White Regency 03 - White Knight (16 page)

As if in answer to her cue, the duchess
spoke up again. “Lady Rennington, did you not tell me the night of our
ball that your grandson, Charles, is quite the poet? I should love to read
something he has written; I am such an admirer of verse. I wonder who he
inherited the talent from—you, perhaps?”

“Oh, no, Your Grace, I was never one
who did very well at poetry, but Lord Rennington, at one time, wrote wonderful
verse. It has been so long since he last wrote any, I had nearly forgotten.”

“Now, don’t discredit yourself, dear.
When we were younger, you were quite the poet yourself.”

The countess looked on her husband for the
first time all evening. A flicker of long-forgotten tenderness passed between
them that seemed almost to warm the room around them.

Lady Talbot chimed in, “You know Lord
Talbot was also quite the artist at one time. He would send me the drawings he
had made while on the Peninsula.”

“I was a young fool who was
homesick,” said her husband, obviously uncomfortable with the soft subject
matter.

“The letters you wrote were just as
endearing. That is why I married you, Henry.”

Soon they were all comparing memories of
times and tendernesses gone by. It was astounding. With the mention of one
small thing—a grandmother’s boast about her grandchild—Catriona had somehow
reminded these people of what they had first been attracted to in one another.
From then on, conversation was never lacking.

Later, after dinner, they retired to the
parlor to play cards. Grace won two rounds, having been taught well by Nonny,
who had been quite a cardsharp in her day. Eleanor then delighted them all with
her flute playing, accompanied by Grace on the pianoforte. Eleanor’s talent was
astounding. Grace had never heard the instrument played with such emotion and
texture, much less by a lady; women were customarily relegated to the harp or
pianoforte.

It was well past midnight when they stood
at the door, bidding their guests farewell. Despite its worrisome beginning,
the evening had ended up a success.

Grace hugged Catriona as they made to
leave. “I cannot thank you enough for all your help this evening. I would
hate to think of the disaster it would have been without you.”

“Nonsense, Grace, you don’t give
yourself enough credit. It was you who made the evening so pleasant for
everyone. Some of them just needed their eyes opened to it, that’s all.”

Grace watched them walk to their carriage,
then turned to her last guest. The butler Forbes was just helping the old duke
on with his coat. Christian, she noticed, had vanished.

“I thank you for coming, Your
Grace,” she said as he reached for her hand. “I hope your visit was
pleasant.”

“If only to see that I had been right
about you from
the
start. I was a bit rough on you at first, but it is as I thought. You will make
a fine duchess some day.”

Grace smiled at him as he leaned forward
to whisper to her, “A bit of advice, though, my girl. Don’t waste your
time trying to repair something when you don’t know how deep goes the break.
Some things were just never meant to be.”

Thunking his cane, he covered his head
with his hat and shuffled off for his waiting carriage.

When the duke’s coach had pulled away,
Grace closed the door and turned. She started when she noticed Christian
standing behind her, leaning against the doorway to his study. His arms were
crossed over his chest and his expression was shadowed and dangerous.

“Brava, my lady,” he said, his
voice bitingly sharp. “You have succeeded in winning the approval of a man
whom I had thought untouchable.” His eyes grew keen with anger.
“Don’t make the mistake again of putting me in the position you did
tonight.”

And with that, he turned, closing the door
firmly behind him. What followed a moment later was the uncompromising sound of
the lock being turned.

Grace glanced at the small silver clock
that was tucked in the late night shadows of her bedside table. In the single
beam of moonlight coming through her chamber window, she could see that its
small enameled face read three o’clock. Another hour had passed. A few hours
more and it would be dawn—and still Christian had not come up to his bed.

Grace had purposely opened the door
between their chambers so that she would hear him when he came in. She’d even
made certain to sit in the chair that faced onto his room so that she wouldn’t
miss him. They needed to talk. She had angered him tonight by inviting Lord
Herrick and the duke to supper. After Christian’s harsh words to her in the
hall earlier that evening, she knew she wouldn’t find any comfort in sleep
without first talking to him, explaining her reasons, no matter how impolitic
they might now seem.

