Ice Cold Duke (Frigid Dukes #2)

Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

E mery blinked, surprised by the sudden change. She felt disoriented and thrown, as if she didn’t fully understand what was happening. One second, it had seemed as if the Duke was about to kiss her, and then, he’d released her, adopted a strangely amused tone of voice, and asked her what other dances she needed help with.

It’s not as if he’s going to give me a full lesson right here, is it? It’s very late!

At that exact moment, the clock over the mantle struck noon, and both of them jumped.

“It’s late,” he said, looking down at her with the same intensity that she had seen in his eyes when he’d come into her room and told her they needed to spend more time together during the Season--and then could live apart. She hadn’t understood his look then, and she wasn’t sure she understood it now, either.

“Y-yes,” she stammered. “Too late to keep dancing?”

He shrugged, and from the way his eyes lingered on her, she felt as if he didn’t want the night to end just yet. “I want you to feel confident for tomorrow,” he said at last.

“We won’t be dancing tomorrow though, will we?”

“No. But there won’t be much time to practice in London. Our schedule is already very busy. Henry’s rumors must be working, because we are receiving more invitations than I have ever received. The ton is eager to meet you.”

She laughed, a little dazed at the thought. “They wouldn’t if they’d met. Maybe I should thank my parents for hiding me away: it made me a bit of a mystery.”

“Let’s not thank them for that,” he said, his expression clouding. “I’m still angry at them for it, if we are being honest.”

This was so touching that she didn’t know what to say, and when she was silent, he smiled at her and held out his hand. “Shall we practice the cotillion?” he asked.

“Alright then,” she said, taking his outstretched hand. “If you insist.”

The steps in the cotillion were harder than those in the waltz, but she had also practiced this one many more times. It was one of the standard dances her own dancing instructor had gone over many times with her when she was growing up. Still, it had been years since she’d danced it, and as they began, the Duke immediately engaged her in conversation.

“You must practice talking during it,” he explained. “That’s how it will be in London. No one stays silent during a cotillion. It would be too boring, otherwise, as everyone is sick of the cotillion.”

“Well if everyone is sick of it, why do they keep doing it?” she asked, then she answered her own question. “Ahh yes, because it is tradition.”

“Tradition is very important,” the Duke said, moving away from her just as she also moved away from him.

“Tradition is overrated she said,” she said, as they came back together. “But I suppose that is why you and I are so unbelievable as a love match: you believe we should stick to the old ways, and I believe we should create new ones.”

She was testing him, she knew: she wanted to see how he would react to her mentioning a love match after she was so sure he had tried to kiss her. But if she’d been expecting this to elicit some kind of reaction, she was disappointed. The Duke remained calm and cool as he said, “Hopefully the ton can believe that opposites attract.”

They continued dancing for a little longer in silence, and then Emery remembered she was supposed to be making conversation. Of course, the only kind of conversation she wanted to have was the serious kind. She wasn’t much interested in small talk. And although the Duke had been reticent to discuss himself and his family life in the past, she had a feeling that he would be more open to it now.

“Can I ask you about your childhood?” she asked after a moment. Immediately, and predictably, he stiffened, but then after several more moments of them dancing around each other, he seemed to relax again.

“What exactly do you want to know?” he asked at last.

“There were some things you said to me, in the carriage after the wedding, that I’ve been wondering about,” she said slowly. “You said that your parents had a love match but that it led to damage, that Henry had romanticized it but he hadn’t actually seen the harm it had done.”

The Duke swallowed. “Ahh. So, you want to know what I meant by that?”

“I suppose I do,” she said quietly. “And it might be nice for you to tell me, as well. Maybe… maybe if you don’t tell your friend, or your siblings, about your feelings, maybe you could tell me instead?”

He looked at her sharply, and she smiled softly. “I am your wife, after all.”

He was quiet for a moment, and she was afraid that she had offended him, that he might even yell at her again, like he had in the carriage. But when he spoke again, his tone was soft, even appreciative.

“My parents loved each other very much,” he began. “I’m the eldest by many years, so I was the only one who saw them as they really were. Everyone else heard stories of their love, but I witnessed it. And it truly was a joy to behold. That is, their love was radiant. I could see it in the way they looked at each other, even as a young child. When I was young, that’s how I thought all marriages were, and I was shocked, as I got older, to learn that most marriages are not.”

