Four Nights With the Duke

  Chapter Thirty-two

  By the time the coach arrived at the Queen’s Minion, the inn closest to Sir Richard’s property, Mia had wept herself to a standstill. Her heart burned in her chest and her throat was sore, but she had no more tears.

  She climbed the stairs to her bedchamber, questions pounding through her head. Why was she never good enough? Her father, her brother, now Vander . . . she had been a charity case for all three: easily dismissed, insignificant. Her father never had much love to spare for his daughter; he had spent it all in his adulterous pursuit of the late duchess. Her brother was fond of her, but didn’t trust her with his most prized possession, his son.

  And Vander . . .

  Vander had genuinely enjoyed her company, especially in bed. But he hadn’t fallen in love with her. She had been just a female body, obtained for a few nights, used, tossed aside.

  Losing Vander wouldn’t hurt so much if she hadn’t believed—truly believed—that he was falling in love with her.

  Though she might as well be honest, at least with herself.

  It wouldn’t hurt so much if she hadn’t cast and recast Vander in the role of hero. In Lucibella Delicosa’s books, Vander always rode to his lady’s rescue, and Vander always married a seamstress of low birth after love triumphed over every accident of fate—and that would have included being short and round, had she created such a heroine.

  A low, bitter laugh wrenched itself from her chest as she dropped into a chair.

  The real Vander hadn’t even tried to convince her to stay.

  She was a fool, who had to stop nurturing a dream of romantic love that didn’t exist in real life. Vander was right: her father and his mother had engaged in a tawdry, sordid affaire that had tarnished everyone in their vicinity.

  There was nothing honorable or beautiful about it. At best, it was pitiful, and at worst, it was contemptible. The years she had spent, putting her love for Vander into poetry or fiction? Equally pitiful.

  And contemptible.

  The most ironic point was that An Angel’s Form still needed to be written, no matter how hollow and withered her heart felt. She had to support herself and Charlie when they were jaunting around Bavaria.

  She was washing her face when a footman delivered her valise and manuscript, along with a note from Edward apologizing because he would be unable to join Mia for supper.

  Presumably he was planning some sort of offensive against Sir Richard. Mia couldn’t bring herself to feel even a shred of concern for Charlie’s uncle. Sir Richard deserved everything he got.

  She ordered supper in her chamber and began reading through her manuscript as she ate, scratching out a line here or there. It was appalling to realize just how much her silly girlhood dreams formed the bedrock of the novel, never clearer than when Frederic—on his knees—vowed that he loved Flora because of her inner beauty.

  For a few minutes Mia toyed with the idea of throwing the pages—all her notes and chapters and fragments of dialogue—into the fire.

  But no.

  She may have lost faith in love, but readers needed her novels, especially when they were sick at heart, desperate, nearing death, or watching a loved one fade.

  They needed to believe in the fairy tale that she no longer believed in herself.

  After finishing her meal, she slapped the pages down on the desk in the corner of her bedchamber, trimmed the wick on the lamp, and got to work.

  Frederic had to change. He was too mealy-mouthed, too passive. A few hours later the lamp guttered, and she rang for more oil. By then she had turned Frederic into a man who was big and strong and prone to telling Flora what to do—although he loved her to the bottom of her dainty toes.

  Rather than roaming English byways in search of Flora, growing thin and wan from hunger, Frederic went galloping after her, his greatcoat whipping behind him as he crouched over his magnificent midnight black steed. Or should it be a stallion?

  She wasn’t certain what the distinction was. Something young ladies were not supposed to know, she thought. She began compiling a list of vulgar words that she wanted defined. Stallion. Cock-pit. Lolpoop. Quim. She had a pretty good idea of what the last word meant, but she wanted to be certain. Love custard.

  Wasn’t there a dictionary of the vulgar tongue put together by someone named Grose? Obviously, she needed a copy so that she could create realistic characters.

