Tamed by her Duke (Seductive Mysteries #4)

Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

D espite the unyielding temptation to never leave her bed again—it was so lovely and soft and warm, and nobody could see her or look at cheeks that would likely never stop blazing—Grace went down to breakfast.

Maybe if she pretended that she wasn’t embarrassed then she would magically, somehow, not be embarrassed?

Grace rolled her eyes at herself. No, that lie was simply too implausible to stand. Maybe it was like pulling out a splinter—you could do it straight away and it would hurt, or you could delay and then it would fester, and you’d still have to pull it out anyway, only now it would hurt far more.

Yes. That explanation suited her situation—and her mood.

Also, she was very hungry. Apparently traipsing about and sobbing in the dark built an appetite.

She was hungry enough, in fact, that her stomach didn’t even protest (aside from a single, dramatic swoop) when her husband entered the breakfast room.

Grace steeled herself.

“Good morning,” she said cautiously.

“Mornin’,” Caleb grunted.

And then…nothing.

Grace ate three kippers, some pickled cod on toast, some marmalade on a different piece of toast, and two cups of tea.

And still. Nothing.

Mr. O’Mailey entered. Grace had had little to do with the stern-faced butler, compared to his wife or Mrs. Bradley. But Mrs. O’Mailey’s face always softened, just a touch, when she spoke about her husband, and that was enough for Grace to feel a note of fondness for the man.

“Sunday papers, up from London, Yer Grace,” the butler said, presenting the ironed pages.

Grace paused, a forkful of eggs halfway to her mouth.

It took two days, she’d learned, for the papers to arrive by post from London. If the Sunday papers were here, that meant today was Tuesday.

And if today was Tuesday, it meant that it had been two weeks, exactly, since her husband had made his bargain with her about their…relations.

Her eyes flew to his. He was already watching her, but his expression was inscrutable.

‘Thank ye, O’Mailey,” he said, turning his eyes to the newsprint after an unending moment.

And then he just read the paper quietly until Grace’s nerves frayed and she left the room to pace and fume in the privacy of her own bedchamber.

“I should tell him,” she said around noon, not necessarily sure which thing she intended to tell her husband about.

There was, after all, that splinter, still festering. She really probably ought to tell him why he’d found her screaming at the edge of a cliff the night before.

But the idea of saying to him, Oh, Caleb, by the by, do you recall that gossip about how I was presumed dead for several years only to have been found alive, just kidnapped? Yes, it was in the mill we saw last evening. You probably gathered this from the to-do in the tavern yesterday, but just to confirm! Yes, that was me made her want to cast up her accounts.

There was also the bit about her virtue. That was worse, somehow.

Ah, yes, Caleb, furthermore, do you recall how my father tossed me in your lap like a sack of spoilt grain because my reputation was ruined? Alas, that was unfounded! I am yet a maiden! Surprise!

“I am never, ever telling him,” she said around two o’clock, pressing her face into the pillow so hard the words were inaudible.

“But won’t he know ?” she wondered at half three. This applied both to the abduction, as he was not a stupid man, and to the maidenhood bit. She’d always heard that there were ways for men to know such things, but she didn’t know if those tales were true or not. They seemed, somehow, both probable and improbable.

She managed to dither long enough about confiding in her husband that she made it past teatime before she started fretting about the act itself.

She did have something of a better education in such matters than most well-bred young women. She knew that the gentleman put his, ah, personal parts inside the lady.

But certainly, what she’d witnessed between farm animals (far more times than she cared to recall) wasn’t precisely the same as between a man and his wife?

And those frankly horrifying images aside, she’d felt a certain, um, firmness about her husband’s lap when she’d sat upon it in the carriage, however briefly. That had to be a mistaken impression due to her skirts and his plaid and all that, hadn’t it? Surely the whole act was a bit more…modest.

“I’m sure it will be fine,” she reasoned as she dressed for dinner. “Plenty of people have done it. That’s how you get babies. Lots of people have babies.”

This line of thinking, unfortunately, carried her to considering some of the stodgier people she knew who had managed to produce heirs, so she very quickly desisted in thinking about it before she could imagine something she’d never be able to forget.

When she went down to supper, she told herself that she was going to be brave and not ridiculous. Caleb hadn’t hurt her yet. It would be fine. It would be just fine .

Alas, this turned out to be another splinter.

“I cannot believe,” she seethed into her soup, upsettingly aware that she’d done quite a bit of talking to herself that day, “that this Scottish lout is doing this to me again .”

Because, again, Caleb had not come to dinner. And when she stormed back up to her bedchamber, he did not come to her there, either.

The only difference between this and her wedding night, she decided, was that tonight, it took her much less time to grow sufficiently furious to track down her husband.

And this time she remembered to put on a dressing gown before she stomped out of her room.

She found him— of course —in his study.

She didn’t bother with pleasantries; they were, she now knew, entirely lost on Caleb, and if she didn’t speak quickly, she’d lose her nerve.

“Why?” she asked, her voice shaking only the tiniest bit. “You know what day it is—I know you know. So why are you doing this?”

When he looked up—unhurriedly, as if determined not to give in to petty demands, no matter who gave them—he looked weary. This was, she supposed, fair enough. He, too, had spent last night traipsing about in the cold. And unlike her, he had, presumably, been awake for all of it.

Still, that look did sting. Men were meant to like having relations, weren’t they? And yet he persisted in putting her off. She knew he hadn’t chosen her, but was she really so unappealing?

“It’s fine, Grace,” he said, his voice, as always, catching in a rumble on the R in her name. “Go back to bed.”

She did not go back to bed. She walked further into the room. Enough was enough.

“You said two weeks,” she insisted, her chest rising and falling rapidly with her breaths. “It’s been two weeks.”