“So you admired their love?” she clarified.

“As a child, yes, I admired it. I even craved it myself, I suppose. I would imagine my own wedding and my future wife and I thought I would love as much as they loved one another. But as I grew older, I began to see firsthand just how selfish their love made them.”

Emery tilted her head to one side and gave him an inviting look, as if asking him to go on.

“They were very caught up in their emotions,” he said, with a faraway look in their eyes. “They would spend lavishly on one another and then go off on holidays to far-flung places, leaving the castle for weeks at a time. I know it’s normal for the upper classes to not take much of a hand in the rearing of their children, but this was extreme. They wanted nothing to do with us. And especially when the girls were very little, just babies, they would cry and cry for our mother, and she was nowhere to be found. I had to act as a kind of mother to my sisters, and I was barely out of leading strings myself.”

He shook his head, and she could tell, from the flash of anger in his eyes, that this was a difficult story for him to tell. “And that’s not to mention how much they drained our resources by the money they spent together or on one another. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, it wasn’t until I became the Duke that I understood just how much money my parents had wasted. Instead of putting money aside for the girls’ dowries or to help Henry--younger sons, as you know, are often left penniless by their parents--they bought each other expensive gifts and never once thought about their children.”

“I’m so sorry,” Emery murmured. They were still dancing, and she realized, with a jolt of surprise, that she had been so absorbed in his story that she’d completely forgotten to count her steps or even worry about the dance. It had become automatic; instinctive. “I didn’t know all this.”

“No one knows,” he said quietly. “I have told no one, and Henry wouldn’t have known anything about it to tell you.”

“How old were you when they died?” she asked.

“Fourteen. It was a carriage accident, I’m sure Henry has told you. Very tragic, of course. Devastating. I’ll never forget when I heard--and all the servants kept calling me Your Grace and I didn’t know what was happening, because that was my father’s title.” He stopped, swallowed, and then kept going. “So I was mourning my parents, but at the same time, I was also thrust into all this responsibility that I wasn’t ready for. I was just a lad of fourteen and I suddenly was learning that my parents, whom I loved and missed terribly, had bankrupted the estate, and I had to fix it, but I didn’t know how, and meanwhile I also had to act as father to my younger siblings, who were still in desperate need of their parents. It was…”

He trailed off, and she didn’t press him to clarify exactly what it was like to experience such an onslaught of emotions and responsibilities when he was still only a child himself. She could imagine how difficult it had been. And the pain in his eyes was clear enough: it had changed him. Whatever kind of boy he had been before, this experience had turned him into someone else entirely.

Maybe he wasn’t overprotective and controlling before. Maybe he became this because he had to be in order to survive.

“I hadn’t even graduated from Eton,” he said with a hollow laugh. “And that’s what I had to deal with.”

“You must have been angry with them,” she said quietly. “And I’m sure it was confusing to be angry at the people you were also grieving.”

His eyes slid to her, full of surprise. “Yes,” he said. “It was very confusing. I felt like a horrible son for being angry at the people who had died. I felt…”

“Guilty.”

This time, he didn’t speak. He just nodded, and she nodded as well. They had both stopped dancing, she realized. They were standing across from one another, just looking at each other. He looked haggard, she thought. His shoulders were slumped, and there was pain and anger on his face like she’d never seen before.

“You had nothing to feel guilty about,” she said at last. “Your anger was normal. They’d bankrupted the estate, and you were far too young to have had to deal with that.”

“But it wasn’t their fault they died,” he said, shaking his head.

“Of course not.” She reached out and took his hand. To her surprise, he didn’t pull away. “But it’s still natural for you to be angry. In my experience, humans can hold many complex and even contradictory emotions at once. We can mourn people and miss them terribly when they’ve passed, but also be mad at them for leaving us their debt and disorder. We can feel thankful for all they did to raise us, and still feel anger at them for locking us away from the world for years. And we can be furious at them for marrying us against their will, but still have sympathy and care for them once we realize everything they’ve been through.”

He smiled at this. “Is this your way of telling me that you have started to forgive me?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said lightly, “but I do feel that the more I understand you, the more I feel you are not the worst husband a woman could have ended up with.”

