When You Wish Upon a Duke (32 page)

From his first glimpse of her, high in the tree above
him, he’d known she was a brave woman. But for her to let Sir Lucas capture her like this, with every emotion plain on her lovely face, took a rare kind of courage. She’d offered her love as completely as a woman could, and she didn’t care who knew it.

And what had he done for her? He’d taken her innocence and her trust and her love, and then he’d left her. Once again he’d behaved exactly like Father. No matter how he tried to be a better man, he couldn’t escape the past.

He stared at her portrait now, struggling to think only of her, yet still the old nightmares of his loveless, bitter childhood returned. The longer he sat there, the hours slipping by, the darker and more oppressive his thoughts became. He ignored the polite knocks at the door, doubtless from Carter and from servants. He didn’t hear the carriage in the drive, or the exclamations in the front hall that marked an arrival. All that existed for him was Charlotte’s portrait and the mire of his own thoughts.

“Do you like the picture, then?”

He turned quickly in his chair, certain he’d imagined her voice behind him.

“Do you like it, March?” She was standing near the door, unhooking her traveling cloak in the most ordinary way imaginable. She was like sunshine itself, so beautiful that it hurt him to look at her.

“Damnation,” he muttered. “Are you real?”

“Am I
real
?” she repeated, perplexed. “La, what manner of welcome is that?”

She tossed her cloak on a chair and came to him. Swiftly she bent and kissed him, her lips brushing sweetly across his. He was too shocked to kiss her back, and she frowned, her gaze searching his face.

“You look dreadful, March,” she said with concern. “Are you ill? Should I send for a doctor? What is wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Everything.”

“Goodness,” she said. “How am I to answer that?”

He shook his head, rubbing his hand across his forehead. He was making no sense and he knew it, which meant that he wasn’t as mad as he feared. Not quite.

He looked from her back to the picture. “Tell me, Charlotte,” he said. “How did your father die?”

“My father?” She pulled a chair close to his and sank into it. “It was long ago, and because I was so young, I only knew what they told me.”

“Tell me now,” he said. “Tell me what they said.”

“Very well.” She smiled sadly. “It was a butterfly that killed him, they said. A white butterfly. It flew out from the mulberry bushes near the stable gate and startled his horse, and Father fell and landed on his neck. The friends who were with him told Mama that he was laughing and jesting one moment, and the next he was silent and dead, it happened that fast.”

“A white butterfly,” he said, stunned by the ordinariness of it, and the purity of it, too.

She nodded. “I was terrified of butterflies for years afterward,” she confessed. “I still don’t like them, not at all. Strange how things like that linger, isn’t it?”

He rose quickly, seizing her hand to raise her to her feet as well. It was time for this, past time, and he couldn’t put it off any longer.

“Come with me,” he said, pulling her after him. “I’ll show you.”

“Show me what, March?” she asked breathlessly as he led her from the room and up the stairs. “What will I see?”

But he didn’t answer, not until they were in the distant parlor to which he’d banished his father. The portrait of the third Duke of Marchbourne was very grand, almost regal, with him in his ducal robes and the old-fashioned long wig of a generation before. But not even all that red velvet could mask his father’s nature, the innate cruelty
in his heavy-lidded eyes and the dismissive sneer that passed for a smile.

“There,” he said, staring up at the portrait. He hadn’t been in this room for years, yet the impact of Father’s painted face struck him like a blow, so hard that he had to force himself to stand before it. “That’s my father, Charlotte.”

“Goodness,” she said. “He’s very … very regal, isn’t he?”

March laughed bitterly. “He’d be proud to hear you say that. Father never forgot his royal blood, or how it made him superior to everyone else. Can you tell how he died?”

She shook her head. “How could I tell that?”

“It’s there, Charlotte, it’s there,” he assured her. “This was painted only months before he died. You can see the pox that killed him, eating away at his flesh and his mind until he went mad from it. No pretty butterflies here, are there?”

The artist had been kind and flattering. There were no signs of the sores his father had tried vainly to cover with black plasters and patches, none of the pallor that hinted of the grave. The artist hadn’t showed how most of Father’s teeth were gone, how ghastly his smile had become, or how his eyes had grown cloudy as blindness stole his sight.

