My Fair Duchess (A Once Upon A Rogue Novel Book 1) (2 page)

Alexander repeated the oath, coldness gripping him and burrowing into his bones.

Moments later, his throat burned, and he could not stop the tears of happiness and relief that rolled down his face as he cradled his healthy son in his arms.

Then in a faint, but happy voice Camilla called out to him. “Alex, come to me,” Camilla murmured, gazing at him with shining eyes and raising a willowy arm to beckon him. He froze where he stood and curled his fingers tighter around his swaddled son, desperate to hold onto the joy of seconds ago, and yet the elation slipped away when realizing the promise he had made to God.

That vow had saved his wife and child. As much as he wanted to tell Camilla of it now, as her forehead wrinkled and uncertainty filled her eyes, fear stilled his tongue. What if he told her, and then she died? Or the babe died?

“You’ve done well, Camilla,” he said in a cool tone. The words felt ripped from his gut. Inside he throbbed, raw and broken.

He handed the babe to Jane, and then turned on his heel and quit the room. At the stairs, he gripped the banister for support as he summoned the butler and then gave the orders to remove his belongings from the bedchamber he had shared with Camilla since the day they had married.

As he feared, as soon as Camilla was able to, she came to him, desperate and pleading for explanations. Her words seared his heart and branded him with misery. He trembled every time he sent her away from him, and her broken-hearted sobs rang through the halls. The pain that stole her smile and the gleam that had once filled her eyes made him fear for her and for them, but the dreams that dogged him of her death or their son’s death should the vow be broken frightened him more. Sleeplessness plagued him, and he took to creeping into his son’s nursery, where he would send the nanny away and rock his boy until the wee hours of the morning, pouring all his love into his child.

Days slid into months that turned to the first year and then the second. As his bond with Camilla weakened, his tie to his heir strengthened. Laughter filled Waverly House, but it was only the child’s laughter and Alexander’s. It seemed to him, the closer he became to his child and the more attention he lavished on him, the larger the wall became between him and Camilla until she reminded him of an angry queen reigning in her mountainous tower of ice. Yet, it was his fault she was there with no hope of rescue.

The night she quit coming to his bedchamber, Alexander thanked God and prayed she would now turn the love he knew was in her to their son, whom she seemed to blame for Alexander’s abandonment. He awoke in the morning, and when the nanny brought Colin to Alexander, he decided to carry his son with him to break his fast, in hopes that Camilla would want to hold him. As he entered the room with Colin, she did not smile. Her lips thinned with obvious anger as she excused herself, and he was caught between the wish to cry and the urge to rage at her.

Still, his fingers burned to hold her hand and itched to caress the gentle slope of her cheekbone. Eventually, his skin became cold. His fingers curiously numb. Then one day, sitting across from him at dinner in the silent dining room, Camilla looked at him and he recoiled at the sharp thorns of revenge shining in her eyes.

The following week the Season began, and he dutifully escorted her to the first ball. Knots of tension made his shoulders ache as they walked down the stairwell, side by side, so close yet a thousand ballrooms apart. After they were announced, she turned to him and he prepared himself to decline her request to dance.

She raised one eyebrow, her lips curling into a thinly veiled smile of contempt. “Quit cringing, Alexander. You may go to the card room. My dances are all taken, I assure you.”

Within moments, she twirled onto the dance floor, first with one gentleman and then another and another until the night faded near to morning. Alexander stood in the shadows, leaning against a column and never moving, aware of the curious looks people cast his way. He was helplessly sure his wife was trying to hurt him, and he silently started to pray she would finally turn all her wrath at how he had changed to him and begin to love the child she had longed for…and for whom she had almost died.

St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, England

The summer of 1812

The dinghy creaked and dipped to the right as Colin leaned back against the knotted wood and kicked his boots up on the middle bench. Crickets chirped a pleasant sound that tickled his inner ears.

“Watch it,” Philip de Vere, Viscount Rhetford snapped, gripping the sides of the rocking boat.

Colin chuckled at the pinched sound of his best friend’s voice. “You really weren’t joking when you said you don’t care for the water, were you?”

Rhetford flashed a pained grin from his seat on the other side of the dinghy. “You’re clever. I see now why you’re at the top of our class.”

Colin shot him a grin in return and eased into a sitting position before carefully placing his hands on either side of the small boat. “Remember last week when you tricked me into drinking vinegar?”

Rhetford laughed. “How could I forget? Your face turned the most hilarious shade of pea green.”

“Yes.” Colin purposely eyed the water. “I did say I would be sure to pay you back when you least expected it, remember?”

“Don’t even think of it,” Rhetford growled. His dark eyes had grown wide.

Colin snickered. “Oh, I’m thinking of it. Would it bother you if I did this?” Ever so gently, he rocked the boat until the water lapped with a soft slap against the hull.

Rhetford’s pitiful groan caused Colin to burst into laughter, but he also stopped shifting the boat. It was one thing to tease his friend, and it was quite another to be cruel. After a moment, the sound of the water sloshing against the boat died away to be replaced with the more distant notes of orchestra music flowing out the open terrace doors, across the wide expanse of meticulously manicured gardens, and down the rolling hill to the lake. It always amazed Colin how far music carried in the silence of the countryside when there was no other noise to compete with the beautiful melody. The soft notes seemed to carry even farther in the warm summer air, but that was preposterous.

