Duke of Thunder (Regency Gods #1)

Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

F or the next few days, Helen longed passionately for the days when her main problem was that she did not have sufficient connections to find a husband for her sister.

After that disastrous outing with Xander—oh, excuse her , His Grace the most eminent Duke of Godwin—Helen would have preferred to hide under her blankets to emerge only on her wedding day, which was scheduled for the end of the week.

She hadn’t, after all, expected him to be happy about this hideous mess, but she hadn’t expected that whole spot of lunacy about the burden of his name or whatever he’d called it. She’d thought, rather, that he’d been cross because he’d thought her complicit, whereupon she’d planned to make the precise argument he’d made in her defense—she was neither so cruel nor so stupid as to do such a thing.

Her na?ve country girl’s heart had thought that would fix things.

But no . He had ideas about the way things had to be .

Men! God, the lot of them were useless.

Not that she was all that keen on ladies at the moment, either. The women of the ton had, after all, descended on her en masse starting the day of that trip along Rotten Row. They alternately wanted to ingratiate themselves to a future duchess or insult her for her scandal.

“The Duke of Godwin was always so clever,” said Lady Asquith. “We all should have counted on him to find a diamond in the rough.”

“Sometimes marriages do come from…unconventional associations,” sniffed Miss Petunia Ashley-Cooper while her mother looked as though she smelled something unpleasant.

“Good for you, gel,” said the ancient Lady Arundell. “T’was savvy is what it was.”

And those were just the A’s.

She’d also had visitors from every letter of the cursed alphabet, all the way down to Misses Edwina and Roberta la Zouche, the twin spinster daughters of Baron Zouche, who perched on the edge of the settee like a pair of birds.

It had been, in a word, a nightmare.

Helen felt, therefore, that she could not be blamed when, the day before the wedding, something simply snapped inside her.

She threw her cloak over her shoulders and stalked down the stairs.

“Tell my sister and cousin I’m going out, if they ask,” she told the butler, who had started to look as if he was considering whether his position was truly worth the trouble these past few days. “If they don’t, fine. I don’t care.”

In the back of her mind, she recognized that this was not the behavior of any normal young lady, let alone the behavior of the perfect duchess that her future husband seemed to envision.

But her options were to be vaguely snappish about her whereabouts or start screaming and perhaps never stop. So Helen felt that she’d chosen well, on balance.

Night had just fallen, which made it actually one of the best times to move through Mayfair unobserved by Society. While country folk would be out and about at this hour, returning home from fields and gathering in local pubs, well-heeled Londoners were rousing from their afternoon naps and undertaking the elaborate task of their various toilettes before supping no earlier than nine o’clock in the evening.

Helen might as well have been invisible as she quietly hired a hack and went to Oldhill House, the Lightholders’ London home.

“Good evening,” she said to the butler when he opened the door. She’d decided along the way that she planned to act as though she had every right to be there. After all, starting tomorrow, this would be her home, no matter how much that thought made her worry she was about to break out in hives. “I’m here to see His Grace. Is he in?”

It was unsurprising, of course, that the butler to the most powerful family in Britain was too well-trained to show even a flicker of surprise when an unchaperoned woman showed up at the door. It made equal sense that he knew the woman who was about to marry into the family on sight.

“Of course, Miss Fletcher,” he said, stepping aside and holding the door for her to enter. “Please come in; allow me to take your cloak. I will take you to His Grace in his study.”

“Thank you very much,” Helen said. It was the very last ounce of politeness she had in her body.

As such, she lasted until the millisecond the door closed behind her in the duke’s study before she exploded.

“This is ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “This is ridiculous, and you’re being ridiculous!”

The duke carefully finished what he was writing, blotted the ink, laid down his pen, set it aside, and only then looked up at her.

“Good afternoon, Miss Fletcher. How can I help you?”

Oh, she was going to kill him. See what her reputation looked like when she murdered the man!

“Is this really how you want things to be?” she demanded. She wasn’t certain that she was angry, not exactly. He had so clearly believed all the absolutely insane things he was saying about duty and image and all that. It made it quite hard to be cross at him, sort of like how you couldn’t blame an injured animal for snapping at you when you tried to help it.

But staring down a lifetime of just…going along with that lunacy? It made something cavernous open inside her, and that gaping maw of uncertainty made her feel twitchy. She couldn’t live with it. She’d end up mad herself.

Even if it changed nothing, she had to say something.

He looked vaguely remorseful as he stood, unfolding himself from behind his chair and coming to stand nearer to her—nearer, but not near. Far enough that there was none of the crackling energy that so often sparked between them.

“No, it’s not how I want things to be,” he said, though nothing about the admission gave her any cause for hope. “But it’s how things must be.”

Tears of frustration sprung to Helen’s eyes, but she blinked them away. She didn’t want him to think she was crying over him. She had enough pride for that.

“Then why ask me to marry you?” she demanded. “You said it yourself— your reputation would have recovered. Why not let me hang and have done with it?”

His hand twitched, almost like it was going to reach for her, but he stopped it.

“Because that would have been unjust,” he said. It was so dispassionate that it left a bitter taste in her mouth. He said it as though he would have proposed marriage to a fish if he’d ruined that fish’s reputation. It was not about Helen at all.

And that did not at all align with the man who had caressed her until she’d detonated, who had murmured filthy words in her ear. She could not believe that the man who had, when offered his use of her body, worried about her readiness could be the same as this man. The one who looked at her as though she could be swapped with any other woman without any trouble at all.

