The Dissolute Duke(14)

It came in the way his fingers held her to the dance even as she tried to pull away, and in the quiet caress of his skin over hers.

Memory shattered sense and the salon dimmed into nothingness; the feel of his hands upon her nakedness, the smell of brandy and deceit and a wedding quick and harrowing in that small chapel.

Even the minister had not met her eye as he said the words, ‘To have and to hold from this day forward …’

Taylen Ellesmere had stayed less than a few hours.

Her husband. A different and harder man from the one who had left her and now back for a legitimate heir. She wanted to slap him across his cheek in the middle of the ballroom and he knew it. It took all of her will not to.

‘If there wasn’t a male left in Christendom save for you, I still would not—’

He broke over her anger.

‘I will gift you the sole use of the Alderworth London town house on the birth of our first son and pay you a stipend that will keep you independently wealthy in fine style.’

Blackmail and bribery now. She shook her head against such a promise, but did not speak.

‘One heir and then the freedom to do whatever you want for the rest of your life. A safe haven. The power of independence and autonomy. One heir whom you shall have the right as a mother to raise until he is ten. Eton should see to the rest.’

‘And if the child is a girl?’

‘Then I will dissolve all contracts and allow you what I offer regardless. I would not tie you to such a bargain for ever should you in good faith produce only a female Ellesmere.’

She frowned, barely believing the words she was hearing. ‘There are other women here who would jump at your offer, your Grace, if you obtained a divorce and remarried.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why?’

‘Salvation.’ He gave no other explanation as he smiled at her, the deep dimple in his right cheek caught in the light. So very beautiful.

Lucinda felt the muscles inside her clench.

Freedom for the use of her body? He had had his fill once and she was no longer young. The very memory of it all took her breath away.

‘I will not rape you if that is what you are thinking.’

‘A mutual consent may never happen, your Grace.’ She put as much disdain into the words as she could manage.

‘I stake all my gold on the fact that it will.’ His voice was overlaid with a certainty that was worrying.

Could she do it? Play the whore to a husband she could not trust and sell her body for a freedom she had never had? The girl she had been almost three years ago now would never have considered such a monstrous proposition, but the woman she had become did.

‘I want it in writing. I want a hundred pounds for every time I lie with you and a hundred more for every month it takes to become pregnant. No one must know of this bargain of ours, however, and in public you will only sing my praises. Do you understand? I shall not be the subject of any scorn whatsoever, for if my brothers ever found out exactly what you have proposed …’ She could not continue.

‘They would offer more threats.’ He said this not as a question but as a truth. ‘However, I would like to add one more condition of my own. For the conception of an heir I would require the whole night in my bed, at a time of your choosing. No rushed affair. I wish to lie in the moonlight and know your body as well as you know it yourself. Hedonistic and unhurried.’

She turned her face away so that he would not see what she imagined might be there—horror vying with avidity. The muscles deep inside throbbed in a promise that was like the echo of memory. She would not show him the hurt or the anger or the plain recognition of the choking shame she had lived with since he had gone.

She would tell him none of it until she could take the papers for the town house and fashion a separate existence.

Salvation, he had said. Perhaps it would be hers as well, this unexpected departure from being beholden to her brothers’ generosity and benevolence. The gossip that had never died down as she thought it would, but had followed her with every step that she took.

The forgotten wife. The abandoned bride. The willful Wellingham sister whose reckless antics had finally caught up with her.

‘My carriage will collect you the day after tomorrow from Wellingham House and bring you up to my seat. It would be an early departure so you would need to make sure that you are ready when it arrives.’

She shook her head, sense returning in the indifferent way he gave her instruction, like a Lord might order his valet to set out his clothes. ‘My brothers will stop me.’

‘Then it is up to you to persuade them otherwise. But know that we are married in the face of God for ever. I have given you my terms of agreement and I would never consent to a divorce.’

When the music stopped he escorted her back to her place near the pillar and into the company of Posy.

