Tamed by her Duke (Seductive Mysteries #4)

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

I f she hadn’t taken the table set for one as a message, the long, slow tick of minutes into the supper hour would have made things clear enough.

Her husband was not coming.

She tried to appear unaffected through the soup course—which consisted of an honestly delicious chestnut soup. She didn’t know if the quality of the food spoke to Mrs. Bradley’s professional pride or some affection for Grace (or at least not outright hatred), but she didn’t much care.

She managed to keep her cool during the meat course, though she could only pick at the herbed rabbit that was brought to the table by a footman who refused to make eye contact.

By the time she reached the fish course—perch delicately cooked in lemon parsley sauce—she could not control her anger.

She slammed her fork down on the table as she stood. She nearly sat back down to dab at the spot of sauce she’d left on the clean linen before stopping herself. No, the staff was being rude and cold to her, too—no doubt following their master’s lead.

No, forget social hierarchies or her status as a newcomer—forget all of it. This was downright rudeness. And Grace was sick and tired of it.

Oh, so his high dukeness wasn’t pleased that he had her as a wife? Well, at least he’d had a choice in the matter! She’d seen him that evening, positively swarmed by options. He could have done whatever he wanted. He’d picked her.

Meanwhile, Grace? Grace had never had a choice, not in one bleeding part of it. She hadn’t chosen to be her father’s daughter; she hadn’t chosen to attract Dowling’s attention. She hadn’t asked to be abducted, hadn’t asked to be talked about or picked over like a particularly tasty morsel.

She thought about all the choices she’d never been given as she stormed through her new home—her new home that she had not, of course, chosen for herself—and then she thought about how certain other people, people who did have all those choices, were acting like—like?—

Well, like proper arseholes, she thought sourly. If there was ever a time to use the language she’d overheard during her time away, this was it.

Her head of steam was so built up that she was well prepared to give her new husband a piece of her mind by the time she found him.

“You!” she exclaimed, barging into his study. “You are a rude man!”

She might have been ready to think the oaths, but she was not yet prepared to speak them out loud. She was a lady, after all.

In the moment of surprise before her husband rearranged his features into his usual smirk, he looked…different. Softer, maybe? The look was there and then gone, fast as lightning, but it only stoked Grace’s anger higher.

If he had some way to be different, that meant that being awful was merely another choice that he got to make.

Well, this one she could choose, too. She could be awful, too. Even when it scared her.

“I take it something is amiss, wife,” he drawled in a way that made Grace feel very small.

She refused to be cowed.

“You didn’t come to dinner,” she accused.

His sneer was a knife. “I ate.”

“You are rude,” she said again. “And it is encouraging your staff to be rude. “You have brought me to this new place—which, mind, you didn’t even bother to tell me where this place was—and have simply flitted off. It is intolerable behavior.”

Upon entering the room, Grace had felt that all these complaints were legitimate. The longer her husband looked at her, unspeaking and cruelly amused, however, the longer she felt like a child facing their weary nanny after a tantrum. She was about to either shriek and throw something at him or turn and flee—even she didn’t know which, to be honest—when he finally sighed and gestured to the chair across from his desk.

“Sit.” It was an order. “I think it is high time we clarify some things between us.”

She sat as he crossed from behind the desk to stand in front of it, leaning back against the edge and crossing his legs at the ankles, crossing his arms across his chest. The posture made her hate him a little. She knew this trick. He’d made her sit, then moved to make himself seem bigger. If she moved again, she looked churlish. If she stayed where she was, she had to face his looming form.

She burned, burned with rage. He had all the advantages—every one of them. He was a man. A duke. As her husband, he legally controlled her. They were in his house, with his people. And yet he still played tricks to give himself even more domination over her.

She clenched her fists so hard her nails bit into her palms.

He could play his dirty games if he wanted, but there was one thing that she controlled—how she reacted. She’d die before she’d give him an ounce of satisfaction.

“I married ye for one reason and one reason only,” he said, his voice low in the way of a man who was confident that everyone would stop to listen to him. “I need an heir. Aside from that, I daenae need ye and I daenae want ye. Aside from that, I daenae care what you do. As long as ye don’t get yerself round with another man’s give, you can do as ye please.”

For all her vows about not reacting, Grace could not stop her eyes from growing round at his crude references. She thought she might find blood when she finally unclenched her fists.

“That’s the start and end of our business together,” he continued. “It’s business. Ye’ll have yer allowance and it’ll be generous. Ye’ll have yer freedom, so long as ye return to bed at night to lay back and do yer duty. If ye hate me, fine. If ye want to think of some other man while ye’re at it, fine. As long as it’s my babe in your belly, it’s naught to me. But don’t come nattering on about dinner conversation or niceties. This is nae a romance, like ye English girls are forever sighin’ over. It’s a deal. And so long as ye hold up yer end of the bargain, I daresay we’ll not have much to discuss with one another.”