  She was searching her memory for more words banned to young ladies, when a leg suddenly appeared over her windowsill. Before she could make a sound, the leg was followed by the rest of Vander.

  Mia jumped to her feet, dropping her quill. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, low and fierce. He had thrown her out like yesterday’s bathwater, and it was pure foolishness that the very sight of him set her heart thumping.

  He didn’t answer for a moment, his eyes fixed on her.

  “What do you want?” she demanded again.

  His gaze raked over her, heated, furious. “A nightdress for Reeve?” he growled, ignoring her question.

  His words hit her with all the force of a slap. As if a passerby on the street had given her a blow to the chin or called her a whore. “The gown was for you, for my husband. I am not a woman who commits adultery.” She meant to shout it, but her voice betrayed her, coming out ragged with distress.

  She saw satisfaction flash in his eyes.

  Madame duBois had made the nightgown from black silk, which clung to Mia’s every curve. She usually wore white cotton trimmed with eyelet lace, so Vander did have a point.

  “I shall give you the name of the modiste, and you can order one for your next duchess,” she replied, in a voice as chilly as she could make it.

  “There will be no ‘next duchess,’” Vander said, finally dragging his eyes from her body and stepping closer. “You are my duchess, my only duchess.”

  Before she could grasp what he was saying, Mia caught sight of a darkening bruise on his cheek and realized that his linen shirt had been sliced open by a blade. She gasped and took a step forward before stopping herself. “Are you hurt?” He didn’t appear injured; he was moving with the same graceful power that he always had. “You went to Sir Richard’s house! What happened? Was Edward there?”

  His eyes darkened ominously at the last question, but she had never quailed before him, and she wasn’t about to start now.

  “Yes, he was.” Vander spoke through gritted teeth. “When I saw him last, Reeve was fine.”

  A sudden, horrific thought struck her. “Are you here because something has happened to Charlie?”

  “No. Charlie rode all day and went to bed exhausted. I came to see you.”

  Mia took an unsteady breath. Right. Her panic drained away, replaced by a desperate wish to protect herself. She literally could not survive any more humiliation courtesy of the Duke of Pindar. “Then why are you here?” she managed.

  Vander pushed tumbled locks, dark with sweat, from his forehead. “I won’t give you up.”

  Mia’s heart bounded. Stay with Vander . . . live with him. Sleep in his bed, make love to him night after night.

  The image snapped her back to herself. Where was her self-respect? Even the fact his ripped shirt revealed his muscled chest made her long for his touch. Something about him was destructive to her.

  It was pitiful, she reminded herself, to want a man who was not only disrespectful, but unkind. As pitiful as all those novels she’d written about one duke—Vander—though she’d given him six different names.

  “Have you changed your mind so quickly?” She tried for flippant. “Will you change your mind again tomorrow? You never struck me as a fickle man.”

  His jaw tightened. “I am not fickle: in point of fact, I am Charlie’s guardian and I don’t intend to give him up.”

  Incredulity scorched down Mia’s spine and she drew in a searing breath. “You want me to stay married to you because of Charlie?” The mortification cut like a blade: it seemed that even her eight-year-old neph
ew was more valuable than she was. She had never felt more unlovable.

  “Not merely that,” Vander bit out. Then something else flashed through his eyes. “Look, regardless of what my mother did, my father never stopped loving her, all those years, even when he was in the asylum.”

  Somewhat to her relief, Mia discovered that fury was allowing her to view the scene from a distance, as if she had walked into a play.

  “I fail to see how that is pertinent to our marriage,” she observed. “If our parents are to be the subject of conversation, I think it’s far more relevant that when I described my father and your mother as loving one another, you countered with an assessment of my father as a bastard who seduced your mother, and moreover, you implied that I was more of the same. A bad apple from a bad tree.”

  Another moment of silence followed. “I didn’t say that.”

  “In so many words, you did.”

  “That wasn’t my intent.”

  “You said what you thought at that moment! You said things you believed!”