He let out a furious snarl. The sound made her gulp, but she did not retreat.

“Jesus Christ, Grace,” he said, shoving back from his desk with enough force that he nearly toppled the chair. “Honestly, what do ye take me for?”

That was the problem, wasn’t it? She didn’t know. She didn’t know where she stood or why this deadline had seemingly been delayed anew.

She was spared from answering, however, because Caleb was evidently not finished.

“Do ye really think I’m the kind of monster who would force ye to my bed when ye’re afraid of me?”

Now, she frowned.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said, nonplussed and not a little annoyed. “I already told you that.”

“No?” The word was biting, a challenge. “Then why are ye skulkin’ around, hiding things that trouble ye so wretchedly that it sends ye prowlin’ in the night—every night? I hear ye movin’ about, Grace; I know ye’re too unsettled to even sleep in the next room.”

“What? Yes, I—that’s not about you . You know that!”

She stood her ground even when he surged forward, his face thunderous.

“Do I know that, Grace? Here’s what I know. I know yer father was keen to get rid of ye because ye’d sullied yer reputation. Now I know ye’re askin’ about some to do with a toff and a girl and a mill. Is that him, then?”

Grace’s anger was still there, as was her wounded pride, but those feelings were buried under heaps and heaps of confusion.

“Because—mark me, Grace—I’ll not send ye back to him. I daenae care about your past. I made that clear when I married ye, reputation be damned. But ye are mine now, do ye hear me? My wife. It’s nae concern of mine if he wasted his chance, left ye untouched—left ye unwed , even after ruinin’ ye.”

Grace felt rather as though she was in some sort of play where she didn’t know the lines, one where she expected to find herself in a tragedy only to realize it had been a comedy all along.

“I—” She shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He looked disappointed, angry. “If ye are so determined to lie to me, I daenae know what else to say.”

And then, in a gesture clearly born of frustration, he threw up his hands. There was no violence to it.

And yet, unable to stop herself, Grace flinched.

Caleb grew very, very still. His expression was unlike anything she’d ever seen before.

He didn’t speak at once, but when he did, his voice was low and deadly calm.

“Who struck ye, Grace? Who did harm to ye, to make you react like that? Tell me, and I will kill him.”

He wasn’t blustering, didn’t speak from temper. The words were a promise to do swift, dispassionate violence in her honor, to avenge any wrong done against her.

His gaze burned with its intensity and somehow this made Grace finally realize what piece had been missing, why they seemed destined to misunderstand one another so desperately.

“Caleb,” she said carefully, testing the words as she spoke them. “Do you mean to say that you don’t know why my reputation was sullied?”

Incredulity flickered across his features, like he could not believe that she’d chosen this moment to ask that particular question, but he gave his head a sharp shake.

“I dinnae care about the specifics,” he said, done dripping with disdain. “I was given the impression that there was some question about your virtue, though I know now that wasn’t true. I assumed it was some sort of the usual English shite. Found kissin’ some man, dallyin’ too long on a veranda, exchangin’ letters when you oughtn’t.”

There was distinct irony that this man—the one who had been far more intimate with her person than any other—seemed to have some sort of certain knowledge about her virtue, but that, Grace decided, was a matter for another day.

Because he didn’t know . He didn’t know about any of it.

A month ago—maybe even a week ago—the idea would have held undeniable appeal. Now, however, the idea that this argument was caused by something so obvious as a misunderstanding felt laughably idiotic.

“No,” she said. “My reputation was ruined because for three years I was abducted and presumed dead, and when I turned up, very much alive, the ton assumed I must have been sullied during that time.”

It did sound utterly absurd when laid out like that, so, really, Grace did not blame her husband for looking absolutely gob smacked.

“What?” he asked, sounding almost as though he doubted his own ears. It did not suit him; he was not the kind of man who second guessed himself.

And so, with a sigh, she told him everything.

She told him how Dowling had snatched her, dragged her away from a ball. She told him how she’d been bound and tossed in a carriage, carried north to the dubious care of the wretched Packards. She explained the parts she only knew secondhand—how the late Duke of Hawkins had hanged for her supposed murder, but how Diana had never believed the matter to be truly settled. She covered how Diana had uncovered Dowling’s duplicity, how Emily had, in turn, learned that the dowager countess had been behind the plot.

She told him of her dropped handkerchief, and her agonizing hope that someone would find it. And then she told him how someone did—how her brother and Frances had come to save her. She told him how excitement over her miraculous return had turned to pity, then scorn, as far as Society had been concerned.

“My father’s a politician,” she said with a shrug. They’d both sat down at some point in the telling. “Reputation is his life. So, he decided I should be married off, found you, and shipped me up here—where, as it turns out, I’d been all along.”

The doubt had been quick to leave Caleb’s expression, replaced by anger and not a bit of incredulity.

“The mill,” he said. “That’s the same bloody mill.”

It wasn’t really a question. Grace shrugged a shoulder.

“And so when you were asking that chatty fellow about it all…?”

“I mainly wanted to know what happened to my abductors, to start,” she confessed. “That’s what troubles me most, in the dreams, you see—I dream I’m back there. I thought maybe if I learned what had happened to them, I’d know I was safe. But then I learned that someone is trying to sell the place—some man, some lord.”

Caleb frowned at the implications of this. Once he had all the information, he was sharp indeed.

“And the man who took ye is dead,” he said, sounding grimly satisfied by this. “And the other one’s a woman—and locked up.”

“And her son, who inherited it all, married my dear friend, so there’s little chance I’d not have heard of it, were he trying to sell it off,” she confirmed.

And then she added the part that had been keeping her up in the night, the part that had led her to walk halfway to the village while asleep, in bare feet and her nightgown.

“Which means,” she said grimly, “that we haven’t got the full story. Someone else is involved.”