“I don’t understand,” she said, hating how her voice cracked a little on the admission. “Why? Why is this what is required?”

He took one more step toward her. It was the kind of step that felt like the prelude to an embrace, to some kind of comfort, but again, he stopped himself.

“It has been my duty all my life,” he said, “and it will be your duty soon, as well. We must protect the dignity and safety of the house and title.”

“And us being friends would diminish that?”

Friendship would have been a fine consolation. She didn’t expect him to fall on his knees in raptures of love now that they were to be wed. This was, if not quite a marriage of convenience, then one at least destined to minimize inconvenience . Which was, ultimately, all Helen had ever hoped to find for herself. The attraction between them could have been a nice bonus, like a sprinkling of sugar atop a bun.

But the duke seemed to want them to behave as strangers. And it simply didn’t make sense.

Frustration was beginning to show in his expression as well, the tiniest crack in his facade.

“Yes,” he said emphatically. “Any show of—of sentiment would open us up to criticism, to censure. People are vultures , Miss Fletcher. The people of the ton especially so. The Lightholders have not retained power because we have been given it; we have retained it because we fought for it. Because we continue to fight for it. Because we stamp out any weaknesses before they can be exploited.”

It was as cynical a worldview as she’d ever encountered. And God help her if it didn’t make her feel rather sad on his behalf.

Because the duke, the man standing before her—he really believed it.

But she didn’t think Xander had believed it. Not truly.

And it was beginning to become clear to her that the fissure between those two men was deep and wide. Perhaps too far to bridge.

Her sadness began to shift toward anger, and she embraced it. It was so much easier to feel. She clenched her fists, knowing a blush was rising to her cheeks.

“And that’s why you have let yourself become one of the most notorious rakes in the country, then?” she asked venomously. “Because you’re terrified of censure? There’s some irregularity in your story, Your Grace. What was it that you said? That you would not credit me with stupidity? Well, the same applies to you, I daresay.”

She saw it, the moment that same thing that had snapped in her snapped in him. He stepped forward, and she stumbled back until her spine was pressed against the edge of one of his bookshelves. The wood was hard where it prodded against her, but the support was oddly reassuring, if not entirely comfortable.

The duke gave her the razor-sharp smile of a predator.

And there he was. Xander, again.

She smiled back at him, triumphant.

Of all the maddening chits in the country, Xander felt certain that he had been saddled with the most infuriating one.

Miss Helen Fletcher, who scarcely came up to his shoulder in her flat half-boots, looked up at him, her chin set mulishly.

Why could she not just listen to him ?

Why could he not listen to the wisdom of his own counsel where she was concerned?

The need to make her bend to his will roared in his blood. It put him, unfortunately, in mind of how deliciously she’d yielded to him, how lust-drunk she’d gotten when he’d whispered his intentions for pleasuring her, how delightfully she’d responded to his touches, his caresses, his kisses.

He struggled to cling to anger when desire threatened to come to the fore.

“I suppose I see now what you really came here to ask, Miss Fletcher,” he said, catching himself from using her true name only at the last moment. Starting tomorrow, he’d be able to call her his duchess, his lady. The thought was more appealing than it ought to have been.

“I came to ask why you’re being so recalcitrant,” she insisted, not budging an inch. With each of her heaving breaths, the front of her bodice grazed ever so slightly against the lawn of his shirt.

He hummed thoughtfully.

“No, I don’t think so,” he countered. His mind screamed for him to back away, to stop this foolishness at once, but he could not seem to make his body obey. “I think you came here to ask me if I’m going to continue chasing women.”

Her breath caught. Her bravado slipped just a little.

“Are you?” she asked, sounding as though she hated herself for the question.

The predator in Xander purred. The duke urged him to withdraw.

The predator won.

He bent forward, his little bride pinned before him, moving slowly enough that he could catalog each one of her reactions. Her breaths grew even shallower. A hint of gooseflesh rippled across her skin.

He pressed a slow, wet kiss behind her ear and felt her pulse leap where her throat touched his.

When he pulled back, that lust-drunk look was back in her eyes. He wanted to roar with triumph.

“Certainly not, little rabbit,” he said. For once, the duke and the man agreed that he would be faithful to his bride. “Why would I? After all, from now on, I shall have you to satisfy me.”

Her mouth dropped open, and no power on earth could have stopped him from kissing her. He plundered her mouth, his tongue tangling with hers, his hands sliding up to her hair like they belonged there.

They do , the predator said. She belongs to you.

Not yet, countered the duke. And never truly .

He tore himself away so quickly that he was halfway across the room before she opened her eyes. She looked bewildered and hurt.

But she was clever, wasn’t she, the little Northern girl who was set to become a duchess? For it took her no more than two breaths to gather that, no, they would not be finding their pleasure in one another.

Any such satisfaction—for either of them—would have to wait.

“I’ll call you a carriage,” he said, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat before continuing. He couldn’t meet her eye, which was nothing less than rank cowardice. “Tomorrow is set to be a trying day. You should get rest and prepare.”

A pause and then?—

“Don’t trouble yourself,” she said, voice steady and sure. “My driver will be waiting. Good day, Your Grace.”

It was, in all honesty, a perfectly proper response. She was nothing less than the cool duchess he’d commanded her to be. She curtseyed with exact politeness and then left the room looking composed and calm.

Xander hated it. Hated it .

Still, images had to be maintained. So he waited until the door had clicked shut behind her, then another few moments until he knew she wouldn’t turn back.

And only then did he drop into his chair and let his head drop into his hands, sighing a sigh that echoed down to his soul.