But March couldn’t look at his father’s once handsome face, so much like his own, and not see how the pox had destroyed his soul as surely as it had destroyed his flesh.

“I’m sorry, March,” Charlotte said softly. “I’m sorry.”

“Save your grief,” he said curtly, still confronting his father’s painted self. “His death was his own doing, as surely as if he’d taken a knife to his own throat.”

“But he couldn’t always have been a monster,” she said slowly. “Before he was sick, he must have been a
better man, else my father never would have agreed to a match between us.”

“I have heard it said that my father was more of a gentleman as a young man,” March said, though he didn’t believe it himself, and never had. “I can only judge what I know of him from my own memory.”

“But my father—”

“Charlotte, I know your father was a paragon, but he was also only an earl,” he said wearily. “Of course he would have agreed to a match if my father proposed it. To wed one’s daughter to a duke: what father would refuse that?”

Charlotte didn’t answer, clearly not believing her perfect father could be so mercenary. Well, so be it, thought March, and though he tried to be cynical, he couldn’t help but envy her a bit, too.

“Was the picture painted in Italy?” she asked tentatively. “The setting looks the same as the picture of you as a boy that’s in my rooms.”

“Rome,” he said. “That’s where we were. I hadn’t wanted to go with Father, but he insisted, taking me from school in the middle of the term. A last grand tour, he’d called it, a voyage with his only son and heir.”

Gently her fingers moved against his. “That must have been quite an adventure. You weren’t very old.”

“Eleven,” he said. “But because I was tall for my age, the whores all judged me older.”

“The whores?” she asked.

“With Father there were always whores,” he said, bitterness filling his mouth like bile. “Our lodgings stank of their perfume and their bodies. He didn’t care. No matter how cruelly he used them, there were always more to be bought.”

“But you were a child, March,” she said. “What could you have known of your father’s sins?”

He closed his eyes, unable to meet Father’s gaze any longer.

“I knew because I saw them,” he said. “Father made me watch. To be a man, he said. He wanted me to be a man. He made me watch him with the women, and he bid them touch me and—and handle me, and though I knew it was wrong and sinful, I would let them because it pleased Father to share his debauchery. But I hated it, and I hated the women, but mostly I hated Father for making me part of his wickedness.”

He remembered their touch, the coaxing cleverness in their fingers, and how little it had taken to destroy his innocence. He’d been ashamed of himself, especially when they’d used their mouths as well, and Father had laughed and called it the best sport a man could know. But it hadn’t felt like sport to him, not at all, and he’d lived in a sick dread that others would discover his secret. There was no one he could turn to, no one who could help him, not when it was his father’s idea and his father was a duke.

“It wasn’t your fault, March,” Charlotte said, her voice soft. “You were still a child, no matter what your father said.”

“Mother knew it, too,” he insisted. “She saw it in my eyes as soon as we returned to England. She said I was no better than Father. She said that my soul was poisoned by sin and that my blood was black with it, just like Father’s. She wanted nothing to do with me after that. She said that Father had broken her heart, but that I had trod upon the pieces.”

Still in his traveling clothes, he had stood between his parents in the drawing room as they raged at each other over his head, using words and accusations that no child should hear parents say. By then he’d understood that he was only a tiny part of the anger and loathing they bore toward each other, yet even his insignificance had
wounded him. He hadn’t taken either side, but stood with his shoulders straight and his gaze focused on his mother’s chinoiserie cabinet. Only later, when at last he was alone, had he seen how he’d bloodied his own palms, neat rows of semicircles where he’d clenched his hands so tightly his nails had cut the skin.

“But your mother must have loved you, March,” Charlotte insisted. “There’s the portrait of you in the bedchamber, where she could see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night, the way I do now.”

Slowly he opened his eyes and once again met the scornful painted gaze of his father, looking down at him as he always had.

“That picture of me was painted when we first reached Rome,” he said, turning away from him and back toward her. “Before everything else. Before I changed. She wouldn’t have kept it otherwise.”

“I don’t believe that,” Charlotte said, appalled. “How could any mother feel like that about her only child?”

