The Ugly Duchess (10 page)

Twelve

H
er husband strode through the library doorway the moment Theo reached the bottom of the stairs. His face was dark with rage—but at the sight of her, it cleared, though his eyes remained troubled.

“Hello,” she said, feeling acutely self-conscious.

He said nothing, just grabbed her hands and walked backwards into the library. He smelled faintly of leather and a high wind.

“You’ve been out for a ride,” she said a short time later, when they stopped kissing for a moment.

“God, I’m mad for you,” he whispered in her ear, ignoring her comment altogether. “But I’m surprised you’re able to walk. We shouldn’t have done it, that last time.”

“I wanted you,” she said against his lips. “I want you now.”

“You smell so sweet, like a daisy.”

“You simply
must
stop calling me that! I insist on being addressed as Theo.”

He had backed her against the wall and a hand was now wrapped around her breast. “I can’t,” he said, rather thickly.

“Why not?”

“Because you may be Theo when we’re at breakfast, or at a play or something, but when I’m holding you like this, you’re my Daisy.” He took her mouth again and Theo melted against him, thoughts fading before the onslaught of his mouth and his hands and the arrogant strength of his body against hers.

“Can’t do this,” James said hoarsely. “You’re too sore. We’re only kissing.” He guided her over to the sofa on the far side of the room and began plucking her hairpins, destroying all of Amélie’s work in seconds. He was unweaving a braid that had taken Amélie a good ten minutes to concoct. “Couldn’t you just leave your hair down when you’re at home?”

Theo giggled. “Can you imagine Cramble’s face if I begin wandering about the house with my hair around my shoulders?”

James’s face loomed over hers, and he kissed her again, hard and dominant. “What if, as your husband,” he growled, “I ordered you to?”

Theo felt a shiver go all the way to her toes. When James got that look, that possessive, tigerlike look, she felt the most embarrassing desire to simply melt into him and do whatever he demanded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, tracing the line of his full bottom lip with her fingers, “but no one can ever dictate how I look or dress again. I made that promise to myself five years ago, when Mama began trying to compensate for my face by embellishing my gowns with frills and ruffles.”

James frowned.

“She can’t bring herself to admit it, but she wanted to make sure that everyone knew I was a girl,” Theo explained.

He had discovered the precariously attached scrap of raspberry silk and pulled it out without further ado. Without a fichu, her bodice showed a great deal of cleavage. “She thought you didn’t look enough like a girl,” he said, sounding stunned. He bent his head and licked a wet, warm path over the curve of her breast.

Then he reared up again. “What if, as your husband, I ordered you to leave off your drawers?”

She laughed at him, loving the way he was testing the limits of his power. “That would depend on how I felt about you at that moment.”

“And how do you feel about me at this moment?” he demanded.

She arched up, just enough so that she could run her tongue along that sweet lower lip of his. “What would
you
do if I ordered you to do something?”

His lips parted, and he took a deep breath. “Whatever you want,” he said, his voice fervent. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Then I’d like you to sit quite still,” she said, twisting about and tumbling off the sofa.

James sat obediently. His eyes were black with excitement. “I am yours to command, my lady.”

“Pull down your breeches,” she said, her blood racing.

Without blinking, James stood up and did exactly as she demanded.

Theo stayed on her knees and pointed back to the sofa. He sat down. His organ seemed, if possible, even bigger than it had the night before. At the very sight of it, a little warning twinge came from Theo’s private place.

“All the time you were kissing me last night,” she said, reaching out to caress him, “all I could think about was what it would be like to kiss
you.
”

“Oh Lord,” James whispered. “I won’t survive it. I won’t.”

“
I
did,” Theo said, throwing him a saucy smile. She bent over and tasted him.

James let out a hoarse sound and Theo dipped her head a little lower, exploring the velvety feeling of him.

It must have been his groan that prevented her hearing the sound of the door opening. Or perhaps it was the dizzying sense of power Theo felt.

But a second later the sound filtered into her head. She leapt to her feet, met the eyes of her father-in-law, and fled in the opposite direction, straight through the closest door, which led into the morning room. She slammed the door and leaned back against it, her heart pounding as if she’d run from an assailant.

She felt sick. The duke had seen . . . He’d seen everything. He’d seen her there, bending over James’s lap.

“Oh God.” Her knees were too weak to support her; she slid down until she was sitting on the floor. Through the door, she heard the rumble of James’s voice as he spoke, but the words were indecipherable. The sound reminded her, with sickening vividness, of how he had been sitting before her, breeches around his ankles, and she buried her face in her hands.

Did it
have
to be the duke? Hadn’t she suffered enough humiliation in the last few days? Would it have been worse, though, if a footman had interrupted them? She could have dismissed a footman. No, she would never turn out a person for being unlucky enough to see her behave like a doxy.