“A great compliment indeed,” he said dryly, and she laughed. “Perhaps you are the one who has to learn how to pay a sincere compliment. I had to learn, after all.”

“That’s true.” She pretended to look as if she were contemplating this very seriously. “I told you how selfless I find you--”

“You said I was surprisingly selfless . It wasn’t exactly the most effusive compliment.”

“--so now you must pay me one,” he went on doggedly, and she laughed at the stubborn look on his face.

“Can mine also be backhanded?” she asked with a slight smile, and he rolled his eyes but nodded.

“I suppose it can.”

She thought for a moment, but she didn’t really need to think about it. She knew what she admired about the Duke. “I think you are a very good older brother,” she said. “I didn’t always understand your methods, but now that I know you better, I can see that you are strict because you love your family.”

The Duke said nothing. In fact, he was silent for so long that she started to worry her words had offended him. But at last, he spoke.

“After my parents died, the only way I thought I could save our family was by following all the rules: spending money thriftily, saving as much as possible, raising my younger siblings to be paragons of Society. My parents’ waywardness had nearly ruined us, so I thought that being the opposite was the way to keep everything from falling apart.”

“And you were just a child,” she murmured. “You were overwhelmed. Of course you thought you had to follow all the rules of Society. No one else was helping you or giving you advice, and by following the rules, you had a rulebook, in a way, to follow.”

“I suppose so,” he said, nodding slowly. “By following the rules passionately, my siblings became easier to manage, and the estate slowly started to become solvent again. Everything was working, and after many years, they even began to work smoothly and efficiently, without as much effort on my part. And now that most of our money problems have disappeared, I can anticipate a time when I won’t have to worry all the time about keeping the estate together.”

These words sank into her slowly, comprehension dawning. “Ahh, you mean my dowry? That has helped fix your money problems?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “That was part of it.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t marry sooner, then,” she said, smiling softly. “If it would have solved your money problems.”

He didn’t respond to this, but the way his jaw tightened told her she had hit a nerve.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said. “I only meant that it would have fit into your life philosophy: follow the rules, do one’s duty, save the estate with a large dowry. Marrying is a duke’s duty, isn’t it?”

“You haven’t upset me,” he said. “But now that you know more about my parents, I hope you can understand why I made a pledge never to marry. I knew I didn’t want a love match, and I didn’t want a woman who desired one to find herself in a situation where she was married to a man who couldn’t love her.”

Emery took a long moment to contemplate this . That is why he didn’t want to marry me and part of why he was so furious at Henry . It all made sense now: it wasn’t just that he was angry about being forced to marry a woman he didn’t know or love; part of his anger came from the noble idea that he couldn’t do that to a lady. This realization made her like him more, and she looked up at him with renewed admiration.

Something in her look must have softened him, because he gave her a small smile. “Despite my pledge not to marry, I am glad you are my wife,” he said, and the words were so intimate and so tender that Emery felt her heart flutter.

“Really?” she asked, her throat dry.

He nodded. “And not just because of the dowry, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“Well, I wasn’t before!”

They both laughed, then he sobered. “It is because of how much life you have brought back to the castle,” he said. “And to my family. I’m not a fool. I know that my rigidness has made the castle, and my siblings, a little lifeless over the years. And I’m not too proud to admit your presence has corrected some of my mistakes. And for that I am grateful.”

Her heart in her throat, she smiled up at him, and he paused. For the first time since they had started dancing the cotillion, he stopped, and she stopped with him.

For a moment, it seemed as if she was going to say something. He had that look in his eyes, as if he were on the verge of confession. A storm seemed to be passing through him, and she could see him battling it; battling himself, really.

She opened her mouth to ask him about it, but before she could, he released her. In the silence of the ballroom, he took several steps back. His face once more clouded and became reserved, all the warmth in him dying away at once.

“I should let you get some rest,” he said, his voice hard and cool. “We leave early tomorrow morning.”

“Yes,” she said, a faint feeling of sadness overcoming her. “I suppose I should be off to bed.”

“Goodnight, Duchess,” he said, bowing stiffly. “I shall see you anon.”

He turned and left the ballroom, leaving Emery to stare after him, a hollow feeling filling her up.