Ice Cold Duke (Frigid Dukes #2)

Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

“ S o, this is where you’ve been.” Lucien stood in the doorway to the parlor, his arms folded, and took in the wide, surprised eyes of his brother, who was sitting at the desk near the windows, writing what appeared to be a letter.

Henry set down his quill and slowly stood up. He still looked surprised, but as the seconds stretched out, another look clouded his face: fear.

“Don’t say that as if I’ve been hiding for weeks,” Henry said, turning fully to face Lucien. “The wedding was only yesterday. In fact, I was just writing you a letter to let you know where I’d gone.” He gestured at the paper behind him on the desk. “I wasn’t trying to disappear or anything.”

“And yet you did disappear. From perhaps the most important event of your life.”

Lucien took another step into the room and looked around. He hadn’t been to his house in Cornwall in many years. It was a dreary place, Cornwall, with far too little light and far too much rain, but he had suspected that it was where Henry had run off to. Henry had always enjoyed quiet and solitude. His favored hobbies had always been reading and writing, as opposed to the more gentlemanly riding and shooting. And Cornwall had always been his favorite of their homes to curl up with a book on long, rainy afternoons.

Henry swallowed. He looked very nervous now, and his eyes flitted to the doors, as if wondering about escape. But he didn’t waver, and when he spoke again, it was in a strong, clear voice.

“I am very sorry, Lucien. I should not have run away like that from my duty. I know that I let you down, not to mention Lady Emery and her parents. But I just couldn’t do it. Every single thing inside of me was telling me it was wrong.”

Lucien felt a flicker of anger, but he tried to remain calm. “You couldn’t do it?” he repeated. “Or you didn’t want to? Because in my experience, men can do any number of things. Take responsibility, Henry: you absolutely could have married Lady Emery. You just chose not to.”

Henry blinked, then grit his teeth and nodded. “You’re right. I could have. But I didn’t want to.”

“Leaving me to clean up your mess.” Lucien couldn’t keep some of the anger from his voice now. “Not to mention endangering your sisters’ marriage prospects. You do remember that Leah is meant to debut in a month, do you not? Abandoning Lady Emery at the aisle could have ruined her reputation and destroyed our family name! Not to mention Lady Emery’s.”

“She asked me to do it!” Henry said, his tone sharpening just slightly. “She wrote me a letter telling me she didn’t love me and couldn’t marry me. In it, she begged me to call it off, to leave her at the aisle. I knew it might ruin her, but I also knew it was what she wanted. What we both wanted…”

“I know,” Lucien said. “I read her letter to you, and I have also spoken to her about it at length.”

A shadow of guilt passed across her face, and he shifted. “How is she?” he asked. “Is she… upset? Relieved? Have the gossip columns caught wind of it yet? I do hope she won’t be ruined…”

Henry’s large, round gray eyes were so full of earnest worry that Lucien almost felt bad about the news he had to deliver. Almost. It was his brother’s doing, however, and he ought to know the consequences of it.

“Her state of mind is unclear,” he said after a moment. “But she is at least saved from ruin.”

“She is? How?”

“She married someone else.”

Henry’s jaw fell open. “What? Who? She never mentioned anything about--”

“Me. She is married to me.”

A beat passed. Another shocked silence. My whole life has become one shocked silence. And then Henry sat down heavily in his chair, a stunned look on his face.

“You?” he whispered, looking up at Lucien. “But… why?”

“Because I could not allow you to tarnish our family name,” Lucien said. “Nor could I allow my younger brother to ruin a respectable young lady. I had to do something or everyone would suffer.”

“But… now you and Emery will suffer most of all!”

Lucien narrowed his eyes. “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

Henry spread his hands wide, as if this were obvious. “You two are the most incompatible people I could ever put together. Emery is light-hearted and funny. She’s a bit mischievous, really, although she never got a chance to act on it. And she’s fun! She loves to dance and stay up late. Her biggest regret is not getting to spend every Season in London having adventures. Whereas you…”

Henry didn’t need to finish that sentence. Both of them knew what he thought of Lucien. Over the years, the brothers had clashes more times than Lucien liked to remember. Henry was charming and gregarious, a dreamer, full of ideals and ambitions but no willpower to see them through, no discipline. He was, in Lucien’s opinion, lazy and spoiled. Whereas Henry thought Lucien was uptight, cold, mirthless, and even cruel. He had told him so on more than one occasion.

Well, someone has to protect this family ! He’d wanted to shout during all those arguments. And protecting one’s family takes discipline, control, and yet, sometimes cruelty. Not that I would have to be cruel if you would be less foolish in your choices.

But he’d never said those things. If Lucien had one fear that out-trumped all the rest, it was tearing apart his family by saying or doing the wrong thing. So, he always suppressed his anger and let it seethe underneath an exterior of cool indifference.

Henry, seeming to realize that he’d rekindled these old arguments, flushed. “I just mean to say that Emery is very different from you. She’s not as serious. She’s a bit mischievous.”