They’d have to retire to the country for the next month. Or year.

The muffled sound changed pitch; her father-in-law was speaking.

Shifting to the side, she stretched up and opened the door slightly. If he was calling her a brazen slut, she might as well know the worst.

But he was laughing.

Laughing!

Her heart thudded a panic-stricken rhythm in her throat. Was laughter better than scorn? Or worse? It felt better. Maybe this sort of thing happened often to newlyweds. After all, she and James could have been caught actually making love. And if she hadn’t been so sore, they probably would have been. Theo turned her ear to the crack of the open door.

“I returned to London because I heard about the ugly duchess business,” the duke was saying. “Thought you’d want me to threaten a few reporters, maybe even shut down one of those scandal rags. But it looks as if you’ve been too busy to worry. Who cares if she’s ugly? Obviously it makes her more grateful, huh? I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw she was servicing you as eagerly as any tavern wench might for tuppence.”

Theo’s head dropped forward onto her knees. What did she expect from the duke? Her mother had declared him a coarse fool years ago, and she was obviously right.

“In fact, it’s
because
she’s ugly,” the duke continued. “You could never get a proper lady on her knees like that—”

“Silence!” James snapped.

Thank God he was saying something, Theo thought numbly.

“I don’t care for your tone,” his father responded, instantly switching to his characteristic angry bluster.

“You are not allowed to
ever
say anything about my wife,” James replied. His voice, in contrast with his father’s, was icy cold, controlled, and yet deeply dangerous.

Theo took a shuddering breath. At least James was defending her.

The duke seemed not to notice the threat in his son’s voice. “I’ll say anything I want!” he bellowed. “I picked the girl out for you, didn’t I?”

“You did not!”

“I did! You didn’t want to marry her, but I expect you’re glad now. I told you, didn’t I? I told you they were all alike in the dark.”

“I’m going to kill you,” James stated. Years of experience with James’s temper told Theo that his self-control was reaching its limit. He hated it when that happened, when his shouting resembled that of his father.

But as the duke’s words—
I
picked the girl out for you, didn’t I?
—came into her consciousness, she stopped thinking about James.
What?

“I may not have had your marriage in mind at the time,” the duke was saying. “I may not have thought of it in precisely that way—”

“While you were embezzling her inheritance!” James roared. With this, Theo realized two things simultaneously: the first was that James’s self-control had finally snapped . . . and the second was the significance of what he had just said. About embezzlement. It couldn’t be true.
Could
it be true?

“I only borrowed from it,” the duke said, sounding pained. “You needn’t cast such an ugly light on it. After all, look what I’ve done for you. Got you a wife so grateful that she’ll do you in the broad daylight, when Cramble might have walked in any moment. I apologized for her looks when I forced you to propose, but I take all that back now. I never heard of a lady doing such a thing. Never. You’ll save a fortune on mistresses. Just blow out the candles first.”

Theo’s breath was coming in little sobs. Her entire world was toppling, falling about her ears. The duke had
forced
James to marry her. He had apologized to James for how ugly she was. She had done something that no lady would do, though she hadn’t known it. Still, she did know that intimacies belong only in the bedchamber. Even the servants knew that.

“Do not say a word about my wife,” James shouted. “Damn you!” Rage boiled in his voice now, but Theo didn’t care. He wasn’t denying it.

He wasn’t denying any of it.

The duke—her late father’s closest friend—had embezzled her dowry. Mr. Reede, the estate manager, had to have known that when they were talking the day before.
James
knew. James knew the entire time. He had sat there and talked about how they could pay the duke’s debts from her inheritance, and the entire time he knew that his father had already stolen whatever money he wished from it.

Her mind spun, putting it all together. She had never seen James drunk. But when he was foxed at the Prince of Wales’s musicale . . . he must have had to drink deeply so that he would have the courage to propose to someone like her.

In the weeks and years to come, when she looked back she identified that as the precise moment when her heart broke in two. The moment that separated Daisy from Theo, the time Before, from the time After.

In the time Before, she had faith. She had love.

In the time After . . . she had the truth.

Thirteen

I
n the library, James looked up and saw the door to the morning room ajar. He flinched, looked closer, saw a flash of yellow near the floor. Daisy had heard. She’d heard everything.

James jerked his eyes away from the door and turned back to his father.

His stupid, contemptible father.

“I don’t want to see you again.” He felt his throat closing. “She heard you. She heard you. You ass.”

“Well, I said nothing that isn’t true,” the duke said, instantly defensive, swiveling to look at the door.

“She will never forgive me,” James said, knowing it in his bones.

