. Edmund stood with his hip propped along the edge of his desk, arms folded at his chest, elegant in his repose. Why did he have to be so blasted handsome? Phoebe pushed the door closed behind her and then leaned against the wood frame, borrowing support from the wood panel. “You wished to see me?” she asked quietly. Having seen her belongings being packed up, she rather knew what this meeting pertained to. Hurt twisted her belly in knots.
Edmund remained casually leaning, so impossibly cool and calm when her every fiber thrummed with awareness and regret.
“I did,” he said simply.
Her gaze fell to the loathed, damning black leather book at his side.
He followed her stare and, picking up the book, shoved himself to standing. With the leather tome in his hands, he strolled over to her, fanning those pages as he walked. “I lied to you again.” Phoebe stiffened.
“I pledged that I’d never again write a name in this book, but that was a lie.”
Her heart slipped.
His thick, black lashes swept downward. “Here.” He held out that detestable book.
Phoebe clutched a hand at her throat. She didn’t want to see that name. Didn’t want to know that he could not, nay would not, change.
“Take it,” he urged, his tone a blend of steel and warmth. Wetting her lips, she accepted it with numb fingers and scanned past name after name.
Miss Margaret Dunn
The Earl of Stanhope
Lord Alex Edgerton
She continued turning page after page.
The Viscount Waters
Miss Honoria Fairfax.
Phoebe. She paused on her name, her own weaknesses staring back at her. He’d known her so very well that he’d known precisely what mattered to her and forever marked it upon his page. With a drawn sigh, she turned the page—
And froze.
Phoebe shot her gaze to his and found his face a blank, expressionless mask. She quickly looked to the page and read and reread the two sentences. One name. Nine words marked in his hand.
Edmund Deering, the Marquess of Rutland. Weakness my wife.
Emotion swelled in her throat and she quietly handed the book back over to him. He refused to take it and she let it fall to her side. So that is why he’d send her away. A man like Edmund who thrived on power and resented all hint of weakness, would not want to be riddled with the constant reminder of a person who inspired anything less than ruthlessness in him. “I don’t want to be your weakness,” she said softly. She wanted to be his partner through life, making one another stronger with love.
He brushed his knuckles along her jaw, forcing her attention back to him. “Turn the page.”
“What game do you play, Edmund?” she asked, shaking the book. “Why can you not say what it is that you want me to read in these pages?”
“There is no game,” he said, his tone gruff. He took the book from her hands and tossed it aside where it landed with a noisy thwack upon the hardwood floor. “Would you know what those words say on the next page? They say Edmund Deering, Marquess of Rutland. My strength is my wife.”
Her heart stilled a beat as with infinite gentleness he took her face between his palms. “You are my strength. You do not make me weaker. You make me stronger just by your spirit and courage and convictions.”
She shook her head, trying to make sense of his words. “I don’t understand.” Her voice emerged as a breathless whisper.
“How can you not know? I love you,” he said softly.
No. He couldn’t. “But you do not—?”
He silenced her words with the pad of his thumb; rubbing the flesh of her lower lip. “But I do. I spent all my life fearing any emotion that could weaken me and do you know what I discovered, because of you, Phoebe?”
She managed to shake her head.
“I didn’t like the man I was—a man who took his pleasures where he would.” With women who’d been equally miserable and lonely. By the flash of regret in his eyes, she knew he’d followed that unspoken thought. “I do not want to be that man again. I will not be that man.” He brought her hand to his chest and placed it where his heart beat. “What I feel for you, this love, it fills me with lightness, it lifts me from darkness, buoying me in ways I’ve never been.” He lowered his brow to hers. “How can this emotion be worse than the darkness that has weighted me down all these years? It is freeing and healing and makes me stronger, not weaker.”
Phoebe pressed her eyes closed and a tear squeezed past her lashes. Edmund brushed it away with the pad of his thumb. “I love you,” he said again. “And I do not expect after my treachery that you should return those sentiments—”
“Why are you sending me away?” she blurted. Why, if he loved her would he let her go?
“I want you to have what you’ve always wanted. I’ve arranged for you to have your Captain Cook Adventures, your travels to Wales.” He drew in an audible breath. “I would go with you,” he said on a rush, as though fearing her response, “because if you were to board a ship without me, I would take it apart with my bare hands before I let you leave.”
At those words she’d once given him, a sob escaped her. He drew her into his arms. “You deserve a gentleman, a lord with pretty words and an honorable soul, and I know there is little use with the heart of a scoundrel, but I’d give it to you, anyway.”
“Oh, Edmund.” Phoebe captured his face between her hands and looked into his eyes. His eyes slid closed a moment, as though with her words, she’d given him an absolution of sorts. She waited until he looked at her once more. “I love you.” She managed a watery smile. “I don’t need the heart of a gentleman with pretty words. I just need the heart of a good man who loves me.”
A slow smile turned his lips up at the corners and this was pure, honest, devoid of all cold artifice and pretense. “Then that is what you will have,” he whispered. He claimed her mouth under his in a gentle kiss.
And that is all she’d ever wanted.
Epilogue
Spring 1817
One month later
“At last you returned.”