  “Damn it!” The words burst out of him, as if the thread of his control had finally broken. “My whole life, I believed my father was betrayed by my mother,” Vander said, taking another step toward her. “But then I learned he had been beating her.”

  Mia flinched. “I had no idea. I’m—I’m so sorry.”

  “He injured her so badly that she was unable to have children after I was born.” Something in Vander’s voice told her that he had never said this aloud before, and might never say it again.

  “That is terrible,” Mia said carefully. She had been right about all those glass animals. She would have to send someone over to Vander’s house to box up all the fragile little mothers and their crystal offspring.

  “When Reeve arrived this morning, all I could think was that I had married a woman who loved another man, just as my mother did.”

  “I—”

  He took a final step and curled his hands around her upper arms. His eyes searched hers. “I let you go. Bloody hell, I pushed you away because I was so convinced that you loved another man. But the minute your carriage was out of sight, it hit me. I was wrong. You don’t love him, do you, Duchess? You love me.”

  Mia gasped and opened her mouth to hotly refute his statement—but he bent his head and kissed her so ferociously that heat spread like wildfire over her skin. Only a slender instinct for self-preservation gave her the strength to pull away.

  “Unfortunate though your parents’ history is, I’m afraid it doesn’t change our situation.” She blurted out everything she’d been thinking about all afternoon. “You and I are not a good match. We’re too volatile and too—” She couldn’t think of the word. “I did things with you that no lady should do, and when you lose your temper, you say things I can’t forgive.”

  “I can change,” Vander said, his eyes fierce.

  Mia shook her head. “It’s not just that. I lost my dignity when I blackmailed you into marriage, and I lost even more when . . . um . . . well, you know what I mean. If we remain married, over time I would lose what fragments of self-respect I have left.”

  Vander’s rough-hewn features were set hard. “There is nothing, and I repeat nothing, in what we did together that you should be embarrassed about. What we did together was a gift, Duchess. And I will have no other duchess.”

  “You will not tell me how to feel! Nor can you discard me and then demand to have me back, like a piece of lost luggage. What we shared is not good enough to sustain a marriage.” She stepped to one side and pointed to the window. “Please leave the way you came in.”

  Vander’s eyes darkened and without answering, he pulled her back into his arms. Like a flash of lightning, that dangerous warmth spread through her again. When she opened her mouth to protest, he took possession.

  Mia didn’t regain sanity for long minutes, coming back to herself only to discover that she was shaking, clinging to her husband, her knees weak. Vander was swearing under his breath as his hands roamed over her body.

  Once again she had succumbed to her basest impulses. She was shaming herself again. Ladies didn’t act this way.

  She pushed against his chest. “You must go,” she said, her voice cracking. “I cannot do this. You cannot do this to me. I deserve a husband who respects me!”

  “I respect you,” Vander stated.

  The look in his eyes made her body throb with need. But she managed to clear her head. “You want me, which is not the same. You don’t respect me, not the way a gentleman should respect the woman he marries. The heroes in my books would never say the things that you have said to me. They would never even think them. But you have. A minute ago you asked me if I’d worn this nightdress for another man, even knowing our parents’ history and the toll it took on both of us. You have repeatedly expressed your low opinion of me, no matter what you say now.”

  She stepped farther away from him, as though putting physical distance between them would somehow translate to loving him less. “The truth is that I am nothing more than the title to you—the title, and a body to go with it.” Anger once again began to shore up her courage, putting a layer of thick ice between them. “Are you aware that in our short marriage, you have never once used my name? To you, I am always ‘duchess’; at one point I wasn’t sure you even remembered my name. The final proof? Yesterday you and Edward renegotiated our marriage without bothering to ask me about my feelings—though I stood between you in the room.”

  “You misunderstood. It wasn’t like that.”

  “Neither of you even thought to inquire whether I would prefer to remain married to you, or marry Edward.”