“Given what I saw—”

James bared his teeth, and his father shut his mouth. “We had a chance, you know. Even after the way it happened.”

“I’ve no doubt that she’ll be tetchy,” Ashbrook said. He lowered his voice and added conspiratorially, “Diamonds. It always worked with your mother. Helped us rub along together for years.”

James had stopped listening. “I shall spend my life trying to—to make up for it.” For the first time in years, he wanted his mother. He hadn’t felt a wash of fear like this since she lay dying.

“You’d better leave,” he said now. “Find somewhere else to live. I think that we’re probably done with the pretense that there’s any true feeling between us.”

“You are my only son,” the duke said. “My
son.
Of course there’s feeling between us.”

“The kinship means nothing,” James said, a terrible feeling of fury and misery swelling in his heart. “I am nothing to you, and Daisy is nothing to you. We are just people you walk by in the hallway, people you use when you need us and then throw away.”

His father’s eyes narrowed. “You’re hardly the victim here!” he said, voice rising. “You’re the one who threw yourself at the girl. No reason for
you
to whine.”

“I betrayed her—my wife—in order to save you.”

“You didn’t do it for that,” the duke said. “You did it to save your estate and shore up the title. You could have told me to go to blazes, but you didn’t. I thought you’d go all moral and tell me to go to the devil. But you turned out not to be the sticker you pretend to be. We’re not so different.”

James’s fists were clenched. He couldn’t strike his father.

“In fact,” Ashbrook went on, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and don’t you forget it. Your mother didn’t fool herself that I was a perfect man, but we were married, and that was the end of it.” His lip curled. “There’s one way that we are different, though: I’m no whiner. I may have been surprised when you went through with it, but I’m not surprised you’re crying about the results. Be a man, for God’s sake. You’re an embarrassment. You’ve always been an embarrassment, with all that singing. I blame it on your mother.”

“You don’t love me in the least,” James said, breaching the unspoken rule that English gentlemen never discussed such matters. “Do you?”

“Of all the asinine questions, that has to be the most,” the duke said, color exploding into his cheeks. “You’re my heir, and that’s the end of it.”

“People who love each other don’t do this sort of thing,” James said dully. He walked over to the library door, opened it, and stood beside it. “Go.”

“You’ll have to talk to her,” the duke said, not moving. “Take charge of the situation. You’re the man here. Assert yourself. Don’t let her go into hysterics; it might set a pattern.”

“Go,” James repeated, not trusting himself to say anything else.

The duke huffed, but he walked toward the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob, but didn’t turn around. “I love you,” he said, quietly for him. “I—I love you.” And then he left.

Staring at the closed door, James was struck by another blinding wave of longing for his mother—for the days when his mother, or at least his nanny, could make anything better. He had to go into the morning room. He had to talk to Daisy, tell her how much he—how much what? She would never believe he loved her.

He’d just said it to his father: People who loved each other didn’t do cruel things to each other.

The leaden feeling in his chest spread through his body. Maybe he was incapable of loving anyone. He was like his father. He should just leave. She’d be better off without him.

He made his way to the morning room door.

F
or a long time Theo didn’t move, her muscles frozen, her eyes shut. The bitterness in her stomach threatened to rise into her throat.

Fighting for control, she didn’t even notice at first when a pair of boots moved directly into her line of vision.

Standing up and meeting her husband’s eyes took every bit of backbone Theodora Ryburn had. But stand she did, and she met his eyes, too. And she saw exactly what she expected: shame. That answered her last, lingering question. He had never wanted to marry her.

So she steeled herself. “I hope you enjoyed that,” she said finally. “As I’m sure you have guessed, it’s the very last time your wife will service you.”

“
Daisy.
”

“Must I spell it out?”

“Don’t leave me,” he said, choking out the words.

Theo had retreated behind a thick ice wall, where she felt utterly calm. And her brain was working with remarkable adroitness.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “I’m not leaving you; I’m throwing you out. I’ll mend the estate with whatever is left of my embezzled dowry. I think we can both agree, after your behavior at yesterday’s meeting, that you would be utterly unhelpful and won’t be missed.”

He swallowed, a faint sign of mortification that she welcomed.

“That being the case, there’s nothing to keep you here,” she observed. “You and your father are obviously not on the best of terms. He’s a vulgar, despicable criminal, and you are a weak-kneed fool—who deliberately ruined my life in order to cover up your father’s crimes.”

His eyes were burning, but still he was silent.

“You will leave this house, and then you will leave England altogether. You may have that boat you visited yesterday—take it somewhere. I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

James shifted from foot to foot, for all the world like a guilty child.

“The damnable part is that the marriage was consummated,” she continued. “There’s no getting out of it.”

“I don’t want to get out of it.” James’s words came out in a strangled growl.

