Tamed by her Duke (Seductive Mysteries #4)

Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

C aleb rubbed at his brow, which did absolutely nothing to dispel the wretched headache brewing behind his eyes. This whole thing was a mess.

He wondered where he’d gone wrong. Obviously, preventing his wife from tumbling to her death had been the right choice. He disliked the idea of Grace with a broken neck more than he cared to admit.

What he should have done, most likely, was taken his lying little wife and put her over his knee until she told whatever truth she was locking up inside. That or pleasure her until she was too limp to do anything but give in to his demands.

Yes, that could have worked. Then he would have his answers and perhaps even have gotten an heir on her in the bargain. Maybe he’d send her back to London for her confinement. She couldn’t drive him mad all the way from London, could she?

To his great irritation, he suspected she could.

“Will ye be taking yer tea up here, Your Grace, or do ye plan to leave it to go cold as well? If so, I’ll save myself the trip.”

Despite her acerbic words, when he glanced up at Mrs. O’Mailey, he found her looking at his—nearly untouched—breakfast and lunch trays with a faint air of concern. Caleb would never call his housekeeper maternal —and he suspected she’d be horrified to hear it, if he did—but she was loyal, and her steadfastness was something he’d come to rely upon, particularly as his family had grown increasingly fractured over the years.

Caleb sighed. He’d spent the morning—and now the early afternoon, it seemed—in his study, accomplishing nothing. His wife likely would have accused him of brooding, if not for the fact that she was avoiding him. This morning, she was the one to have been absent from the breakfast table, prompting Caleb to order a tray up to be eaten at his desk.

Or not eaten, as it happened.

“Save yourself the trouble,” he said, reaching for a cold chicken sandwich. They were finally having some suitably springlike weather, and Mrs. Bradley had prepared a cold luncheon to celebrate. Nothing on the tray would be harmed for having sat out for a few hours.

“Very good, Your Grace.” Mrs. O’Mailey turned to leave, then paused.

This was the kind of thing that never boded well for Caleb.

“Aye?” he demanded, a bit more snappishly than he perhaps ought to have done.

His housekeeper indulged in an arched eyebrow at his tone, then said, with excessive deference (in order to really make her point about having known him since he was a squalling infant), “Might I speak freely, Your Grace?”

He waved her on.

“Yesterday, ye asked me what was wrong with Her Grace. Today, whatever is amiss with her has got ye , too. This thing is catching, it seems, so I hazard that ye best sort it out before it afflicts the entire estate.”

Metaphor aside, Caleb thought, this was not an unfair point. Perhaps whatever was bothering Grace was no real illness to spread by touch or breath, but the lord and lady did set the tone of a place. If they were at odds, it would set the servants on edge. The servants had families, friends, and sweethearts in the village. The poison would spread.

Caleb knew that. What he didn’t know was how to fix it.

“She willnae say what’s amiss,” he complained, feeling like a gossiping fishwife for confiding in his housekeeper, of all people. He decided to blame Grace for this. “Nae—she willnae even say that aught is amiss, never ye mind what’s actually botherin’ her.”

The middle-aged Scotswoman pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Well,” she said, “I’m nae a fancy London lady, ye ken, but as a woman who has been married these many years, I wonder… Do ye need to know what’s troublin’ the lass?”

Yes . Caleb bit the instinctive response.

“I daenae take yer meaning,” he said instead.

“Well.” Her fingers tapped thoughtfully on the back of a chair. “Think like this, mayhap. Did ye know Mr. O’Mailey was married once before?”

Caleb hadn’t ever thought about it—the couple was an institution in his childhood and remained seemingly as reliable as the sun—but no, he hadn’t.

“Was he?”

“Oh, aye.” She waved a hand. “As a young man, some years before I met him. Poor thing got herself a nasty bout of influenza and died. He evidently loved her quite a bit, though I did not learn this until we’d been wed, oh, five or six years.”

“He lied about her?” Caleb asked, not sure he liked where this bit of advice was going. Grace was no young widower; if she was pining after a lost love, that meant the lout hadn’t had ruined her without marrying her, which meant he would be a dead man, just as soon as Caleb got his hands on him. Then he would revert to his original plan of pleasuring her until she forgot any other man’s name.

Mrs. O’Mailey was too polite to call him a dolt, but her exasperated expression suggested that she was not too polite to think him a dolt.

“Not as such. Rather, he just dinnae mention that they’d shared young love until after we’d been wed long enough that I was assured of his affection.” Caleb apparently did not look sufficiently impressed by this wisdom, so she added, “Marriage is long. Let the lass have her secrets for now. It’ll give ye something to talk about when ye’re old and gray like me.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “She’s my wife. She shouldnae have secrets from me .”

Mrs. O’Mailey threw up her hands. “Why do I even try? Nae, tis my own fault for forgetting I’m talking to ye, nae Master Leonard.”

Caleb heard his brother’s name like a knife to the chest. One of the perils of returning home, after so many years fighting abroad, was the reminder of his own ghosts.

Which, he supposed, might have been Mrs. O’Mailey’s point in mentioning Caleb’s beloved brother. Caleb, too, had his secrets—ones he did not intend to share with his wife.

“She was walkin’ in her sleep last night,” he said quietly. “Near fell down the stairs. Could’ve broken her neck.”

The unspoken words hung in the air. He could not wait for time to smooth the rough edges of marital discord. Not when his bride could tumble to her death and rob them of any such future.

“Then,” said Mrs. O’Mailey, “ye need to give her a reason to look forward, not back. Take her somewhere. Distract her. Make her happy.”

This, too, struck like a blow. “That’s nae how it is,” he insisted. “Ours is a Society marriage. Arranged.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. O’Mailey.

“She can find her own amusements,” he added.

“I’m sure she can.”

Another argument sprung to his lips before he realized it was weakening his position, not arguing it. He was a duke, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t need to explain himself to his own bloody housekeeper, even if he had known her all his born days, and even if he knew, from long experience, that when she shot him a knowing look like the one that she now sported, he’d do best not to ignore it.

He returned his attention to his ledgers and steadfastly tried to make even simple sums add up until she left the room.

As afternoon drifted into evening, his frustration did not abate. And so, when he saw Grace scamper past on her way back to her bedchamber, he shot out of his chair and followed her.

“Grace!” he called.

She looked over at him, that polite look on her face. Christ and martyrs, he hated that look.

“Yes?”

“Ye’re going to town with me tomorrow,” he demanded.

She blinked. “I’m--?”

He huffed out a sigh. He understood, at long last, all the cads of London who gamboled about and did everything they could to avoid the altar. Marriage was a bloody battlefield as unsettling as any of the actual battlefields he’d stood upon.

“Will ye,” he said through gritted teeth, “go into town with me tomorrow?”

There was, he supposed, one reward for his half-hearted attempt at politeness: her own drawing-room look faded into a look of astonishment.

“I—yes,” she said, clearly taken aback.

“Good,” he grunted. Then he retreated into his study and slammed the door before he could do anything to make the situation any more snarled and troublesome—and before this headache that refused to abate could outright send him to his grave.