This was…insupportable. It was egregious! Outrageous! Grace’s education had been top-notch for a woman—as her father liked to brag—and she did not have words for the utter absurdity of what was being presented before her.

Oh, she knew there were businesslike marriages. But ones where the man practically encouraged his wife to be unfaithful, so long as she didn’t find herself increasing? Ones where he didn’t even bother to pretend that he was going to treat her courteously? That was something else entirely.

Grace found that she could no longer simply sit there. She stood, practically shaking with rage. Moving out of her chair brought her too close to her husband by half, the hem of her skirts grazing his boots where they were propped lazily in front of him.

“So you think,” she said, pleased when her voice came out level, “that you can so grievously insult me and then, what? You plan to throw me into your bed like some sort of ancient marauder? You intend to force me?”

She had said it mostly to be cruel, to get something back in this losing game. But part of it had been a test. To his credit, he flinched, though he covered it quickly.

“I’ll not force ye, lass,” he said. His words weren’t soft, but they were firm. And that was something of a condolence—likely the best she was liable to get.

“I’ll not,” he repeated. “Ye…need time to adjust. I accept that.” He was stone. She would never wear him down. “You can have two weeks. After that, you will live up to your end of our arrangement. Do you understand me?”

She did. She understood that she should have fought harder, should never have trusted that her father cared enough about her to check that the man she was to marry wasn’t a brute before he’d signed her life away. She understood that this was a new prison—but that unlike her old prison, this one at least had windows. There would be glimpses of the sun. She would have children. She would have things—and only a person who had never been denied things like clean clothes and warm blankets would pretend that didn’t matter. She would get to write to her friends.

It would be a life in the way she hadn’t had in a long while. Not a perfect life, not a real marriage. But a life.

And part of making that life livable would be holding onto her pride. She’d learned that lesson, too. Sometimes the fight mattered just to fight.

So she didn’t answer. She raised her chin and met his eye.

Yet, just like everything else in the utter farce her life had become, this was a misstep, because she was standing lose, and his face was close to hers, and they’d just been talking about, if not lovemaking, then at least something not entirely unrelated.

And his eyes were so very, very blue. Blue, like the way one imagined the sea should look. Blue, like the deepest night when the moon was full. Deep and dark, with just enough color that you could not look away.

That Grace could not look away.

He was just so big . It was unfashionable to be this big, this broad, but Grace couldn’t envision a world where Caleb cared if his looks were fashionable. He’d been in the military, he’d said. Surely that strength had kept him safe, kept him alive.

Maybe she’d have been better off if that hadn’t happened, but she couldn’t help but be grateful that he hadn’t died in some far-off ditch somewhere. At least for right now, she felt that way.

Her mouth felt dry. She licked her lips. His gaze flickered, just a bit, when she moved, and she couldn’t help but wonder if the two weeks he’d promised her had just vanished with that one simple movement.

She wondered if she was sorry about that.

She kept wondering for half a breath longer. She thought that maybe, just maybe, he leaned toward her.

And then all the things he’d said came back to her?—

Broodmare.

I daenae need ye and I daenae want ye.

Lay back and do yer duty.

--and she stopped wondering.

She stepped back. Then again. She saw that flicker of surprise on his expression, again there and gone.

“I understand,” she said, answering the question he’d long since asked. “I appreciate the clarification. I suppose I shall see you in two weeks.”

She left, knowing that walking away was the only way she’d ever get the final word. At least she had enough freedom, this time around, to do that.

The scream woke Caleb. Leonard, he thought, half frantic, before he remembered no, of course it wasn’t Leonard. It was Grace. The scream cut off as quickly as it started, almost as if his wife, on the other side of the door that connected the duke and duchess’ chambers, had clapped a hand over her mouth.

Probably thought she saw a mouse—or a ghost, he told himself, urging himself to roll over and go back to sleep. She might be bonny, his little English wife, and she might have more spine than he’d initially given her credit for. But that didn’t mean that it was any of his business when she got to jumping at shadows. He didn’t want it to be his business—as he’d told her very explicitly that evening.

But even as he told himself this, even as he said he would regret losing his first good night’s sleep back in his own bed, something pricked at the back of his mind. Something that said this wasn’t right.

Caleb had learned that ignoring that voice was a mistake.

