by Eloisa James
“I understand,” she said, quite peaceably. After all, as he said, she’d been through this exact scene before. She had a precedent; she understood the undertow of anguish that would follow, the sense of regret and loss, the bewilderment of loving someone more than he loved her.
The next time around, she thought, it’s going to be different.
But it was different. She knew that. There wouldn’t be any next time around for her when it came to love…but that was all right, too.
If she couldn’t have the complicated duke in front of her, she didn’t want to love anyone. He was still staring at the empty fireplace, so she just drank in the sight of him, his muscled legs and lean powerful rear, the way his shoulders flared, the exact color of his hair—
And that was when the door burst open.
Chapter Twenty-eight
It happened so fast that afterward Leopold was never quite able to describe it. One moment he was trying to figure out why his heart felt as if it were splitting in two, and the next moment he was faced by an utterly enraged, out-of-control Duke of Astley who was screaming—literally screaming—about the fact that he had dishonored Eleanor.
Which he had.
No one could argue otherwise, given the fact that he was stark naked in her bedchamber. He pulled on his breeches, but could think of only one thing to say. “Do you want everyone in this house to know?” His voice cut across Astley’s hysteria like a knife.
The man choked.
“You will give me satisfaction,” Astley said, his eyes bright as a lunatic’s. “Immediately.”
“You must be out of your mind,” Leopold said, unwisely. “You don’t believe in duels.”
Astley went for his throat, forcing Leopold to throw him across the room, which was ridiculous and made him feel even more foolish.
“I know why you want to keep quiet!” Astley hissed, lurching back on his feet. “I will marry Eleanor no matter whether you’ve debauched her or not. She is not in control of her own impulses. She needs a man, and I left her. This is all my fault.”
“I will not marry either of you,” Eleanor cried, intervening. “So Gideon, if you wish to save my reputation, I would beg you to stop speaking so loudly.”
Astley stared at her. “Of course you’re marrying me. I have forgiven you, Eleanor.”
She shook her head. “I will not marry either of you.”
“I forgive you,” he persisted.
“She doesn’t need your forgiveness,” Leopold found himself saying through clenched teeth. “You should be groveling at her feet, begging for her forgiveness.”
“I already have,” he said, with an odd sort of punctured dignity. “And now I shall defend her honor, just as I should have defended her years ago.” The sound of his slap was shockingly loud in the quiet room. “Name your seconds.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Leopold said. He turned away and walked toward the balcony window. He had won four duels and lost one, badly. And he had sworn never to fight with a sword again. He was too good—and it was only after almost losing his own to a dueling wound that he realized how much he prized life.
His successful duels had ended with him wounding his opponents, none mortally. It was only by the grace of God that he hadn’t killed someone. He had no desire to alter that record.
“I don’t want to kill you,” he said, turning around.
“You won’t. Virtue—truth—God are on my side.”
“Astley, you’re one of the House of Lords’s most vocal opponents of dueling, and you have been for the last few years at least. Tell me that you even know how to handle a rapier.”
“Of course I do. I was trained as is any gentleman’s son. Do I need to slap you again, Your Grace?” Astley was maddened by rage. His face was completely white.
“No,” Leopold said slowly. “But I won’t fight you with seconds. If you want to fight, you’ll have to do it privately.”
“Why?”
“Because if you involve another, the world will know. And if Eleanor then refuses to marry you, as she has a perfect right to do, she will be ruined.”
“You wouldn’t marry him instead of me!” Astley swung around.
“He hasn’t asked me,” Eleanor said, head high.
Leopold actually sympathized with Astley this time. He could have ducked; he certainly knew what was coming. But he took a hard right to his chin.
Eleanor grabbed Astley’s arm. “He’s marrying Lisette! For pity’s sake, Gideon. He can hardly marry me when he’s promised to her.”
“Then why are you in her bedchamber?” Astley said, panting.
Although it hurt like the devil, Leopold refused to give his opponent the satisfaction of seeing him feel his chin. “Because I’m a bastard,” he said heavily.
“You are that,” Astley said. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you’d rather marry Lisette than Eleanor.”
It hurt to open his mouth, and not only because of the blow. He didn’t manage to open it before Eleanor intervened once more.
“He does!” she said, her voice tight. “What are you trying to prove, Gideon? Leopold has decided that Lisette will be a better mother to his children. He bedded me, but that gave him precisely as much desire to marry me as it gave you. In short: not much.”
Astley started to speak, but she held up her hand. Her eyes were flaming. “Neither of you seem to care, but I’ll tell you this: I deserve better than either of you. I deserve a man who will love me, who will believe to the bottom of his heart that I’m exactly the woman he wants to raise his children. Who won’t think of me as just a woman to bed.”
Leopold felt her words as if a blow had shuddered down his spine. He had never meant to hurt her. And yet there were tears standing in her eyes.
“I deserve more,” she repeated savagely.
“I think you’ll be a wonderful mother,” Astley said, like an eager puppy dog.
“No, you don’t.”
“I do!”
“You want to marry me because you realize you made a mistake. But that’s not the same as loving me now, Gideon. We lost each other, somehow. And frankly, you loved Ada, for all you are disparaging your time together. You loved her.”