“Because she was my mother, not yours,” he said evenly, a truth not even she could deny. “She was right about me, too. I
am
my father’s son. No matter how I’ve tried to be the gentlemanly husband you deserve, I always sink back to his wickedness.”

“Whatever are you saying, March?” Charlotte asked. “You’re the most gentlemanly gentleman I have ever met. There’s not one scrap of wickedness in you anywhere.”

He groaned and shook his head, glancing back over his shoulder at Father’s portrait.

“Consider how I’ve treated you, Charlotte,” he said. “I have, and to my endless shame, too. Think of that last night in my bed, of all the reprehensible things I did to you—”

“But you didn’t, March, not for a moment!” She reached up and cradled his face in her palms, forcing him to look directly at her. “What we did was make love,
March. We did what we’re meant to do, which is to give each other pleasure as husband and wife. Without love, I suppose our actions might be the same as those of your father and those—those vile women, but the joy would not be there. It’s love that makes it special, my dearest, dearest husband, love and love alone.”

How desperately he wanted to believe her! “What you ask of me, Charlotte, what you ask,” he said, still bowed beneath the weight of his parents’ history. “I can’t deny the past.”

“Nor am I asking you to,” she said, the pearl earrings swinging against her cheeks. “I won’t ever tell you to ignore your past or to forget your parents. For better or for worse, they’re part of you.”

He did not need her to remind him of that. “Charlotte, please—”

“Hear me, March, I beg you,” she pleaded, her eyes wide and blue as the sky. “Your parents are part of you, yes, but I’m part of you now, too, as our children will be. I know you cannot change the past, but you can make your future as bright as ever you could.
Our
future, March.”

Yet still he hesitated, torn and tempted at once. She was like an angel standing before him, offering redemption. His first tastes of her love had been impossibly, unforgettably sweet. Could he truly deserve the joy she promised? Could he ever be worthy of her and this glorious shared future?

He hesitated, and she saw it, disappointment flickering through her eyes.

“Love me,” she whispered. “That is all I ask, March. Just—just love me.”

She rose on the toes of her slippers to kiss him gently, a kiss that was meant to seal that pledge, that promise, and at last it was enough. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her as if all the world depended on it, and
for their world, perhaps it did. He bent to slip his arms beneath her knees, and she yelped as he swept her into his arms.

“Goodness, March,” she said breathlessly. “What is this?”

“It’s what I should have done in the beginning,” he said, carrying her from the room. He stopped beside the door’s frame and did not look back. He wouldn’t let his father rule him any longer. He knew better than to believe his past would never trouble him again, but he prayed that with Charlotte at his side, he would be able to keep it in its place.

“Shut the door for me, Charlotte,” he said. “Shut it as hard as you can.”

She grinned, and with one hand she shoved the door with such force that it slammed behind them, the sound echoing down the hall.

“There,” she said proudly. “Done.”

“Entirely,” he said, and for the first time he smiled. “There are no portraits in my bedchamber.”

“None?” she said, circling her arms around his shoulders. “Then I suppose we must make pictures of our own.”

He laughed, and she laughed, too, though she clung to him more closely.

“I vow, March,” she warned, “if you drop me because you were weak from laughing, I shall be hard-pressed ever to forgive you.”

“I won’t drop you,” he said, carrying her down the long hallway. “I may not ever put you down again.”

But he did, of course, onto the center of his bed. He left the windows open, with the sun free to stream around them, and the sweet scent of the newly mown field grasses drifted in on the breeze. Before this day, he’d never have taken her to bed in the middle of the afternoon, thoroughly unseemly for a proper married couple. Now he
could think of nothing better. This was how he wanted it always to be between them, without any artifice or shadows or haunting ghosts, and as she pulled off her clothes and smiled at him, he knew she’d make it so.

This time he’d no doubt that they made love. He took care to woo her with a hundred little endearments and as many kisses peppered all over her creamy pale body, and he caressed her in every way he could imagine and a few more besides. When at last she begged him to enter her, he was more than ready, too, feverish with desire and the need to join with her. He’d never felt anything more right than her body beneath his, moving with him in mindless, perfect unison, and together they explored every inch of his oversized featherbed.