“I expect you don’t. After all, there I was, kneeling at your feet, begging for favors you might toss my way. As your father so kindly pointed out, any man would be in seventh heaven; I gather such eagerness is generally paid for. I suppose you were reiterating the sort of demands you give a doxy when ordering me to not wear drawers? And to wear my hair down?”

“No!”

“Don’t bellow at me,” Theo responded. “I’m not a terrified scullery maid facing your father. If you throw a china shepherdess at me, I’ll pick up the bloody dining room table and throw it at your head.”

“I have never thrown anything,” James stated.

“You’re just coming into your own. I’m sure when you’re as old as your father you’ll have equal bragging rights to being a bastard. Or . . . wait. I think you’ve already earned them.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m just so sorry, Daisy.”

His face was contorted, as if he was trying not to cry, but she didn’t feel a bit of pity. Safe behind her icy wall, she felt nothing.

“You’re beautiful, and I’m not. But you know something, James? I’d rather be me a hundred times over. Because when I fell in love with you, I did it honestly. I was a fool; I realize that now. But I loved you last night. I truly loved you. I hope you enjoyed it, because I think I’m probably the last person stupid enough, and fooled enough by your beautiful face, to think that there’s anything worthwhile inside you.”

His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

She had one more thing to say. “When someone falls in love with me—and he will, because life is long, and this marriage is
over
—he’ll love me for who I am, not for my face. He’ll be able to see inside me, and he’ll want me for more than my dowry, or the fact that I could be ordered about and turned into a prostitute without even understanding my own humiliation.”

“I didn’t do that!”

She managed to keep her voice steady. “You are disgusting. Utterly disgusting. But the saddest part of this is that I did all that with you because I thought I was in love with you, and that you loved me as well. I didn’t do it for money, which is why you did it. So I think your father had it wrong: it seems that I just had two very expensive nights with a cicisbeo.”

“Don’t do this,” he said, his voice little more than a rough whisper. “Please, Daisy, don’t. Don’t do this.”

“Do what? Tell you the truth?”

“Break us apart.”

She waited, but he found no more words.

“There is no us,” she said, feeling suddenly shattered. “I’ll expect you to leave the house within the day.” To her horror, she realized that the sight of him still warmed some errant part of her heart, and the very realization drove her on.

“I would never have done this to you.” For the first time, her voice almost cracked. “I loved you, James. I really loved you. The odd thing is that I didn’t even realize it until we were married. But even if I hadn’t loved you that way, I wouldn’t have betrayed you, because you were my closest friend. My
brother.
You could have just asked me, you know.”

His face had turned deathly white. “Asked you what?”

“Asked me for my money,” she said, head high, eyes dry. “People who love . . . they share. They give. I would have given you that money. You needn’t have walked over me to get to it.”

She turned and left, closing the door precisely behind her.

She climbed the stairs to the second floor feeling as if she were a hundred years old, as empty and wizened as a beldame. As she walked down the corridor, the duke emerged from his chamber.

She met his eyes without even a tinge of shame.
She
was not the one to be ashamed.

His eyes fell.

“I own this house,” she told the top of his head. “I want you out of it. As I learned yesterday, I seem to have promised you a generous allowance. You can rent your own damned house with it.”

His head jerked up and he bellowed, “You can’t do that!”

“If you are not out of here by tomorrow, I will take that lying estate manager, Reede, and deliver him and his records directly to my solicitors, not to mention to Bow Street. Say what you like. Tell your friends that you can’t bear to see my ugly face in the morning. But move out.”

“Tell her she can’t do that!” her father-in-law shouted.

She glanced down and saw James standing at the bottom of the stairs, his hand clenched on the banister. “He’s leaving, too,” she told the duke. “I’m closing this house to save the expense of running it. I’ll be living in Staffordshire for the foreseeable future, but if either of you wishes to communicate with me, you can do it through my solicitor.”

“I will not communicate with my wife through a solicitor,” James said from below.

“I agree. I would prefer that you not communicate at all.”

“You’re a virago,” the duke snarled, his voice shaking with rage.

“There’s nothing to throw in this hallway,” she said, looking at him with distaste.

“You cannot make me leave my own house, the house my grandfather built.”

“No, I can’t. But I can air the evidence of your embezzlement of my dowry, left in your care by your best friend. Interesting, that.” She glanced back down at James. “Best friends seem to be no more than fodder for betrayal in this family.”

The scorn in her words seemed finally to penetrate the duke. He wheeled and stalked back to his chamber without another word.

Theo did not look down the stairs to see if James was still there. She knew he was staring up at her; she could feel his eyes on her back.

But she walked on, leaving Daisy behind. Leaving her marriage behind.

Leaving her heart behind.