Sins of a Wicked Duke
Page 31
And yet she did.
She had fought the feeling, resisted it like a bad cold creeping into her lungs. She had plunged ahead into her new life: settling into her home, meeting and greeting the curious, well-intentioned neighbors and villagers, spending time in her garden. Her garden. She paused. It felt remarkable to even think those words.
On a whim, she had decided to create an arrangement for the church. A small thing to do for the community that had embraced her with such warmth. A few of the residents recalled her father.
Even her. There was something in that, she supposed. Almost as though she really had returned home. Something to distract from the ache for a man incapable of emotion. Incapable of love. A man she would never see again.
She did not fear meeting Dominic here. Even with Wayfield Park a rock throw’s distance, it was the last place he would visit. Her cottage on the southeast corner of Little’s Saums posed even less of a threat.
She had convinced herself the ache wouldn’t last. Like any sickness, it would pass and she would grow stronger from it.
She strolled along the churchyard, pausing at the gate to the cemetery. Dull light peered down through tree branches. She spied a figure bending awkwardly at a grave, clinging to a brass-headed cane as he set flowers upon it. Extravagant yellow tulips. Cheerful for the dreary afternoon.
The gentleman stood, straightening his frame and lifting his face to the muted light. There was no mistaking him. Dominic’s grandfather. Mr. Collins. Not quite at death’s door, it would seem.
Something terrible twisted inside her at the sight of this man who caused Dominic such pain.
Who made him what he was—a man who could never love. Never love me. Not as she loved him. And she did love him. Painful as it was to admit, painful as it was to feel. And she did feel it. Every day.
Jaw set, she strode ahead, her strides swift and purposeful, even if what she would _say _ to him remained a void.
He looked up, startled at her approach. “Who are you?” he snapped.
“Fallon O’Rourke.” She stopped.
He appraised her critically. “Am I supposed to know you?”
“I’ve taken residence at the cottage just beyond the old mill.”
He nodded once, the motion curt, dismissive. With a grunt, he turned his attention back to the grave.
He reminded her a little of herself just then. Enough that she could only stand and stare. No doubt Wayfield Park abounded with servants. People left and right. Yet here he stood. Looking as she felt. Alone. Lonely.
Fallon had only thought to claim her home and everything would be right. Solved. Happy, even.
But at night, long after the Redley sisters had departed for the day, she climbed into bed and lay alone. There she could not fool herself. Nothing felt right. She had not counted upon the stark sense of aloneness that would come with living independently. The humming silence of her house. The quiet hush of her breath in the room. In her bed. Damn Dominic. He had ruined everything for her.
She followed Mr. Collin’s gaze, reading the marker and feeling a small flicker of surprise.
“Would not the Duchess of Damon be buried with her family?”
He turned steel gray eyes on her. Eyes so familiar that she felt a second stab of surprise. “She is.”
There was no family crypt at Wayfield Park? _Unusual. _ Fallon shook her head, glancing at the markers near Dominic’s mother, wondering why she did not then see the grave for Dominic’s father.
“How do you know me?”
“I saw you in church last Sunday.” She had no intention of revealing the specifics of the first time she saw him.
“Mr. Simmons needs to work more on his oration. Too many ‘ahems.’” With a grunt, Mr.
Collins dropped his gaze back to the grave. “The duke thought my daughter belonged _here _ and not in the Damon family crypt.” Resentment laced his voice. “According to him, she was scarcely his duchess before she died.” Mr. Collins settled both hands on the head of his cane and shrugged as if it mattered little now.
Even knowing nothing of the situation, and little of Dominic’s father, she heard herself voice with her usual candor, “That shouldn’t matter.”
He turned those gray eyes on her again, his expression somber as ever. “I couldn’t agree with you more. She died bringing the duke’s heir into this world. She earned her place in the crypt.”
His words gave her a start. She was quite positive that she should not find accord of any kind with a man that reared Dominic with such cruel neglect, placing him with a governess who abused him.
And yet in that moment, standing in a graveyard with the wind whistling around them, she realized they were both two souls adrift. Cast apart from Dominic. A strange sense of kinship filled her chest and she stood a little closer to the old man who swayed at each gust of wind.