So even as he cursed Grace, women, and the entire country of England, he dragged himself out of bed, threw on a dressing gown so he didn’t freeze important bits off, and crossed the freezing flagstones of his bedchamber. He cursed his English wife for that, too. He wasn’t sure how it was her fault that he’d become such a weak-willed sot that he complained of cold feet while indoors in the spring , but he’d figure it out when it wasn’t the bloody middle of the night.

If he opened the connecting door between their rooms, he’d likely scare her half to death—and he didn’t want to trigger more screaming, not if he ever wanted to get asleep again.

So—again, cursing himself for his tender heart—he went to seek her via the corridor. He’d even knock, that’s how bloody civilized he was.

Except…her door was already open.

“Christ and all the martyrs, Grace,” he muttered. Where in the nine hells had she gone?

He should go back to bed. He should really just go back to bed. He’d learned many things during his time in the army, but one of them was the value of following through on his word, especially when it wasn’t what a junior officer wanted to hear. If he wanted to be taken seriously, his actions needed to follow his words.

Grace, though, was no soldier. And he still had that feeling.

“Should have never married the chit,” he grumbled as he moved through the dark hallways. “Should have told the bleeding English with their bleeding concerns about lineage to go straight to hell. Married a bonny Scots girl.”

Things would have been easier if he’d done that, he thought with longing. Or if he’d just give it all up and died without an heir—that would have shown his father, eh? The successor to the title was currently an eight-year-old who had grown up in Italy with his diplomat father. That would set the late duke to spinning in his grave.

He grumbled all the way through the upstairs corridor. By the time he headed downstairs, his heart was racing in his chest.

Worry. That was this feeling. He resented her for making him feel it. One day. It had taken her one day to do something hairbrained enough to throw his calm, simple life into chaos. One goddamned, pox-ridden, thrice blighted day.

When he found her, he told himself, he was going to give her a piece of his mind. He’d give her the kind of lecture that made her ancestors cringe, ten generations back. At least.

The words died in his throat when he saw her, sitting cross legged on the floor in her nightgown, in the long, nearly empty portrait gallery. She wasn’t wearing the half-sheer thing she’d had on when she’d shown up at his door the night prior. Instead, the simple cotton gown covered her completely, though he knew the thin fabric wouldn’t be enough to keep her warm in this old, stone building. She showed no sign of the temperature bothering her, however. She was staring with a sort of detached curiosity at one of the few ancestors still hanging in place—someone so many generations back that Caleb couldn’t even recall the man’s name.

“What are you doing, lass?” he asked.

It was like he’d jabbed her with a pole. Though she’d been sitting levelly, she toppled, letting out a squeak of surprise that was—Caleb was simply furious to admit it—adorable.

And, that voice deep inside him whispered, it was a very different sound than the one that had woken him. If he’d startled her and she reacted like this, what had made her scream like that ?

She distracted him from this train of thought by puffing up like an outraged little bird, trying to fluff its feathers to seem bigger than it was.

Her dark braid slithered over her shoulder, thick as a rope, as she propped herself up to look back at him, her expression indignant.

“Don’t sneak up on me !” she said, pressing a hand against her chest. “Good Lord, don’t you think this place is unsettling enough without you creeping up on people in the dark?”

It was too absurd, frankly.

“Did ye never consider,” he asked conversationally, “that I couldnae sneak up on ye if ye weren’t creepin’ around the dark yerself?”

She scowled at him. “You said I could do whatever I wanted,” she retorted. “As long as I didn’t bother you. Well, I was just sitting here not bothering you. Therefore, I am well within my rights. Goodnight.”

She was right. It was very irksome.

He didn’t know why he didn’t just leave. She was fine. He knew that now. She was an absolute lunatic, no doubt, sitting here in the dark, looking at dusty old pictures. But she was safe.

He slid down the far wall of the gallery instead until he was seated beside her.

She looked back up at the portrait. Caleb looked at his wife instead. Her nose was a pert little slope, and, from this angle, he could see how her bottom lip poked out farther than the top. She bit it as she looked at the portrait and, like it had in his study when she’d challenged him, it made him wonder what it tasted like.

“What are you doing?” he asked her again.

The sharp cut of her eyes sideways gave her a very different look than she’d held moments before. Where she’d seemed like a virginal innocent, in that simple white gown and with that plait, she now looked like one of the trickster fae, the kind that lured men off paths and into their doom.

“Not bothering you,” she said again, this time more pointedly.

“Lass,” he said tiredly. “Just answer the question, will ye?”

She sighed, as though he was the one being ridiculous.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “And sitting alone in my room seemed like a good way to ensure that I’d never fall back asleep again.”

“So ye…decided to come look at that fellow?” he asked skeptically.

