Ice Cold Duke (Frigid Dukes #2)

Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

“ A nd this spoon is for the dessert course,” Lucien said, picking up the smallest spoon that had been set on the table in front of his wife and waving it in front of her face. “You eat it last. A good way to remember it is that it is the smallest spoon, which corresponds to the fact that dessert should be the smallest portion of the meal that a lady eats.”

Emery, he was unsurprised to see, glowered up at him. “The smallest portion of the meal should be dessert?” she repeated, incredulous. “Is that true for ladies, or also for gentlemen?”

“It is true for both,” Lucien said, “although it is especially true of ladies. A proper young lady should never appear glutinous if she is to attract a husband.”

“That is absurd,” Emery said, banging her fist down on the table in what Lucien would describe as an excellent example of how not to attract a husband. “You want to take away fun and love from a lady’s life, and now you also want to take away dessert?”

Lucien sighed and set the spoon back on the table. This was their etiquette lesson so far in the week since he’d returned from Cornwall, and he felt as if he was going to tear his hair out. It wasn’t that his wife was a slow learner. In fact, she was almost frighteningly quick and clever. The problem was that she was too clever and seemed to disagree with him--and by extension, Society --on what was the correct way to do things.

“Emery, can you please just listen to what I’m saying and not comment on it?” he asked now, pinching his nose once again to try and stave off the headache that she was bringing on. “I am only teaching you the rules, I’m not endorsing them one way or another.”

“But you do endorse these rules,” she said, crossing her arms. “Or why else would I have to learn them? If you didn't endorse these rules, then everyone would believe that you might actually have fallen in love with a woman like me who finds them silly and ridiculous.”

Lucien frowned. He couldn’t exactly argue with that, and while he wanted to have a witty retort, his head hurt too badly. She is driving me in circles!

“Why don’t we just move on to the correct way to exit the dining room?” he suggested after a moment.

“There’s a correct way to exit as well?” Emery moaned, putting her head in her hands. “We already spent a quarter of an hour discussing the correct way to enter it! There cannot be these many rules. It would drive any sane person to the madhouse!”

“And yet, I am very much sane,” Lucien said with strained patience. “As are most members of the ton .”

“Well, that’s debatable,” said a male voice from the door, and both Lucien and Emery looked around, surprised, to see Henry standing in the doorway, a nervous, sheepish smile on his face.

“Henry!” Emery exclaimed, and to Lucien’s surprise, she pushed her chair back from the table, sprang to her feet, and ran across the room to his brother and flung her arms around him. “I’ve missed you!”

“I’ve missed you too, Em,” Henry said, laughing, as he hugged her back and then patted on the back. “Although it’s only been a week.”

“Well, a lot’s happened in a week,” she said, releasing him and smiling up at him. “You may have heard: I got married. To your older brother.”

“I did hear…” Henry glanced from Emery to Lucien, his smile slipping somewhat.

“Ran off and left me with him, did you?” Emery said, punching him softly on the shoulder. “And I thought you were a gentleman!”

Henry laughed awkwardly, and Lucien sensed that he wasn’t sure how to respond to this. Did he make a joke? But he was the one who had put Emery in this less-than-desirable situation, and Lucien could tell he still felt far too guilty to make jokes about it.

Good , he thought churlishly. Let him be guilty.

“I hope you’ve at least had a better week than I have,” Emery said, putting her hands on her hips. “Your brother is giving me etiquette lessons. It’s quite dreary.”

“Ah yes, I remember those,” Henry said, flashing an uncomfortable smile. “He made Leah, Celeste, and Eve do those as well.”

“And you? Did he try with you?”

Henry blushed slightly. “I never needed them. I’ve always had excellent etiquette.”

“Except for leaving me at the aisle,” she pointed out.

“You wanted me to!”

“I know, I’m only teasing.”

Lucien, meanwhile, stood up straighter and looked from his brother to Emery. The warmth between the two of them was palpable, although entirely without romantic chemistry.

That’s always how they’d been, even from a young age. They’d always known they were intended for one another but had never been awkward about it. Perhaps that lack of awkwardness was because there was just nothing between them other than friendliness.

Still, watching them, Lucien couldn’t help but feel a small flare of jealousy. Why is it always so easy for Henry? He always knows the right thing to say to befriend someone. Even with Emery, he can be her friend so easily, whereas I never know what to say to her.

Although he knew part of this was his fault: he hadn’t made it easy to win his wife’s friendship by marrying her against her will.

“Actually,” Henry said, clearing his throat, “that’s what I came here to talk to you both about. I wanted to apologize.” Henry blushed again, his face turning the color of a tomato, and he looked deeply into Emery’s eyes, a very serious expression coming over his face.