Perhaps Fallon wasn’t the only one to feel the crush of Dominic’s rejection. True, he would not see asking her to stay on as his mistress as a rejection, but she could see it as nothing else.
Nothing more than a gouge to her heart. A heart that demanded more. Sighing, she shook her head. _Everything _ it seemed.
She thought of her newly achieved home with its green ivy and sweet-smelling honeysuckle. It was more than she ever hoped for…and yet no longer enough.
Suddenly, impulse seized her. Lifting her chin, she heard herself asking before she could reconsider, “Do you care for chicken soup, Mr. Collins?”
Chapter 29
This time, the secretary sent word.
The missive was brief, succinct. Dominic dropped it into the fire after reading it and rested his arm along the mantel, studying the curling fingers of fire devouring the parchment.
Still, the words floated before his eyes. Your grandfather is dying. If you wish to see him ,come with all haste.
This was it, then. His jaw clenched.
He wasn’t going, of course. His feelings on the matter had not changed since he last spoke with Meadows at his club. His feelings had not changed. But he had.
The last weeks had altered him. He hardly slept, scarcely ate. His usual brandy held no appeal.
Ethan had stopped by and tried to coax him out of his melancholy. Dominic had spent the entire time quizzing him on Fallon, trying to discover the location of her long-soughthome . All to no avail.
If she wants you to know, she will contact you. The response had sent him into a rage. The fact that Hunt knew her location—was perhaps maintaining contact with her—filled him with impotent fury. His hand fisted. Rather than thrash his lifelong friend to an inch of his life, Dominic had ordered him from his house.
No matter how he tried, he could not stop thinking about Fallon. Wrong as it was. She had her home now. All she ever desired. And yet he had hired a Bow Street runner to locate her. He didn’t quite know why. Even if he knew where to find here, he could offer her no more than he had before. He could not be the man she deserved. Fidelity, marriage, the type of husband to escort her to church on Sunday. A proper, loving husband. He could give her none of that.
If he were honorable, he would leave her in peace. Permit her to move on with her life. But then he had never been the honorable sort.
He would not stay away. He doubted he ever would…ever could. Even if he found her years from now, married with a horde of children at her skirts, he would still want her. She was a fire in his blood and he’d been a fool to ever let her go. For her sake, he hoped the Bow Street runner did not locate her. Because he was too selfish to let her slip away a second time.
The memory of Fallon as he had last seen her smoldered through him: her taste, her touch…her voice. In particular, the words she had last spoken to him. He jammed his eyes shut. If you don’t see your grandfather ,you shall regret it.
His hand tightened on the mantel, the flesh of his palm tight, unable to stretch. Why did he have to remember those words? Why now? He found himself shoving from the mantel with a savage curse. He strode from the room, his lips set in a grim line, one destination on his mind.
For Fallon. He would go for her. He shook his head as he strode into the foyer and called for Adams to ready his mount.
Because she had lost her father. Because he had never known his. Because, like it or not, Rupert Collins was the closest thing to a parent he had ever known. Dominic would see him to his Maker. Only then would he be well and truly rid of the old man and the past. With luck, all those painful memories would depart with him. Then he would be free.
With only Fallon left to haunt him.
“Shall we continue with chapter sixteen?” Fallon lifted the book from the rosewood side table and flipped the crisp pages, searching for the spot where she left off last time.
A rattled breath answered her as she found her page. Her gaze caught on the brass-headed cane sitting beside the bed. As it had sat for the last fortnight. Almost as though Mr. Collins would rise and grasp it in his gnarled hand.
She wished he would. They had fallen into a pattern before he took to his bed. A pattern she missed. Luncheon or tea at her cottage followed with a walk through her garden. Granted, the walks grew gradually shorter in the days before the fall that led to his confinement. Now she called upon him at Wayfield Park, reading and chatting and pretending as though she did not sit in the home of Dominic’s childhood, as though these walls had not borne witness to his unhappy youth…to the years that had formed him and shaped him into the hard man she happened to love.
Mr. Collins coughed. She set down the book and lifted a glass of water from the bedside table.