Curled up at Edmund’s side, Phoebe looked up at the door to where her brother and sister stood. A patent smile lined Justina’s face. Andrew, however, wore a dark scowl. “It is lovely to see you, as well,” she drawled, making to rise, but Edmund wrapped a possessive arm about her and held her at his side. Since he’d discovered she was expecting in Wales, he’d ordered their belongings packed and rushed them back to the confines of their townhouse. He’d not left her side since. Despite her assurances and the assurances of his family physician, he’d not gathered that this expecting business was really quite natural.
Either failing to hear or care about Phoebe’s droll tone, Andrew sailed into the room. He plopped down on the chair nearest Edmund. “You’ve been gone an infernally long time.” His lips settled into a petulant frown.
“It was but a month.”
“It was a month and one week,” Justina muttered, and gave her brother an accusatory glance. “And I should know. That one spoke of it. Every day.” She looked to Phoebe. “Every. Day.”
At his sister’s pronouncement, embarrassment turned his cheeks red and Andrew tugged at his lapels. “Well, is there something wrong with a chap missing his friend?”
A smile twitched at Phoebe’s lips. “Your sister?”
Her brother furrowed his brow in consternation. “Did I say my sister? I was referring to Rutland, there.”
“Ah, of course,” Phoebe said with mock solemnity. She stole a glance up at her husband. A pained expression marked the chiseled planes of his face. Another smile tugged at her lips. For the gentleness and love he’d shown her this past one month and one week as her siblings had aptly pointed out, there would always be, she suspected, a bearish gruffness to him around others and the affection shown him. She slipped her hand into his and gave a slight squeeze.
Edmund glanced down at their interlocked digits and raised it to his
lips. A look passed between them and warmth filled her heart. It spiraled through her with a blazing heat.
Andrew leaned forward in his chair and waved his hand about. “Are you two listening to me?”
“No, they are not.” Justina slid into a mahogany shell chair beside her brother. Her blue eyes twinkled with mirth. “They are giving one another the look of longing.”
“The look of longing?” her brother wrinkled his nose. “What in blazes is that?”
Edmund wrapped an arm about Phoebe. “Someday you will discover precisely what that is, Barrett.”
Andrew gave a dismissive wave. “Regardless, I’ve not come to talk about Phoebe’s odd looking business.” It did not escape Phoebe’s notice that he’d very deliberately left Edmund out of that odd looking business. “I’ve missed you at the clubs. Not the same there without you.”
Annoyed by his visiting those shameful sins, Phoebe frowned at Andrew. She opened her mouth to deliver a stinging lecture on those very clubs, when Edmund folded his ankle at his knee.
“I no longer visit For…those clubs,” he amended, glancing over at his young sister-in-law and then wife.
The man he’d been would have not given a jot about talking about those scandalous clubs before anyone and everyone. The man he truly was, however, cared…about Phoebe, her family, their life.
Andrew blinked in rapid succession. “You no longer visit Forbidden Pleasures.”
Edmund gave a somber shake of his head. “I do not.”
“Never tell me you attend,” He gave a shudder. “Brooke’s or Whites?”
Edmund’s silence stood as his answer.
A pained groan escaped the younger man and he threw himself back in his chair. “You’ve ruined him, Phoebe. Utterly and completely ruined the Marquess of Rutland.”
Edmund raised Phoebe’s fingertips to his lips once again and placed a lingering kiss on the inner portion of her wrist where her heart pounded wildly. “Ah, but that is where you are wrong, Barrett. Your sister saved me.”
And ignoring the painful groan of her brother, Phoebe leaned up and kissed her husband.
The End
To Wed His Christmas Lady
by Christi Caldwell
Chapter 1
William James Alexander Winchester Hargrove, I expect you home for the Christmastide Season! Your mother and I (but particularly your mother), have expectations for you.
Post Script
Your mother wanted me to stress that we are expecting you home prior to Christmas.
~Your father
Just outside Farnham, England
December, 1817
William Hargrove, the Marquess of Grafton, should have learned early on to be wary of barters presented by his father, the Duke of Billingsley.
At just six years of age, his father had dangled one of Cook’s Shrewsbury cakes in exchange for William’s beloved toy soldiers. With a boy’s impulsivity, William handed over every last figure from colonel to captain. Only after, when sugar flaked his cheeks and lips and the treat was gone, and his father’s large palm extended out, empty, he’d discovered for the first time—one always came out on the losing end of Father’s deals. William had turned over his toys forever for a bite of cake. It was a permanent loss in exchange for a fleeting pleasure.
That had been the first barter William had made with the clever duke.
The one he’d made as a youth of eighteen had been William’s last. The problem of making a pledge when one was but eighteen years of age was that time seems endless and years were eternal when you’re nothing more than a boy. A black curse ripped from his lips.
But now, he’d run out of time.
With snow falling about him, William leaned against the mighty oak and again skimmed the contents of his father’s missive. The note could not be clearer had the words been written: Your travels are up. It is time to see to your duty. His stomach muscles tightened. For that last deal struck would prove the most final in terms of what he’d sacrificed for eight fleeting years—his freedom.