  Vander couldn’t bear the look in Mia’s face: her expressive features were lifeless, all her joy and passion locked away so it didn’t shine from her eyes.

  His wife was standing before him, telling him to leave, but he would not leave. She was his. With that thought, he picked her up, ignoring her gasp, and carried her to the bed, following her down. The moment his body lay on hers, he felt an exquisite wave of relief.

  “I’m at home when I’m with you,” he muttered, kissing her nose, then her cheekbone. Other words eluded him, so he took her mouth.

  And her body. When he slipped his hands between Mia’s legs, she was already wet. After a second her eyes glazed over and she pulled him to her, so he slid into her tight warmth, mating with her like an animal, mad with the taste and the smell of her.

  It was raw and magnificent, not slow and gentle. But after she had come three times, and he rolled, breathless, to the side, she still wouldn’t meet his eyes. And when she sat up, his heart sank.

  “This isn’t right,” she said.

  “Duchess—”

  She turned like a flash. “You see? Even now, you don’t use my name.”

  Vander hated her hard, frozen look. He sat up and took her face between his hands, as if he could warm her with his touch. “Mia, you are my duchess. It is the greatest gift I have to bestow. My name, my title, everything that’s mine.”

  Mia closed her eyes, opened them again. “I need . . .” She trailed off and began again. “That isn’t enough. I need respect, Vander. You can’t know how much I need it. I have to respect myself, and be respected. It’s the one thing my family couldn’t give me, and you do not feel it either.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, tempering his voice, keeping calm.

  She waited, but the right words didn’t come to him. He could only think of crude words.

  “To you, I’m not someone worth loving,” she finally said, with a sigh. “Not that I can blame you. I wrote that appalling poem; I blackmailed you; I lose my head utterly when you touch me. I’d rather . . . In time, I’ll lose myself.”

  She got up without looking at him and put on a wrapper. “Go now, Vander. Please.”

  Vander followed and swung her about, not gently. “Everything you’re saying is wrong. It’s rubbish.”

  She gave a crack of laughter. “I suppose you
do think that.” She broke free, her chin in the air. At least she didn’t look empty and wooden: now every part of her blazed with fire and determination.

  “My feelings are not rubbish, Duke. Just because you do not agree does not mean that my feelings are invalid. In fact, you just confirmed what I already told you: at the heart, you think my opinions, my feelings, are unimportant. And if we remained married, your opinion would always come out in one way or another.”

  The pain in her voice made each word feel like a needle piercing his skin. “I don’t think that,” he said, straining to explain to the fiery, rebellious woman whom he’d hurt that—that what? He had never had any use for eloquence; he had paid for his pleasures. But Mia deserved eloquence.

  “Go. Just leave me alone. Please.” Her face and her voice were empty again, the charm and strength that everyone from Chuffy to Jafeer had responded to gone.

  He tried one more time. “I know your name, Mia, and I don’t want to live without you. I love being married to you. You are mine, my wife.”

  “I am no man’s possession!” she flashed. “I am my own person, Vander. Always. And I want a divorce.”

  He stared at her hard as he realized something. Mia was right.

  He didn’t respect her the way a storybook hero might. He didn’t want to kneel and beg for her hand; he wanted to throw her on the bed again, and do all sorts of disrespectful things to her. He wanted to spend a lifetime arguing with her over anything and everything, giving up and kissing her until neither of them cared about their disagreement.

  He wanted to possess her, eat her, fuck her, live with her, die with her. Put his seed into her and have children—not because he needed an heir, but so that they created a child together.

  So that someone with her eyes and her intelligence and her deep sweetness would always live in England, on his estate. So that future Pindar dukes would have some of her blood to counter the madness in his.

  With a sharp nod, he turned to go.

  Only when he was back in his carriage, turning into the drive leading to Rutherford Park, did it occur to him, with a pulse of despair, that the saintly Frederic would never talk about “putting his seed” into Flora.