With a hand under his nape, she helped him rise. After a sip, he lowered back down, his gray-blue eyes fixing on her. “You’re still lurking about here.” His voice scraped the air in low and raspy tones.
She leaned forward, as if confessing a great secret. “I have to find out how the book ends.”
He gave her a shaky smile. “He was a fool to let you go.”
Her own smile slipped. She had confided some of her past to him during the last fortnight. He had pressed her with questions, so she had told him…without revealing that the man who broke her heart happened to be his grandson.
“I’m certain he regrets it now.” His rheumy gaze grew distant. “We all regret things after they’re said and done.”
Those few words seemed to cost him. His breath came shallower, as if he fought for each sip of air.
“Easy there,” she murmured, smoothing her hand over his, knowing his words were not solely aimed at the unspecified man she told him left her heartbroken. They were aimed at himself.
More than once he had spoken with remorse over the past. And on those occasions, she knew he meant Dominic. Ironic that they referred to the same person.
He worked his lips, grunting, “Read on.”
Reclaiming the book, she found her page again, noticing that her fingers trembled. His words had done it. Thoughts, memories flooded her. Not now. Don’t think of him now.
Spending time with Mr. Collins only reinforced her thoughts of Dominic. She saw him everywhere. As a boy running the halls of the great mausoleum that was Wayfield Park. In the gray eyes of his grandfather. And she felt guilty. Guilty for being in this house. With his grandfather. Guilty for finding peace with the man that Dominic could not bring himself to even visit. The peace that belonged to him, even if he was too stubborn to claim it.
And yet in some small way, she felt as though she were doing this _for _ Dominic. Being with his grandfather when he could not. Would not.
For Dominic. For the day he realized he should have been here. Perhaps it would console him to learn that someone had been—that _she _ had been.
The sound of hooves broke the quiet afternoon, growing from a faint echo to an angry din of clatter on the drive. Mr. Collins’s eyes slid in the direction of the window. She pushed up from the chair and parted the damask drapes. Her heart seized in her chest at the tall figure vaulting from his horse. Even high above, she would know him anywhere. The way he moved. The brush of his too-long hair against the collar of his jacket.
She had fought the feeling, resisted it like a bad cold creeping into her lungs. She had plunged ahead into her new life: settling into her home, meeting and greeting the curious, well-intentioned neighbors and villagers, spending time in her garden. Her garden. She paused. It felt remarkable to even think those words.
On a whim, she had decided to create an arrangement for the church. A small thing to do for the community that had embraced her with such warmth. A few of the residents recalled her father.
Even her. There was something in that, she supposed. Almost as though she really had returned home. Something to distract from the ache for a man incapable of emotion. Incapable of love. A man she would never see again.
She did not fear meeting Dominic here. Even with Wayfield Park a rock throw’s distance, it was the last place he would visit. Her cottage on the southeast corner of Little’s Saums posed even less of a threat.
She had convinced herself the ache wouldn’t last. Like any sickness, it would pass and she would grow stronger from it.
She strolled along the churchyard, pausing at the gate to the cemetery. Dull light peered down through tree branches. She spied a figure bending awkwardly at a grave, clinging to a brass-headed cane as he set flowers upon it. Extravagant yellow tulips. Cheerful for the dreary afternoon.
The gentleman stood, straightening his frame and lifting his face to the muted light. There was no mistaking him. Dominic’s grandfather. Mr. Collins. Not quite at death’s door, it would seem.
Something terrible twisted inside her at the sight of this man who caused Dominic such pain.
Who made him what he was—a man who could never love. Never love me. Not as she loved him. And she did love him. Painful as it was to admit, painful as it was to feel. And she did feel it. Every day.
Jaw set, she strode ahead, her strides swift and purposeful, even if what she would _say _ to him remained a void.
He looked up, startled at her approach. “Who are you?” he snapped.
“Fallon O’Rourke.” She stopped.
He appraised her critically. “Am I supposed to know you?”
“I’ve taken residence at the cottage just beyond the old mill.”
He nodded once, the motion curt, dismissive. With a grunt, he turned his attention back to the grave.
