Duke of Thunder (Regency Gods #1)

Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

H elen watched her husband as he shrugged his shoulders, as if shaking off everything that had just happened, then turned back to face her, a neutral expression on his face.

“Your cousin,” he said lightly, “is an extraordinarily dislikable man.”

Helen launched herself into his arms.

It was a credit to Xander’s keen reflexes that he caught her handily, gathering her up against him, even as his shock morphed into a smile.

“Hullo,” he said, looking as light and boyish as Helen had ever seen him. “What’s all this?”

“You—” She didn’t have words.

So, she kissed him instead.

Xander made a quiet noise of surprise—which really was his own fault, Helen decided, as he ought to anticipate her sudden kisses by this point—and then kissed her back. She was quickly left breathless.

She kissed him a little bit more, anyway.

When the need for air became truly pressing, she pulled away.

“What was that for?” Xander asked, a hint of a smile curling his lips up at the edges.

She nudged his shoulder. “Don’t play coy,” she said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

He grinned more broadly.

“Yes, I was rather heroic, wasn’t I?” he asked, even as he snaked a hand around her waist, then gripped her bottom and used the leverage to hike her tighter against him.

“You were,” she agreed, though goodness only knew that his ego didn’t need inflating.

“And I admit that it felt rather good to manhandle the bastard,” he admitted. He looked extraordinarily pleased with herself, and Helen was horrified to note that it sent the kind of warmth through her that was reminiscent of the pleasure they’d shared together in her bedchamber the night prior.

She absolutely refused to find his smugness alluring. He would be simply intolerable if he ever realized she felt such a thing.

“I might be the tiniest bit jealous of that part,” she teased. “I have longed to throw my cousin out of many a room in the past.”

He chuckled, and the reverberations made her want to press her cheek against his chest. Then she realized that she could do precisely that and did so. He, in turn, leaned so that his own face was resting against her hair.

“And I cannot thank you enough for having my sister stay with us,” she murmured, feeling extraordinarily soothed by the steady thump-thump of his heart. “I confess that I’ve been very anxious about leaving her alone with my cousin. She’s a sweet and gentle girl, and he will run over her roughshod.”

His head shifted; she felt a press of lips against her hair.

“You are my wife,” he said simply. “Your enemies are my enemies. Your family is my family.”

This proclamation, delivered without fanfare or requests for praise, warmed Helen straight through to her bones. How long had it been since she’d had an ally? How long since she hadn’t felt as though she must fight all her battles alone?

She melted against him, tears threatening to spill from her eyes.

Which made the way she stiffened all the more sudden when he added, “We shall simply have to educate your sister on proper behavior.”

Helen’s warm feeling vanished, along with any sense of allyship she’d been enjoying.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded, shoving away from him.

She saw her own emotional progression echoed in her husband’s face—softness to surprise to offense, all in the space of a heartbeat.

“It is the same thing that I have been discussing with you, Helen,” he said, voice precise and level. “There are certain obligations that come with being part of a ducal household. Certain ways of behaving. It is a very different life from being the cousin to a viscount or the lady of the village in some remote, Northern town.”

And there it was. The reminder that Helen—and Patricia, too, of course—was an outsider, would always be an outsider. That even when she’d married the most eligible bachelor in the ton , she would never truly belong.

It had been one thing when the insults had been directed at her. Helen was used to not being enough—or worse, too much. Too unfashionable. Accent too strong, too Northern. Too headstrong.

But Patricia? Patricia was all sweetness and light. She was a girl who had once wept when one of the housecats had brought a dead mouse to her as a gift. She was a girl who would sit patiently for hours to lure a skittish animal to eat, to approach so she could heal its hurts.

Helen would not abide insults to her sister. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

“I see,” she said, as cold as Xander had ever been, even when he wore his ducal facade like sword and shield. Perhaps he would like that, would enjoy a taste of his own medicine. “My sister is inadequate. How considerate of you to point that out.”

Again, she saw her own feelings reflected back at her: anger, quickly replaced by froideur .

“It isn’t a question of adequacy, and you know it,” he snapped back. “You bear the Lightholder name, now. Your sister will live under our protection. That means that she will have to learn not to go skulking in corners with strange gentleman. Don’t be absurd, Helen.”

Helen herself hadn’t been pleased with Patricia for that, something that only increased her anger at Xander for pointing it out. Drat him for having the audacity to make a good point.

She let her frustration leech into her words.

“Absurd, am I?” she scoffed. “Need I remind you that the person with whom she was ‘skulking’ was you?”

“That’s hardly the point. It’s different?—”

“Oh, it’s different ,” she interjected, throwing up her hands. “Yes, of course it’s different . You’re a man. You’re a duke. The world bends to your will. You can do as you please and damn the consequences. And then there is my sister and me. We are mere women. We are just here to shut our mouths and do as we are bid.”

Xander’s face was thunderous. “It isn’t as though you’ve ever tried it,” he sniped. “Perhaps if you strove for just a bit of decorum, you might see that it’s worth your while.”

A distant, very small part of Helen recognized that if she stayed here any longer, she would say something that she couldn’t take back. A larger, louder part of her wanted to forge ahead anyway, to snap and shout and shriek. She wanted to cry that she was what he’d always known her to be, and if he regretted marrying her, that was his own problem to bear. She could not be other than what she was.

But the logical part prevailed. She was merely a woman. She could only do as she was bid. Because she had no power. She had nothing except for what Xander gave her. And if she irrevocably lost his goodwill, she would never save her sister.

And Helen would do anything to save Patricia from a marriage to George. Anything. She would journey into hell and back; she would risk life and limb for her sister.

So, compared to that, perhaps losing her pride was a rather small cost. Perhaps her unhappiness was a fair trade for her sister’s contentment.

With great force of effort, she clawed her temper back. She forced her back to straighten, commanded her fingers to stay loose as she folded them behind her back.

And then she made sure that there was no emotion in her tone, not an ounce of it, as she raised her chin.

“Of course, Your Grace. Whatever you say.”

She swept past him, leaving the room. And when she returned to her own bedchamber—even when the door was closed and locked behind her, and she was as alone as she had always known herself to be?—

Even then, she did not allow herself to cry.