Colin sighed, welcoming a rare peace, until a burst of feminine laughter filled the starry night. He cocked his head toward the boathouse where his mother’s drunken tittering had come from. Under the glow of the lights his father had recently had installed, his mother stood with her arms around the neck of her latest lover, the Marquess of Farnsworth. Colin’s gut clenched as he stared at Farnsworth, who apparently had captivated his mother’s attention but would certainly never have her love, since she was devoid of the emotion. Farnsworth had his hands resting on Colin’s mother’s hips, and Colin narrowed his eyes. His nostrils flared, and a rattle of disgust filled his throat. He swallowed down the useless emotion.

“Say―” Rhetford’s voice was like a horn in Colin’s ears.

He jerked and cut his gaze to his friend. “Keep your voice down. I’d hate to interrupt the lovers’ tryst.”

Rhetford frowned. The pucker on his smooth young skin was perfectly visible in the bright moonlight. “Isn’t that your mother?”

“Yes,” Colin said, striving to keep any emotion out of his voice even as his gaze trailed back to his mother just in time to see her and her lover scurry inside the dark boathouse. The door clicked shut. No light came from within, but that didn’t surprise Colin. His mother was twisted and liked to pretend to hide her affairs, though everyone knew of them. What Colin would not give to row to the boathouse, throw open the door, and drag his mother back to the house and to his father’s side where she belonged. Yet that would cause a scene that would only serve to further humiliate his father, and Colin would never want to do that.

Sickened, he looked away and into the dark water. He knew better than to hope his father would appear and separate the lovers. Colin suspected his father was too afraid he’d drive his duchess completely away if he demanded she stop her affairs. Colin growled deep within but forced the sound to silence, though he could not control the muscles of his shoulders, which tightened considerably. He had not wanted a seventeenth birthday celebration, because he’d known it would provide the perfect opportunity for his mother to slip away and further torture his father with her continued dalliances. The only consolation, though it bothered him to think of it as so, was that his birth had left her barren and there would never be a worry of a child from one of her dalliances. Colin scrubbed a hand across his face. He should not have agreed to this party, but his father had insisted and had seemed briefly happy while planning it with Colin’s aunt.

As wood creaked and the boat rocked, Colin remembered he was not alone. He glanced across the space at Rhetford. What must he think? “I did warn you when you accepted my father’s invitation to this celebration that you needed to be prepared for anything.”

“That you did,” Rhetford echoed with a note of disbelief, his words a hushed whisper. “Is that why you didn’t want me to come? Because you were worried I might see your mother and her lover?”

“Hardly. That”―he waved his hand toward the boathouse―“is nothing. You can see my mother with a lover on any given visit to this house when there are men besides my father in residence. What concerns me is that she may try to slip away with
you
.”

“I’d never do such a thing,” Rhetford murmured, his face turning the same shade of red as his hair.

No. Rhetford would not, and that was one of the reasons Colin especially liked and trusted him. His friend was one of the few truly good people he knew. Bitterness clogged his throat, but he cleared it and leaned back against the wood once more to rest his head in his interlocked fingers. He looked up at the bright stars. It would be nice to recapture that fleeting moment of peace he had felt before his mother had appeared, but the prospect was doubtful at best.

“Scarsdale was the last friend I brought here, and as you well know, he departed no longer a friend.”

“I gathered there had been a falling out when you refused to speak to him at school, but when I asked him what had happened he would not say, and well, you know what happened when I asked you.”

“Sorry about that,” Colin immediately replied, remembering how Rhetford had broached the subject of Colin not speaking to their classmate. Colin had snapped and told Rhetoford that if he ever mentioned Scarsdale’s name to him again, Colin wouldn’t speak to Rhetford anymore, either. “Now that you know, I expect you to take the secret to your grave.”

“Of course,” Rhetford said. “But I think I should point out that I would never sleep with your mother. She is married for one. Your mother, for another. And most importantly, I don’t love her.”

Colin sat up, the boat swaying as he did and leaned against his knees. “By God, you are a dreamer. I wish I could be like you, but in my world, love has nothing to do with sex, or marriage for that matter, which is precisely why I’ll never bother to find it. My father is miserable because he loves my mother and she could care less about him. I’d rather be an eternal bachelor and blissfully happy.”

Rhetford snorted while plunking his booted feet on the bench between them. “My parents love each other and are incredibly happy when my mother isn’t harping. Someday I’ll marry and find a wife who loves me as much as my mother adores my father. The only difference is I’ll have plenty of blunt so I won’t have to listen to any harping.”

“Really?” Colin quirked an eyebrow. “Is your father’s land now profitable?” Rhetford had confided several months ago that bugs plagued their land. The infestation combined with too much rain had hurt their holding’s worth.

“Father has a plan. When I graduate, I’m going home to help him institute it. It’s my dream.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” Colin said, meaning it. The only dream he had was not to end up like his father, at the mercy of a wicked woman.

In the distance, Lady Farnsworth, his mother’s archenemy, and the wife of the man currently bedding his mother, appeared at the edge of the lake embankment. Even with the distance separating them, Colin could make out her green silk gown fluttering gently behind her in the summer breeze. She raised a long slender arm and waved.

Colin grasped his oar, angled it against the side, and slid it into the water where it dipped beneath the dark surface with a swoosh and a ripple. Rhetford sat up from his reclined position and grabbed his oar. “Are we headed back to the celebration now?”

“You are,” Colin said. “I have a prior engagement.” Lady Farnsworth had passed him a note after dinner tonight expressing a wish to see him in private to give him a present. He knew all about her idea of a gift. The idea of bedding Lady Farnsworth tonight did not excite him as it had the first time, however. She was out for revenge, and he was her chosen instrument. The lady was foolish to think his mother would care, but who was he to point it out again. He’d explained this already several months ago after learning what she was up to. He no longer got a bitter taste in his mouth at the memory of her confessing that she’d used him.