He reminded her a little of herself just then. Enough that she could only stand and stare. No doubt Wayfield Park abounded with servants. People left and right. Yet here he stood. Looking as she felt. Alone. Lonely.
Fallon had only thought to claim her home and everything would be right. Solved. Happy, even.
But at night, long after the Redley sisters had departed for the day, she climbed into bed and lay alone. There she could not fool herself. Nothing felt right. She had not counted upon the stark sense of aloneness that would come with living independently. The humming silence of her house. The quiet hush of her breath in the room. In her bed. Damn Dominic. He had ruined everything for her.
She followed Mr. Collin’s gaze, reading the marker and feeling a small flicker of surprise.
“Would not the Duchess of Damon be buried with her family?”
He turned steel gray eyes on her. Eyes so familiar that she felt a second stab of surprise. “She is.”
There was no family crypt at Wayfield Park? _Unusual. _ Fallon shook her head, glancing at the markers near Dominic’s mother, wondering why she did not then see the grave for Dominic’s father.
“How do you know me?”
“I saw you in church last Sunday.” She had no intention of revealing the specifics of the first time she saw him.
“Mr. Simmons needs to work more on his oration. Too many ‘ahems.’” With a grunt, Mr.
Collins dropped his gaze back to the grave. “The duke thought my daughter belonged _here _ and not in the Damon family crypt.” Resentment laced his voice. “According to him, she was scarcely his duchess before she died.” Mr. Collins settled both hands on the head of his cane and shrugged as if it mattered little now.
Even knowing nothing of the situation, and little of Dominic’s father, she heard herself voice with her usual candor, “That shouldn’t matter.”
He turned those gray eyes on her again, his expression somber as ever. “I couldn’t agree with you more. She died bringing the duke’s heir into this world. She earned her place in the crypt.”
His words gave her a start. She was quite positive that she should not find accord of any kind with a man that reared Dominic with such cruel neglect, placing him with a governess who abused him.
And yet in that moment, standing in a graveyard with the wind whistling around them, she realized they were both two souls adrift. Cast apart from Dominic. A strange sense of kinship filled her chest and she stood a little closer to the old man who swayed at each gust of wind.
Perhaps Fallon wasn’t the only one to feel the crush of Dominic’s rejection. True, he would not see asking her to stay on as his mistress as a rejection, but she could see it as nothing else.
Nothing more than a gouge to her heart. A heart that demanded more. Sighing, she shook her head. _Everything _ it seemed.
She thought of her newly achieved home with its green ivy and sweet-smelling honeysuckle. It was more than she ever hoped for…and yet no longer enough.
Suddenly, impulse seized her. Lifting her chin, she heard herself asking before she could reconsider, “Do you care for chicken soup, Mr. Collins?”
Chapter 29
This time, the secretary sent word.
The missive was brief, succinct. Dominic dropped it into the fire after reading it and rested his arm along the mantel, studying the curling fingers of fire devouring the parchment.
Still, the words floated before his eyes. Your grandfather is dying. If you wish to see him ,come with all haste.
This was it, then. His jaw clenched.
He wasn’t going, of course. His feelings on the matter had not changed since he last spoke with Meadows at his club. His feelings had not changed. But he had.
The last weeks had altered him. He hardly slept, scarcely ate. His usual brandy held no appeal.
Ethan had stopped by and tried to coax him out of his melancholy. Dominic had spent the entire time quizzing him on Fallon, trying to discover the location of her long-soughthome . All to no avail.
If she wants you to know, she will contact you. The response had sent him into a rage. The fact that Hunt knew her location—was perhaps maintaining contact with her—filled him with impotent fury. His hand fisted. Rather than thrash his lifelong friend to an inch of his life, Dominic had ordered him from his house.
No matter how he tried, he could not stop thinking about Fallon. Wrong as it was. She had her home now. All she ever desired. And yet he had hired a Bow Street runner to locate her. He didn’t quite know why. Even if he knew where to find here, he could offer her no more than he had before. He could not be the man she deserved. Fidelity, marriage, the type of husband to escort her to church on Sunday. A proper, loving husband. He could give her none of that.
If he were honorable, he would leave her in peace. Permit her to move on with her life. But then he had never been the honorable sort.