For well over a month now, Grace had
picked her way around Christian’s sullenness and she was no closer to figuring
him out than she’d been that first morning when she’d met him at the marriage
altar in Little Biddlington. They were husband and wife, yet he did everything
to avoid being with her. Why? Did he disapprove of her, did he think her an
incompetent wife? She had tried to do the things she thought a marchioness
should do. She took care with what she wore, where she went, whom she saw.
Though she sometimes erred, in the long run she felt she was succeeding, for in
spite of his negligence, there were rare times when Christian would come to her
and take her into his arms, filling her with kisses and touching her more
deeply than she could ever have imagined. But then afterward, in the moments
when they could be so close to one another, he would always pull away so
abruptly and then she wouldn’t see him for days. She had tried and tried to
figure why, but seemed only to end up asking the same question: What was it
about her that continually made him turn away?

The time had come for answers and since
Christian was making no attempt to come to her, she would simply have to go to
him. Grace slipped on her dressing robe, belting it at her waist. She blew out
her candle and headed for the door.

The hall outside her chamber was dark,
quiet, the doors on Lady Frances’s and Eleanor’s chambers long closed for the
night. As the tall case clock in the hall chimed the quarter hour, Grace padded
her way slowly to the stairs in the faint light shining in through the hall
window. When she reached the bottom step, she saw the barest flicker of
firelight shining from under the door to Christian’s study. She hesitated
outside, staring at the door, contemplating what she would say to him. He would
be angry. He would resist her efforts to talk, but she told herself she would
have to be firm. They simply couldn’t go on as they were.

Taking a deep breath, Grace placed her
hand upon the door handle, hoping it wasn’t still locked. Slowly she turned,
and heard it click to open. She took the first step inside.

Christian sat in one of the wing chairs in
front of the fire in his study, his brandy cupped in his palm as he stared
hopelessly into the sluggish flames. He’d removed his coat and had rolled the
sleeves of his shirt over his forearms. His neckcloth was loose and hanging
about his neck and he had loosened the first several buttons of his shirt. His
hair was ruffled from the numerous times he had raked his fingers through it in
the past few hours as he’d sat there, alone in the dark, unwilling to go
upstairs lest he should make love to his wife.

“Christian?”

He jerked his head around at the sudden
sound of the very woman who was tormenting him. The abruptness of the motion
set some of the brandy in his glass to splashing over the side and onto his
fingers. He hadn’t even heard her come in. For a moment, he wondered if he had completely
lost his mind, conjuring up her image somehow in his thoughts.

She moved then and he knew she was real.

Grace stood in the low light from the
ebbing fire, her hair curled in blond waves around her shoulders, looking
damned decadent in her white virgin’s nightrail buttoned up to her chin. She
came forward, her toes bare against the thick woolen carpet. She tucked the
weight of her hair behind one ear and with just that one simple gesture, he
felt the muscles in his stomach tighten as they did whenever he was about to
lose all sense and reason and break his vow not to bed her. He had to do
something. He had to stop himself from breaking his vow again. He fought to
control his desire with the only weapon he had: anger.

“Get out, Grace,” he said,
almost a growl before he turned back to the fire, waiting for her to leave,
vanish, go back by whatever means she had used to come there. He’d been
thinking about her all night, thinking about the things that intrigued him
about her, and about the danger her life was now in because of him and that
damned note.

“No, Christian, I will not leave this
time.”

He glared at her. “What did you
say?”

“We need to talk.”

Her eyes had a light of determination in
them that told she was not about to be daunted. But he was not in the mood for
talking. What he was in the mood for was to haul her to the carpet and take her
in front of the fire, lose himself in her goodness and hope and try to forget
the misery that had been his life. And she would allow him to, because to her
romantic thinking, it meant that he must care—and he knew very well that
couldn’t be. Caring meant feeling. Feeling meant vulnerability. And
vulnerability meant weakness, something he had learned long ago never to fall
victim to.

The results could be—murderous.

“Perhaps another time, madam. I am
occupied at the moment.”

Again he waited for her to leave.

Again she did not.

“Christian, what have I done to
displease you so? You are obviously annoyed with me. Is it because I invited
your grandfather to supper tonight? You must know I only had good intentions in
doing so.”

“There are no good intentions where
he is involved.”

