The Ugly Duchess

Page 25

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
In 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.
For 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.