Jillian Hunter: The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

Funny, she’d have thought he would feel right at home. “Your grace is right, of course. It is all my fault: the fire, the smoke, the-”

“The fire was lit before we entered the room,” he said matter-of-factly. “If anyone is to blame, it should be the idiot who stuffed the grate with newspaper.”

Thunder. Lightning. Rain pummeling the roof. There were certain powers it was useless to resist.

Harriet took her soiled gloves and efficiently swept up the ashes that had fallen on the hearth. Everything else, disregarding her dress, looked in order. The duke had left the curtains parted to emit only a flattering glow into the room. The flocked chinoiserie wallpaper, the delicate armchairs, the Queen Anne clock, appeared to have survived the conflagration unscathed.

The duke reclined, his eyes half closed, on the red tufted couch. Except for the bitter tang of cinders in the air and a brand upon her breast, there was little evidence to raise suspicions when, a half minute later, Charlotte Boscastle escorted Lady Primrose Powlis, Lady Dalrymple, and the duke’s young niece into the room.

Griffin could barely remember the last time he’d felt like laughing. Certainly not in the fourteen months since his brother’s death.

Nor during the eternal journey to London with his meddlesome aunt and his morbid young niece, Edlyn, whose guardianship he had inherited along with a dukedom he did not want. It was assumed that his cousin’s academy would draw the girl out of her gloom and introduce her to a glittering world. He hoped for her sake that such a miracle would be wrought.

It was also assumed that he would take a wife. More than a miracle would be required to bring that momentous event to pass. Before Liam’s death, Griffin had led a charmed life. He’d served his obligatory stint in the cavalry and returned home to the family castle with the full intention of doing absolutely nothing. Liam would inherit the dukedom, and a damned good thing, too.

Griff had no aspirations to either a peerage or the responsibility that went with it. His brother, however, relished the role, riding day for night across his lands, playing the dutiful lord to those who for centuries had depended upon the duke’s largesse.

If a pretty lady crossed his path, Liam thought nothing of taking her to his bed. If a love child resulted from some forgotten affair, he would assume responsibility. What was another benefactor added to the list of a duke’s retainers? Yet as the years passed, the family elders, composed primarily of aging aunts, closed in to curb his reckless ways.

A boy could pursue wicked pleasures for only so long. Did he intend to fulfill his duty as the Duke of Glenmorgan or not? If so, the time had come to leave sporting to his younger siblings and settle down.

He resisted.

His factors had made an unofficial offer of marriage on Liam’s behalf to a young lady in London in the months that followed his father’s death. Liam had met her during a family holiday in Italy. Her beauty was the stuff of legends. So was her fortune. And yet after he came home, he ignored the stream of letters from her family solicitors that first invited and then insisted he step forth to announce his intentions.

Griffin thought it was all a game. Liam was playing everyone like a pack of cards. Why should either of them settle down? Why should he believe the rumors whispered in the village that another woman had captured Liam’s heart?

The answer arrived one early April evening when a castle servant discovered a little girl of seven years or so abandoned on the drawbridge. She had jet-black hair and eyes an unearthly shade of blue that in a certain light looked almost violet. All that could be coaxed from her was that her name was Edlyn and that her mother had left her here to live with her father, who was a duke. She knew, or refused to reveal, nothing else of her background.

Father and daughter loathed each other on sight. Edlyn grieved her mother with a vengeance that seemed unnatural in a young child. She threw fits and refused to eat. She threatened to jump off the turret. She bit her nursemaid’s finger clear to the bone.

Her very existence eclipsed the lives of those who struggled to care for her. Her young aunt Ravenna and the two great-aunts who ruled the castle stopped reassuring themselves that she would outgrow her sorrows.

She ran away the day she turned thirteen and twice a year thereafter. She gave her best gowns to the gypsies and dressed herself in the black crepe of perpetual mourning. She grew her hair to her waist, only to cut it off above her ears one Christmas Day. She sat at the dinner table like a wicked sprite.

Her father forbade her to utter another word about the mother who had abandoned her.

And for reasons he could never fathom, Griffin became her champion. She never confided in him, and for that he was glad. But he was the one she ran to when she was upset, the one who hoisted her on his shoulders and let her swing from the wrought-iron chandelier while he ran around the hall three times, then shouted, “Drop!” And she did, safely in his arms.

It wasn’t that he considered himself to be the family peacemaker. He merely seemed to be the only person in the castle who did not incur her wrath.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you,” she was chanting with her usual malevolence for her father as he sauntered through the passage screen one morning. “I hate you so much that I would burn my bones in acid for a potion to make you die.”

Griffin grabbed an apple from a bowl on the banqueting table. “I hate him, too,” he said genially. “What has the knave done to upset our beautiful Edlyn today?”

Liam, slumped on a bench by a blazing fire, snorted in disgust. “Beautiful? Both of you belong in Bedlam.”

Then, when she stormed off in her usual melodramatic fury, the armorial swords mounted above the fireplace dropped to the stone floor with a clatter that sent the three dozing hounds into a howling frenzy. Liam jumped out of his chair. Griffin fell against the table laughing like the lunatic his brother had just called him. It never occurred to him that Liam might not be immortal. No one in Castle Glenmorgan had died before his time. An unhappy girl’s curse could not alter the course of history.

Liam knelt to the fallen swords. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she did that on purpose.”

“Perhaps she did,” said Aunt Glynnis, studying the tiny spider that dangled from a gossamer thread above her pianoforte.

“She’s definitely inherited the Welsh talent for strangeness,” Aunt Primrose said in concern, the three hounds settling in her tiny shadow.

Liam looked up in vexation. “Is she going to behead me if I don’t obey her nasty little demands?”

Griffin gave him an evil grin. “You’d better start wearing a helmet, or I’ll be the duke, and everyone will be in trouble then.”

“Take the dukedom,” Liam said, touching one of the swords to Griffin’s shoulder. “I dub thee the Most Wicked Duke Who Ever Was. Anyway, I’d rather ride horses in hell than stay in this moldering castle and have a girl who may or-well, damn her, anyway. The next time she runs off, I will not chase after her.”

The two aunts drew a simultaneous gasp that frightened the spiderling up its thread into the blackened rafters. “Don’t say things like that, Liam,” Aunt Glynnis whispered. “That spider might weave your words into the devil’s own web.”

Griffin raised an eyebrow in mischief. “Then I wish I could marry an Irish princess who would make me laugh every night-”