Grace took a step closer. “I do not
know what it is that has caused you to hate him as you do. I wish I did.
Perhaps then I could understand it. I only know it has something to do with the
death of your father.”

Christian’s vision went black. “What
did he tell you?”

He would kill the old bastard if he had
dared to—

“Your grandfather said nothing. It
was Mrs. Stone who told me that your rift with the duke was struck when you
lost your father.”

He muttered to the fire, “Servants
would do well to remember who pays their wages and hold their tongues
accordingly.”

“I asked her, Christian. She did not
offer the information to me unsolicited. I only asked because I wanted to help
you.”

“Do not pry into matters that don’t
concern you, Grace. I don’t need your help.”

Grace came closer, to where she was
standing just beside his chair. He could feel the warmth of her and she wasn’t
even touching him. Already her scent seemed to fill the air.

“I know what it is to lose a parent,
Christian. I lost mine, too.”

A strange feeling, like belonging, came
upon him at her soft, compassionate words. Could he tell her? Did he dare? He
felt himself beginning to yield and fought against it, unwilling to leave go of
the painful secret he had kept safely locked within him so long now. If he told
her, she would know the truth about him. She would know who she had really
married, not the noble heir, but a murderer. He couldn’t bear the thought of
seeing the look of horror, of loathing in her eyes, she who had worshipped him
from the beginning. Instead, he said, “You can know nothing of how I
feel.”

“Christian, I am your wife. I care
about you.”

“How can you care about a mu—”

Christian could only thank the benevolence
of God for stopping him before he could finish saying that word.
Murderer.
He
closed his eyes, fighting to gain control of the churning emotions that were
threatening to choke him.
You must not tell her.
After a moment or two,
his pulse began to calm and he was able to breathe more easily again. He said,
his voice markedly quieter, “How can you care for a man you know nothing
about? Who is my favorite artist, Grace? What is my favorite color? Do you know
how I take my tea? Do you even know the date of my birth?”

He looked and saw that Grace’s eyes were
no longer pleading and soft. Instead she stared at him, utterly resolute, and
said, “Milk, no sugar and September the twenty-third.”

He stared at her in disbelief.

“I took note of one and asked your
sister the other and I might know the other two if you had but allowed me to. I
didn’t expect to learn everything about you in the handful of weeks since we
wed. We were married before we knew each other very well—”

“Very well?” Christian scoffed.
“Madam, we did not know each other at all.”

“Other marriages have begun with just
as little acquaintanceship and they somehow manage to succeed. I knew when I
agreed to be your wife that we would need time to get to know one another. I had
thought we would spend some time together in order to do just that. Did you not
think the same?”

In a perfect world, that might have been
true. But Christian’s world was far from perfect and he couldn’t allow his
misery to ruin another life. He had to keep Grace from getting close to him,
because getting close would mean getting hurt. Perhaps even killed. She had to
stop rhapsodizing on girlish whims of romance and love, marriage and devotion.
She had to face the fact that he was not this beau ideal she’d made him out to
be in her dreams. She needed a healthy dose of reality. The sooner she realized
she had not married the perfect gentleman she believed she had, the White
Knight, all the better it would be for her.

“You are too much of a dreamer,
Grace. Don’t you understand? I did not marry you because of some magical
destiny that was written for us centuries ago. I did not read your name in the
stars. You did not come to me through the prophetic ether of a dream. I married
you because I had to. Not because I wanted to but because you were chosen for
me by another.” He stared at her hard and finished, as coldly as he could,
“Quite frankly, Grace, you could have been anyone.”

Every single word struck Grace a telling
blow and took a small part of the light from her eyes until all that remained
were harsh and broken clouds. Grace blinked a few times as if hoping the clouds
would clear. She was fighting back tears and her lip was trembling so hard she
had to bite it. She stared at him for several moments, silent, stunned. Finally
she said, her voice no louder than a whisper, “I am sorry for having taken
your time.”

She turned and walked slowly from the
room, her step heavy, her arms hanging defeatedly at her sides. And as
Christian watched her go, he could only think that his grandfather should be so
proud, for Christian had become the very model of him, the man he’d spent a
lifetime hating. He was now a heartless bastard, most worthy to hold the title
of Duke of Westover.