The portrait was one of those wretched pre-Renaissance things, where faces all looked like horrifying, lumpy creature that wished to murder you. Or possibly Caleb’s ancestor was just ugly. Either way, the image was all dark colors and haughty disapproval. The main color in the image came from a massive crucifix. The man was praying in a distinctly judgmental manner.

“This is the kind of thing that helps ye get back to sleep? I have to say, lass, if it is, I’m near certain that’s grounds for annulment.”

Her head pivoted toward him with deliberate slowness.

“Did you just make a joke? ” She couldn’t have sounded more shocked if he’d sprouted wings and flown.

“Ye daenae need to sound so shocked,” he said, oddly put out.

She snorted. It was unladylike and oddly charming.

“Don’t I? Sir, you are many things, but you have not yet revealed yourself to be the soul of wit.”

“I thought ye English lasses were meant to be sweet and demure,” he complained. “I feel I’ve been sold a false bill of goods. Promised roses and gotten thorns or the like.”

“Or the like,” she echoed, looking positively incredulous. “Goodness—is this you trying to be tactful ? You’re worse at it than you are at making jokes.”

“Ye might be more gracious! I’ve taken myself out of my warm, nice bed to come see if ye were all right. And what do I get?”

“The thorns,” she interjected before he could answer his own question. She was starting to look highly pleased with herself.

Well, fair play—she was quick, he’d give her that.

“Just so,” he agreed.

The silence that hung between them next wasn’t the same as the other silences they’d shared. It wasn’t quite comfortable, but it was closer. Grace turned back to the wall of portraits.

“I can’t help but notice,” she said after a long, quiet moment, “that there seem to be some gaps in your gallery.”

She would have been blind not to notice. When he’d taken over the title, Caleb had taken the fifty or so frames and left about four. The spots where they’d hung, some for centuries, were obvious marks in the sun-faded marks they’d left behind, even in the dark.

“Is that really what ye want to discuss?” It was a diversion; he had no interest in ever speaking of his antecedents with his wife. She was here to provide the future of the line. The past was none of her concern. “My lineage?”

He thought, for a heartbeat, that he’d broken the fragile peace between them with the comment, but when she looked at him, her gaze was curious—not combative, like it had been for so much of their acquaintance, nor horribly flat, as it had grown in the instant before she left his study, earlier that evening.

“And if I do?” she asked.

He would puzzle, later, over his response. He should have gotten to his feet and bid her goodnight. But instead, he slid his hand until it was behind her back—not close enough to touch, but close enough that when he leaned on that arm, he was, unquestionably, breathing her air. Her scent was simpler than he might have expected, all clean soap and night air.

She looked at his movement, slow and deliberate, still curious. Then she looked back to his face and just waited.

This was, he would decide later, the moment he really should have known that this little wife of his was dangerous.

At the moment, though, he was lost between a dozen other, far more idiotic impulses. There was the moonlight, shining, making everything seem like it was a dream. There was the late hour. There was the fact—it could not be denied—that it had been a bloody long time since he’d had a woman. There’d not been much chance while he was in the army.

Lust. That’s what he’d say, when he paused to think about it. He’d been driven to idiocy by his own neglected needs, which suddenly seemed very pressing. The lust, the moonlight, and the need for distraction.

“I’d say,” he said at long last, “that there are better ways to spend an evening than staring at long dead men.”

“Is there?” Curious. Still so damned curious.

He let the fingers of his free hand, the one not propping up his weight, creep forward until they just rested against the back of her hand. It was too dim to see now, but there would be delicate blue veins there, fragile and powerful.

“Aye.” His voice was hoarse, more so than usual. “I’d say that two weeks is not so very long a time.”

“No,” she said. He didn’t know if it was agreement or disagreement.

“And that perhaps there might be a way to…prepare.”

Surely, some other man had taken over his body. A different man, a more reckless man. One who hadn’t learned the perils of not thinking before he leapt.

Whatever ghoul had gotten to him had evidently diverted all his considerable restraint to his wife. She scarcely blinked as she regarded him.

“Prepare,” she echoed again.

“Aye.”

He let his fingers trail from her hand to her wrist, then along her forearm. Her skin was so soft. He shouldn’t like it. His body felt otherwise.

Yet, by the time he reached her elbow, he found himself…stopping.

If Caleb was rarely an impulsive man, he was never an indecisive one. He committed to a course of action, then saw it through. He did not hesitate. He did not waver.

Except today. Today, he wavered.

Grace looked down to his hand, then back up to his face. When she breathed, he could feel it ghost against his cheek.

And then her hand was there, cool and slim against his jaw, and Caleb could not think of a single thing more before she pressed her mouth to his.