He would not stay away. He doubted he ever would…ever could. Even if he found her years from now, married with a horde of children at her skirts, he would still want her. She was a fire in his blood and he’d been a fool to ever let her go. For her sake, he hoped the Bow Street runner did not locate her. Because he was too selfish to let her slip away a second time.
The memory of Fallon as he had last seen her smoldered through him: her taste, her touch…her voice. In particular, the words she had last spoken to him. He jammed his eyes shut. If you don’t see your grandfather ,you shall regret it.
His hand tightened on the mantel, the flesh of his palm tight, unable to stretch. Why did he have to remember those words? Why now? He found himself shoving from the mantel with a savage curse. He strode from the room, his lips set in a grim line, one destination on his mind.
For Fallon. He would go for her. He shook his head as he strode into the foyer and called for Adams to ready his mount.
Because she had lost her father. Because he had never known his. Because, like it or not, Rupert Collins was the closest thing to a parent he had ever known. Dominic would see him to his Maker. Only then would he be well and truly rid of the old man and the past. With luck, all those painful memories would depart with him. Then he would be free.
With only Fallon left to haunt him.
“Shall we continue with chapter sixteen?” Fallon lifted the book from the rosewood side table and flipped the crisp pages, searching for the spot where she left off last time.
A rattled breath answered her as she found her page. Her gaze caught on the brass-headed cane sitting beside the bed. As it had sat for the last fortnight. Almost as though Mr. Collins would rise and grasp it in his gnarled hand.
She wished he would. They had fallen into a pattern before he took to his bed. A pattern she missed. Luncheon or tea at her cottage followed with a walk through her garden. Granted, the walks grew gradually shorter in the days before the fall that led to his confinement. Now she called upon him at Wayfield Park, reading and chatting and pretending as though she did not sit in the home of Dominic’s childhood, as though these walls had not borne witness to his unhappy youth…to the years that had formed him and shaped him into the hard man she happened to love.
Mr. Collins coughed. She set down the book and lifted a glass of water from the bedside table.
With a hand under his nape, she helped him rise. After a sip, he lowered back down, his gray-blue eyes fixing on her. “You’re still lurking about here.” His voice scraped the air in low and raspy tones.
She leaned forward, as if confessing a great secret. “I have to find out how the book ends.”
He gave her a shaky smile. “He was a fool to let you go.”
Her own smile slipped. She had confided some of her past to him during the last fortnight. He had pressed her with questions, so she had told him…without revealing that the man who broke her heart happened to be his grandson.
“I’m certain he regrets it now.” His rheumy gaze grew distant. “We all regret things after they’re said and done.”
Those few words seemed to cost him. His breath came shallower, as if he fought for each sip of air.
“Easy there,” she murmured, smoothing her hand over his, knowing his words were not solely aimed at the unspecified man she told him left her heartbroken. They were aimed at himself.
More than once he had spoken with remorse over the past. And on those occasions, she knew he meant Dominic. Ironic that they referred to the same person.
He worked his lips, grunting, “Read on.”
Reclaiming the book, she found her page again, noticing that her fingers trembled. His words had done it. Thoughts, memories flooded her. Not now. Don’t think of him now.
Spending time with Mr. Collins only reinforced her thoughts of Dominic. She saw him everywhere. As a boy running the halls of the great mausoleum that was Wayfield Park. In the gray eyes of his grandfather. And she felt guilty. Guilty for being in this house. With his grandfather. Guilty for finding peace with the man that Dominic could not bring himself to even visit. The peace that belonged to him, even if he was too stubborn to claim it.
And yet in some small way, she felt as though she were doing this _for _ Dominic. Being with his grandfather when he could not. Would not.
For Dominic. For the day he realized he should have been here. Perhaps it would console him to learn that someone had been—that _she _ had been.
The sound of hooves broke the quiet afternoon, growing from a faint echo to an angry din of clatter on the drive. Mr. Collins’s eyes slid in the direction of the window. She pushed up from the chair and parted the damask drapes. Her heart seized in her chest at the tall figure vaulting from his horse. Even high above, she would know him anywhere. The way he moved. The brush of his too-long hair against the collar of his jacket.