‘I shall expect you to be ready by nine o’clock on Thursday with any luggage you require. I will join you later on the Northern Road.’

Without further word, he left.

He had done it. He had struck the bargain that he needed with less difficulty than he might have imagined. The line of the Ellesmeres of Alderworth would be saved.

Tay breathed in hard even as he walked through the crowd, wondering why it was he felt so damned uncertain. His wife still wore the ring he had given her, he noticed. The rest of her fingers were bare. The scar on the back of her hand was faded now, but under the light from the chandeliers he had still been able to see it. The carriage accident had left marks inside and out. Shaking his head, he cursed.

She was a hundred times more beautiful than she had once been. He remembered her eyes to be darker, but they were the blue of the early springtime sky, bright with promise. Her curves had matured as well, and her skin was still silky smooth and pale. He brought the edges of his jacket further around his body, angry at the reaction she so carelessly extorted from him.

Looking back from the doorway, he tried to find her in the crowd and there she was, taller than most of the other women present and graceful. Her bones were small, the thinness in her arms giving the impression of a dancer. The dark-blue gown she wore with a froth of lace at the neckline emphasised the colour in her eyes.

‘Hell.’ He swore and as if on cue Jonathon Wigmore, the Earl of St Ives, joined him.

‘Is it the swarm of admirers around your wife you do not like, Alderworth? You might need to get used to that, for since her return to London last year every man with any sense has courted her. Lord Edmund Coleridge, of all the swains, has been the most constant fixture. She allows him more of her time than any other. We all thought you were gone, you see.’

‘So you were amongst her ranks of admirers, too?’

‘Indeed I was, though with little success, I might add. Her brothers are ruthless in the protection of their sister.’

For the first time since arriving back in England Tay smiled and meant it. He had something to thank Asher, Taris and Cristo Wellingham for, after all.

‘There was always something damn fine about Lucinda Wellingham. I could never understand why you left when you did.’

‘I was twenty-five and foolish.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I am older and wiser.’

The first notes of the next dance made it hard to hear and Tay watched as his wife was handed into a quadrille by Coleridge, the look on his face suggesting that he was escorting a rare and valued treasure. He looked away as her hand rested upon his shoulder and she allowed him a closeness that was improper.

Deceit came in a beautiful package with every appearance of veracity. He recalled his entrapment by the Wellinghams with an anger that was as raw as it had been all those years before.

Turning, he left the house and hailed a hansom carriage for he had not bothered with his own. Habit, he supposed, and the habitual saving of pennies even though he could now afford any number of carriages that he wished. Sitting back on the seat, he closed his eyes, the quiet noise of the hooves of the horses echoing in the street.

His wife was beautiful. But it was something else that he saw in her pale-blue eyes. Sorrow lingered there now, the sort of sorrow that had been the hallmark of his childhood: fear overlaid with caution. It did not suit her, this new wariness, this vigilant and all-encompassing apprehension.

Breathing out hard, he cursed the Wellingham brothers their heavy-handedness, but at least, according to Jonathon Wigmore, they had kept Lucinda safe. Tay knew if he was to have any chance of successfully taking his wife to his own estate he would need to get one of them, even begrudgingly, upon his side.

Taris was the one he would target. The middle brother would not grab him in a headlock and try to pummel the daylights out of him with his failing sight and he was tired of defending himself physically every time he came into their company.

A group of women standing on a street corner beckoned to him through the window, the sort of women who had been two a penny in the gold-mining towns of Georgia. Good women some of them, with hard-luck stories almost the same as his own. There was not much to separate success from ill fortune and he had never been a man to judge another’s way of dealing with the varied hands that life dealt.

He had always felt alone. Right from the first moment of perceiving that his parents saw him as a nuisance rather than a blessing and had sent him off to anyone who would have him, little care taken in making certain of the reliability and soundness of their protection. He would never bring his own children up the way his parents had him. He would love them and cherish and honour them.