“Well, if you admire her character so much, why didn’t you marry her?” Lucien snapped, and his brother flushed.

“I hold Emery in the highest regard,” he said, standing up straighter. “But she is like a sister to me. To marry her felt wrong on every level. And…” he paused, and the flush deepened in his cheeks. “There is someone else. A young lady to whom I have formed a deep attachment. There is no understanding, of course. I could say nothing while I was engaged to Lady Emery--er, Her Grace. But now that I am free, I should very much like your permission to follow my heart.”

To follow my heart.

Lucien felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. After everything he had told his brother, after all the ways in which he’d tried to protect him, all the ways he’d sacrificed for him, now this?

“Do I have to remind you,” he began, through gritted teeth, “of what happened the last time someone in this family decided to marry for love?”

Henry’s shy, hesitant smile vanished, and he glared across the room at Lucien. “Mama and Papa, you mean? No, you don't have to tell me: they had five wonderful children and, although they died too young, got to share their lives with a partner they loved deeply.”

“They ignored us!” Lucien shouted. He could feel himself losing control of his temper, of his carefully constructed aloofness, but he couldn’t hold himself back any longer. “They may have given birth to five children but they didn’t care about us once we were born! They completely abandoned us and our upbringings, running off together whenever they could on expensive, elaborate holidays abroad, or spending the entire Season in London and never visiting us back at the Castle. They were selfish, completely wrapped up in one another, and unable to meet the needs of their children, who should have been their first priority!”

“Not this again,” Henry said, shaking his head. “I know that you have your issues with Mama and Papa, but just because they could be a bit self-involved doesn’t mean everyone is like that when in love! It doesn’t mean I will make their same mistakes if I marry for love!”

“Their mistakes?” Lucien snarled. “They completely failed in their duty to take care of us! I had to do everything. If it weren’t for me, you and our sisters wouldn’t have had enough food to put on the table. I was the one out there, collecting rents at just ten years old, while they were in London spending all our money. I was the one staying up with Leah whenever she had a bad dream, riding through the night to find a doctor when Celeste was sick, teaching you how to behave like a gentleman when I should have been enjoying my childhood!”

Henry’s expression had become softer throughout this speech, and when he spoke, it was much more calmly. “And I’m sorry you had to do all of that, Lucien. Truly, I am. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t marry the woman I love, or that I should be forced into a marriage I don’t want.”

Lucien didn’t respond for a moment. He was still so angry that he was seeing red. Finally, forcing himself to take a deep breath, he said, “Well, thanks to your actions, I was forced into a marriage I didn’t want. I was forced to marry a girl I barely know because you could not, for once in your life, put this family first and do your duty.”

Henry’s cheeks flushed again, but before he could speak, Lucien continued, “You say that you’re sorry I was the one who always had to make sacrifices for the family, but then, when I asked you to finally do something for the sake of your sisters, to marry the woman our parents picked out for you, a lady with a sizable dowry that will help save the duchy from financial ruin after they spent every last penny, you still didn’t do it. You couldn’t sacrifice your desires for the good of the people you are supposed to love. Which tells me that you aren’t really sorry.”

“I am really sorry,” Henry said, and he took a step toward Lucien, his eyes pleading. “Lucien, you have to listen to me. I am sorry for what happened. I should have ended the engagement in a more respectable way, so that you weren’t forced to propose to Lady Emery and she wasn’t left in a position where she couldn’t refuse you. I will regret that for the rest of my days. But she and I both realized something before the wedding, and I think you ought to realize it, too: that we deserve to be happy. You deserve to be happy, too. Everyone does.”

Lucien turned away. He couldn’t hear any more of this simplistic, saccharine nonsense. “I shouldn’t have been surprised that Emery was sheltered and naive,” he said, as he stared out the windows of the parlor and out at the sea, which he could just glimpse in the distance. “But I thought you, a man of the world, who has travelled throughout Europe, would know better. I guess I was wrong.”

He sighed heavily and turned back to his brother. “I will not stop you from marrying the woman you want, if she is an acceptable match in terms of family and dowry. But I hope that while you enjoy the happiness you so think you deserve, that you remember that through your actions, you have condemned not only me, but your former fiancée, to live without it.”

Henry’s expression was frozen in horror, but Lucien couldn’t feel anything but sadness as he turned away from his brother. Because until this moment, he hadn’t even realized how unhappy he was with this wedding.

I do not desire to have a traditional marital relationship with you and would have refused had you come here with that expectation.

The words returned to him and seemed to cut like a knife through his chest. They had hurt in the moment, but now, the full weight of them fell on him, crushing him. He had married a woman who despised him; a woman with whom he would never be able to have even a warm, kind relationship with. And while he had thought he didn’t care, since he had never planned to marry in the first place, he was realizing now that he did care.

And it was far more painful than he had thought it would be.