“Em… I want to apologize to you most of all,” he said. “I knew for a long time that you didn’t want to marry me, and I know that you tried to bring it up on more than one occasion. I wish I had allowed us to talk about it, because if we had, we might have prevented all of this from happening. We could have called off the engagement in a timely manner and then you could have been free to marry the man of your choice.”

From where he stood, Lucien couldn’t see the expression on his wife’s face, but at Henry’s words, she had looked down at her toes, and he imagined that there were tears in her eyes. It made something in him flare up at once: an instinct to defend her, to protect her from these terrible feelings. Mixed, of course, with the guilt that he was the one who had caused her to feel so terribly.

“I realize now that I never allowed the conversation about our marriage to happen because I was afraid of doing exactly what ended up happening: embarrassing both our families, putting all our reputations at stake, and disappointing the people we love, especially my brother.”

Henry’s eyes flickered up to Lucien’s for a moment, and Lucien felt his heart constrict painfully. He was fairly certain this was the first time in his life that his brother had ever told him he loved him--even in a roundabout way.

“When I read your letter,” Henry continued, his gaze returning to Emery, who had looked up at him again, “I fooled myself into thinking that it was the best option, all the while trying to ignore what it would do to you and your sisters. I’m so sorry, Emery. I wasn’t a good friend to you or a protector. I should have put your reputation first and thought through how the consequences of my actions would affect you. I let you down--worse than that, I condemned you to a life you didn’t want--and while I know you can never forgive me, I do apologize, from the very bottom of my heart.”

“Henry…” Emery murmured, and she took his hands in hers. “You are not a bad friend, and you did not condemn me to a life I didn’t want. Don’t forget: I asked you to run away and leave me at the altar. I thought that any fate was better than marrying a man who feels like a brother. I, also, didn’t think through the consequences of my actions. All I felt was a blinding panic that made it difficult for me to see past anything other than getting out of the marriage.”

“But Emery,” Henry said, shaking his head, “I am the gentleman. It was my duty to be chivalrous to you, to protect you. It was my responsibility and I am the one who must shoulder the blame.”

“I believe that assigning blame in this situation is not useful,” Lucien said, and both of them turned toward him. Henry looked wary, as if unsure where Lucien was going with this, while Emery looked pleasantly surprised, as if she hadn’t been expecting him to say something of this nature.

I’m not being entirely altruistic , Lucien wanted to tell her . I also very much didn’t like hearing Henry say he is the one who is supposed to protect you. But that was neither here nor there.

“But, Lucien,” Henry began, “I am to blame. You said yourself that I had to take responsibility.”

“And you are,” Lucien said. “This is you taking responsibility right now. However, going back and forth on who is to blame won’t help us now. We’re in the situation we are in, and the only thing we can do is move forward and figure out how to fix it.”

“He has a plan to try and pass off to the ton that he and I are madly in love and that you selflessly ran away so that we could be together,” Emery said, raising her eyebrows.

“Really?” Henry laughed, turning to Lucien. “And you think people will believe that you are in love with Emery? No offense, Emery, but you aren’t exactly the kind of woman I would envision my brother with.”

“No offense taken,” she said so sincerely that Lucien felt himself prickle with defensiveness. I’m not that bad! Am I? “Hence the etiquette lessons,” she continued. “He’s trying to make me into someone people will actually believe captured his heart.”

“I see.” Henry shook his head. “Well, I suppose that might work.”

“The worst of the scandal was already avoided thanks to my quick thinking,” Lucien reminded them. “By marrying Emery, I ensured that we were not completely ruined. However, if we are to convince the ton that nothing untoward took place--that, for instance, I didn’t steal Emery away from my brother and then banish him--”

Emery interrupted him by bursting out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “I’m just trying to imagine you, the least romantic person I’ve ever met, stealing me away from Henry and then banishing him.”

Henry was smiling now as well, and Lucien folded his arms across his chest. “Are you two quite done?” he asked in a sour voice.

“Y-yes,” Emery stuttered, as she forced herself to stop laughing, coughing and wiping her eyes. “Sorry.”

“As I was saying,” Lucien continued in an imperious tone of voice, “we must present a unified front. It’s good you’ve returned, Henry, because by accompanying us to London, we can prove that everything is above board in our family and that there is nothing scandalous afoot. However, once we arrive, we must be very, very careful not to court any more scandal. All of the eyes of the ton will be upon us, and we cannot make one wrong move. For Leah. And for both our families.”

Both of them nodded, and Lucien was pleased to see that they both looked deadly serious.

“And perhaps,” he added, after a moment of contemplation, “if we play our cards right, we can even turn the current attention on us into something productive.”

“In fact,” Henry said slowly, “I have an idea how I can help.”