As boisterous in real life as he was upon the page, the duke fit not at all with rigid Societal expectations of and for a duke. William’s earliest memories of his father included the man’s booming laughter as he’d raced the length of the ballroom with William seated precariously upon his shoulders. Still…for that warmth and affection, his father was a duke in every sense of the word. As such, there was, and always had been, the great expectation that William would do right by the Billingsley line as deemed right by his loving sire.
As a young man of eighteen, in exchange for a pledge to wed the spoiled, cold, and rotten daughter of the Duke of Ravenscourt, his father had granted William eight years of freedom. Freedom to travel. To explore. And to come and go as though the dukedom would not one day pass to him.
Why hadn’t he insisted on more time? His lips twisted with bitterness. Then, a handful more years could never have been enough. Nor did his desires have anything to do with the wanderlust that had filled him in his youth. After years of traveling, the prospect of returning to England and his family was a potent one. Or it should be. Not now. Not when presented with the grim future awaiting him. And where that inevitability was one expected of all noblemen, it was not a matter of giving up his freedom—but rather, whom he’d give his freedom up to. For the woman his parents would bind William to was colder than the snow that even now stung his skin. And while such matches with those frosty, emotionless ladies were commonplace in polite Society, his own parents’ union had stood as testament to the possibility of more—love and warmth and affection.
William clenched his hands reflexively about the page and the vellum crackled noisily in the winter quiet. His mount, Thunder, loosely tied to the opposite tree, picked up his head. The horse flicked his ears and nervously danced about. “Easy,” he soothed, and that seemed to have some kind of calming effect for the black Friesian. Redirecting his attention out once more, William stared into the distant gray-white horizon. He fixed his gaze down the snow-covered, old, Roman road that would inevitably lead him home.
He gritted his teeth, hating his damn foolish younger self who’d sacrificed any hope of a marriage based on anything more than a cold, emotionless, business arrangement between two powerful families.
A gust of wind whipped the steady, winter snow in his eyes and stung his cheeks. Dread pitted his stomach. It was time for him to wed. With a curse that would have burned his mother’s ears, he crumpled the note into a ball, stalked to the edge of the road, and hurled the sheet into the wind.
The growing storm captured that loathsome summons and whipped it up into the air. He stared, numb, as the ivory vellum fell to the earth, and then was carried by the wind, onward—until it disappeared.
If only I could do the same.
But he couldn’t. He’d been wandering for years, away from the world where he would someday ascend to the lofty title of duke. And more, he’d been wandering away from her.
“Lady Clarisse Falcot.” His lip peeled back in a snarl. The ever so proper lady his parents would see him wed. He balled his hands at his sides. His father had, of course, known just what to dangle before his adventure-craving son’s grasp—the ability to travel.
A hungering filled him to turn on his heel, mount Thunder, and ride off in the opposite direction. For the sliver of an instant he allowed himself that possibility, but then thrust it aside. He was a man who, at the very least, honored his word. Where was the comfort in that? William skimmed his gaze over the lightly snow-covered countryside and easily found that loathsome ivory vellum, now a wrinkled ball, tumbling over the white snow. Periodically, the increasing wind carried the page further away. Only, disposing of that missive would not undo the pledge he’d made that would ultimately join him to that miserable brat he’d had the displeasure of knowing as a child.
After effectively burying the thought of her all these years, he let the memories of her slip in. He’d known his mother’s goddaughter, Lady Clari
sse Falcot, since she was in the nursery and he’d been a mere boy of ten. He recalled the precise moment he’d known Clarisse was no manner of woman he’d ever wed, despite his father’s clear expectations. On a visit to her family’s properties, he’d stepped into the foyer. She’d been a girl but had the servants lined up. With a frigid tone better reserved for Wellington himself in the heart of battle, she’d ordered them about in search of some bauble or trinket. He’d stood frozen in the entrance of the duke’s country home, alongside his family, and a chill had snaked through him to rival the current storm. This would be the girl my father will someday bind me to?
Their gazes had caught and she’d stared at him through narrowed, angry eyes. And he’d despised her from the start. Cold, icy, and rude to the servants. As a girl of ten, she was the epitome of pompous nobility. His father had ingrained into William early on that a man’s merit came not in his birthright, but in his sense of right and strength of convictions. Yet, still with that, he’d wed William off to that coldhearted, English miss who’d treated servants as though their only purpose was to serve her.
Another gust of wind whipped the steady snow into his face, stinging his cheeks. He strode over to his mount and freed Thunder’s reins from the oak tree. William climbed astride and then nudged his horse forward, onward toward his family’s country seat in Farnham. Through the worsening conditions, he struggled to see into the tempest. He guided his mount onward, along the snow-covered, old, Roman roads, and struggled to see through the curtain of heavy white flakes.
Momentarily blinded, William slowed Thunder to a walk, mindful of the winds gusting small drifts on the rough roads. It was inevitable. Lady Clarisse could not have stayed a girl forever. And by the whispers and gossip he’d heard before he’d begun his journey home from London, she’d grown into a shrewish, foul extension of her younger self and the duke who’d sired her.
A Heart of a Duke Collection: Volume 1-A Regency Bundle Page 169