Lily Dalton: Never Desire a Duke

While she could not exactly claim to have shocked Claxton, his eyes had noticeably widened and his lips had parted ever so slightly. For her cool, always-controlled husband, those reactions were quite nearly the equivalent. While the gravity of their exchange did not escape her, she could not deny the satisfaction that rushed through her at having astonished him.

Come home with me tonight.

Did he truly believe it would be that simple? That after months of frigid separation she would forgive and forget? With one of his paramours presently circling the waters of her grandfather’s birthday party like a hungry shark, she was in no mood to do either, nor would she ever be. What sort of husband would subject his wife to such public degradation? If she was honest with herself, she could admit she shared some of the blame.

How differently would things have turned out if she’d waited to confront him about that awful letter at home, rather than reacting like a child and running out of the house in a hysterical rush onto steps slickened with ice? Certainly there would still have been tears and angry words and hurt feelings, but maybe they would still have their child. Perhaps, even, they would still have each other.

Days later, when at last he had come to her, smelling of drink and looking like a man destroyed, he openly confessed an affair with the actress who wrote the letter, but assured her, in a most earnest and forceful manner, that the relationship ended months before their betrothal, before he and Sophia ever met. He swore that despite the unfortunate phrasing of the letter couching the affair in present terms, there had been no further dalliance, not even a spoken word.

She believed him, but still, the ugliness of the incident remained, along with a new air of mistrust between them. Seeking comfort, she withdrew to the warm embrace of her mother and sisters to grieve and to heal, never sharing with them the existence of the letter or the trouble it had caused. Claxton vacated London with Lord Haden and his gentlemen friends for his hunting lodge near Inverness. Weeks passed and he returned, but only out of obligation to his seat in the House. At her mother’s insistence, she too had returned home, yet she found herself very much alone. When not in sessions, Claxton adjourned to his club, or so she thought, but Lord Havering confided to having seen him in numerous St. James’s gambling hells at all hours of the night. On the rare occasions when he came home, his eyes and his manner showed the signs of increased drink and dissolution.

All that she could have forgiven. Time passed, and the heartache of losing the child was not gone, but it had eased in the same way her pain over Vinson’s and her father’s deaths had. She just needed him to talk to her, to say he was sorry, so that she could tell him she was sorry too. Then maybe she could have let him hold her. It was what she wanted more than anything. But then she started to hear rumors, gravely repeated to her by her closest friends at tea and cards, who thought she would want to know. He’d been seen in the company of one unsuitable woman, perhaps two.

Just the normal ton scandal broth, which Sophia did her best to brush off, but then early one morning when he returned home sotted after another night out, Sophia crossed paths with the maid who had retrieved his clothing. A different sort of “letter” had fallen from the pocket of his coat onto the floor between them, carefully folded inside a paper envelope. A French letter, which Sophia had only heard about, but never actually seen. The poor maid, only under duress, identified the awful thing and confirmed its purpose—to prevent a man from getting a woman with child.

Consumed by pain and rage, she hadn’t been able to help herself. As he slept the sleep of the dead, she crept into his room. There, with the mother-of-pearl-handled letter opener he’d given her their first Christmas together, she stabbed the vulgar thing through and wedged the blade into his headboard so that he would awake to it dangling over his head. Relations between them only grew chillier after that.

She’d almost been relieved when in May he’d left her with barely a good-bye, sent abroad by a diplomatic appointment to Reichenbach, without so much as a suggestion that she join him later. Soon, the first letter arrived, then another. Written in his distinctive script—dark, elegant slashes and flamboyant whorls of ink—they informed her of his relocation to Töplitz and eventually Leipzig, including only the sparest descriptions of lodgings and environs, and negotiations, treaties, and battles. There had been no mention by her diplomat husband of the balls and dinners and routs he attended. Those letters came instead from a lively Hanoverian baroness, who in the manner of any social hostess worth her snuff, assured Sophia that her husband was being well entertained.

His mistress? She did not know. She did not know anything anymore.

What she did know was that in London she had awakened each day alone to the silence of Claxton’s magnificent Park Lane house, to the equally magnificent attendance of his servants. His carriage had delivered her about town, wherever she wished to go. There were endless invitations. Constant callers. Every drawing room and shop welcomed her enthusiastically as his duchess. His accountants paid her bills without question.

Yet every night she went to bed feeling like a fraud, her only company the whispers that followed her everywhere, celebrating her husband of little more than a year as a connoisseur of beautiful women, a libertine, and a rogue. She’d been left to suffer it alone, managing, she believed, to keep the worst of it from her family’s collective ear.

Come home with me tonight.

No, their reunion would not be as simple as that. Her breathing slowed.

Exactly how long had she stood here, behind this column? Not that she wished for Claxton to pursue her, but—

He would come after her, would he not?

With all discretion, she peeked through the heads and shoulders of party guests, in the direction from whence she had come. Her mouth grew dry. Claxton was gone.

Shock rippled through her, leaving her lips and fingertips numb. Did she, as his wife, matter so little to him that he would not pursue her? Worse yet, would he do as she had challenged him to do and spend his night with another? A sudden vision of Claxton tangled in silken sheets with the buxom, vacant-eyed Lady Meltenbourne—

“Sophia.”

“No!” she exclaimed, her head turning so abruptly her curls bounced off her nose.

The devil himself stared down at her, his face mere inches from hers. Cool liquid permeated her glove, dampening her palm. His hand came beneath hers to steady the glass, a gesture so unexpected and intimate that she gasped.

“No?” he repeated, one dark eyebrow elevated in question.

“ Oh ,” she insisted. “I meant, ‘Oh.’”

Oh, Claxton , her inner femininity sighed in spite of everything.

Upon close inspection, Claxton had not a single perfect feature. Yet with all the imperfect pieces of him put together, what a compelling picture he made. He was handsome in that way, yes, but shared nothing in common with the affable, fashionable dandies portrayed in contemporary fashion plates. His attractiveness was all darkness and intensity combined with the power of uncommon height, broad shoulders, and the lean musculature of an athlete.

She stood taller and straightened her shoulders, attempting in whatever small way to match him. She hated how he always made her feel like a child.

“You’ve stained your glove,” he observed quietly, glancing down, then again into her eyes.

She did not breathe. Could not breathe with him standing so near and scrutinizing her with such interest. With his shoulder to the column, he held her gaze with the easy confidence of a roué who feared no rebuff, which only infuriated her because in contrast she had known nothing but his disregard.