Astley swallowed. “I—”
“You loved her and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can mourn her properly.”
“But if you won’t marry either of us—”
“Don’t tell me that you’re afraid I’ll end up a spinster! I’ll tell you exactly who I am going to marry: a common man, not a duke. Both of you are so steeped in privilege that you never really thought I was good enough for you. I am going to find an ordinary man who will court me. And he won’t be a duke. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you.”
She left.
Leopold pulled on his shirt. “I’ll leave for London immediately,” he said, tired to the bone. He felt as if a clamp were tightening around his heart, as if he’d—He couldn’t let himself think about what he had done.
“No, you won’t.”
“For God’s sake, Astley. She doesn’t want either one of us.”
“You fool,” Astley said. “You utter blithering fool.”
Leopold laughed, shortly. “Are you trying to get me to slap you this time? Because believe it or not, I don’t believe in duels anymore.”
The slap made his head fall back and his teeth rattle.
“What in God’s name was that for? That’s the third time you’ve struck me in five minutes.”
“Because I love her,” Astley said. “I behaved like a young ass when I left her. And maybe she’s right when she says it’s too late for us. But you—you used her. You made her fall in love with you, and you rejected her. I’m going to kill you.”
For the first time, Leopold felt a stir of alarm. Faint, but real. “You can’t kill me.”
“Yes, I can,” Astley stated clearly. “I dishonored Eleanor. This will atone for what I did to her. I’ll revenge her. I’ll take you down because it�
��s the right thing to do. You broke her heart. I’ve never seen her look like that, not when I left her, and not thereafter. By God, I never understood the point of dueling before but I understand it now.”
Leopold knew when a man had irrevocably made up his mind. He pulled on his boots. “Tomorrow at dawn.”
“Where?”
“There’s a stretch of green down by the river. It will do.” He felt inexpressibly weary. A man wanted to kill him because he had broken the heart of—
It was impossible.
She was so logical, so cool, when she agreed with him that he should marry Lisette. Women had moaned and murmured and shouted their love for him before, not that he ever believed them. Hell, Lisette had patted his cheek and told him that she loved him earlier that morning.
Eleanor never said a word.
“She doesn’t love me,” he said, just as Astley was leaving the room.
“You fool,” Astley said savagely. “You utter ass.”
“You’re hardly an uninterested bystander,” Leopold said.
“I do love her. But what I see in her eyes when she looks at you…I never saw that before. She used to desire me. She loves you. But that doesn’t matter, does it?” He turned around, his eyes bright with scorn. “You’ve made your choice.”
“I can’t marry whom I wish—”
“Just what I told her all those years ago,” Astley said, stepping into the corridor. “Precisely those words.”
And he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Eleanor thought she had lived through nightmares before, but the torment of dinner that night surpassed any anguish she had felt when Gideon left her. Lisette’s father, the Duke of Gilner, had returned, and contrary to Lisette’s prediction was enchanted to give his daughter’s hand to the Duke of Villiers.
He didn’t turn a hair over the question of the duke’s illegitimate children, just said cheerfully—and in front of the entire table, “I’m sure my little girl has told you that she can’t bear young of her own, so this is perfect.”
Eleanor had been looking everywhere except at Villiers, who was sitting across from her, but at this she peeked from under her lashes, just enough to see that Lisette had not bothered to inform her future husband of this fact. But of course he nodded as if the news were of no account.
Perhaps it wasn’t. After all, he wanted a mother for the children he already had. Surely an heir was less important. That thought led to bitterness, so she took a deep breath and pushed the question of Villiers’s children aside.
“It seems we both have reason to celebrate,” her mother said archly, from her position at Gilner’s right hand. “Our dear children are matched—and so suitably too!”
For all his liberal notions, the duke didn’t seem quite as pleased with her mother’s announcement, once he realized that Gideon’s wife was barely in the grave. He was a nice man, Eleanor thought. Too nice, perhaps. If he’d placed more of a curb on Lisette…She sighed. There was no use thinking about it.
Anne squeezed her hand under the table. “Almost through,” her sister whispered. “One more course.”
Eleanor gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m so glad you’re with me.”
Anne leaned over and said in her ear. “You’ll see. We’ll get revenge—on both of them. I have plans.”
Eleanor didn’t care.
At that moment she heard the scribble-scrabble of sharp claws on the parquet. Her heart stopped. It couldn’t be. It—
Oyster tore around the corner into the dining room, going so quickly that she heard his claws scrape the wood.
“Oh, no!” she yelped, as loud as Oyster himself.
Lisette was sitting to the left of her father. She leaped up, jumped on her chair and screamed. Of course.
Eleanor was running around the table, trying to catch her puppy, and only learned afterwards what happened. Apparently Oyster bounded onto Lisette’s chair as if he’d grown wings.
“He’s trying to bite me!” Lisette screamed.
Anne said later that it looked as if he was planning to lick her slipper.
Whatever Oyster’s intention, he had only a second before Lisette, without breaking her scream, scooped him up and threw him with all her might across the table and through the air. He didn’t even have time to bark as he sailed over Gideon’s head and slammed into the wall.
Time became slow, like honey pouring from a spoon. The puppy slid down the paneling and collapsed in a boneless heap of too-large paws.
“Daughter!” Gilner roared.
Still Lisette screamed.
Eleanor found herself on her knees by Oyster, tears streaming down her face. She was afraid to move him. Not that it mattered. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Then Villiers was there, sliding one huge hand under the puppy’s neck and the other under his body. “We’ll take him into the library,” he said, straightening.
He must have caught Lisette’s eye.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she screamed. “You have no right to look at me like that!”
“I’m not—” Villiers said.
“You are, you are! You look at me the same way that bastard son of yours looks at me!”
There was a curious silence in the room, and a feeling that Eleanor suddenly remembered from Lisette’s tantrums all those years ago. It felt as if the air in the room was in short supply.
Villiers didn’t say a word, just shifted Oyster closer into his arms. His paw flapped lifelessly and Eleanor’s tears came harder. Her sister’s arms went around her, pressing a handkerchief to her cheek.
“It’s your fault!” Lisette shrieked, turning to her father.
He was on his feet as well, looking miserable and exhausted. “Be quiet, Lisette,” he said, his voice heavy.
“It’s all your fault—all of it. Everything!” She looked around the table, her eyes as bright and hard as cannonballs. “He took away my baby. He took him away and since then nothing has been right.” She turned to her father. “You are a horrible man! You are a despicable, child-stealing—”
Lady Marguerite’s voice cut through the tirade with barely controlled rage. “You will not speak to your father that way, Lisette. You sent away your own child because you said he smelled and cried too much.”
“That’s a falsehood!” Lisette shouted. “A lie because you’re all liars!”
Marguerite’s hand shot out and she pulled Lisette down from her perch on the chair and then grabbed her chin. “Look at me! You told your mother to get rid of that child. You did that to my poor sister, who never recovered. She was never the same from the moment she gave that child to his father. She did it because she knew you would ruin that boy’s life. But don’t you ever, ever, blame another soul for that.”
“I will blame him,” Lisette said, her voice a horrible sobbing half shriek. “I will blame him because it is his fault. And his, as well.” She pointed at Villiers. “He brought that boy here, that horrible boy, who made me think about my own child, the one you took from me. The one my own mother stole from me.”
Eleanor couldn’t bear another moment. She reached out and plucked Oyster from Villiers’s arms before he could stop her. Then she began to walk away.
“And you!” she heard on a rising shriek. “You think I don’t know what—”
There was a sound, of the slap of water, and Lisette’s voice broke off.
Eleanor glanced over her shoulder. Anne had apparently snatched a pitcher of water from the sideboard and thrown it directly into Lisette’s face.
Eleanor just kept going, down the hall to the library. The footman threw open the door, such an appalled expression on his face that she realized everything must have been audible in the entry.
“My lady,” Popper said, hurrying to her as she sat down on a sofa. “I’ll bring a cold cloth.”
“There’s no need,” Eleanor said, icily calm in her grief. “It won’t help.” Oyster’s head had fallen over the crook of her arm and she couldn’t see his
eyes. She closed her own for a moment, and opened them to find Tobias standing before her. All color had drained from his face.
“It was me,” he said hoarsely. “I did it.”
“You didn’t do it. Lisette threw him against a wall.”
“I did it,” he repeated, his shoulders back as if he faced a magistrate. “I rubbed a beef steak on the bottom of her slippers, and then I took Oyster out of your room and let him go.”
Eleanor swallowed. “Why?”
“Because I wanted the duke to see what she was like. I never thought she’d kill him. I never thought that!”
He looked like a boy who had never cried in his life. His skin was drawn tightly over the bones of his face.
Tears slipped down Eleanor’s cheeks again. She slipped one arm out from under Oyster and held it out to him. “I know you didn’t. And Oyster knows you didn’t.”
He stood there, frozen, and she thought, My God, he’s never been hugged. But then suddenly his wiry body was pressed against hers, and a not very clean hand fell on Oyster’s fur, and they were both crying.
Someone handed her a large handkerchief of such fine quality that it could belong only to one person. He slipped a hand under Oyster’s body.
“Don’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
His eyes met hers over the head of his weeping child. “But I think he’s breathing,” Leopold said softly. “Tobias, he’s breathing. Oyster isn’t dead.”
Popper trotted up with a wet cloth. They turned Oyster over. His legs seemed boneless, so limp that Eleanor secretly lost hope again. Tobias began gently rubbing the cloth around Oyster’s closed eyes and around his muzzle, crooning, “Come on, boy. Come on, old boy. Open your eyes, boy.”
Oyster didn’t stir. Eleanor pressed her lips together.
“Smelling salts!” Popper said, and left the room again.
“I can feel his heart,” Leopold said, his deep voice steady. “Just keep doing it, son. Oyster will wake up.”
“We’ll go running as soon as you wake up,” Tobias said, his voice hoarse from crying. “I’ll take you out to the raspberry bushes and you can look for a rat. Remember when we looked for a rat? Remember that, Oyster? Come on, old boy, wake up!”