The Duke’s Dearest Dilemma (Willful Wainwrights #1)

Chapter One

Marsden, the Duke of Harbury’s valet, entered Harbury’s bedchamber. “Ahem.” He made a show of clearing his throat. “Her Grace is prepared to receive His Grace at His Grace’s convenience.”

Harbury laid aside the anonymous letter delivered while he’d been taking his wedding vows—a letter warning of anger building among his tenantry, frustration centered on Harbury Hall’s longtime steward, Anderson.

He would turn his mind to the matter tomorrow.

Tonight, he had other ducal duties to attend. Duties more terrifying to him than vague threats from an unidentifiable source. In moments, he would be expected to bed his wife. A wife he barely knew.

“You may retire,” Harbury replied, hoping Marsden’s smugly knowing expression would be the final wedding night ribbing he’d have to endure.

He rewrapped his heavy, brocaded banyan over his lawn nightshirt then strode across the chamber to the connecting door.

Should he knock first? Or should he just enter?

Enter the duchess’s…

Er, his wife’s…

No, Cassandra’s—Cassie’s?—bed chamber.

Blast.

Only fools vacillated. Dukes—he heard this charge in his father’s voice—were never indecisive.

Harbury had been decisive about Cassandra, alright. Decisive at exactly the wrong time.

A few months earlier, he had swept Cassandra into a waltz at Almack’s even though he’d known the patronesses had strict rules against young ladies waltzing without their permission.

He’d been distracted. Distressed. He’d just seen the lady he’d loved for over a decade, Vivianne, dancing in the arms of her new husband, Lord Pennington.

But instead of creating a soothing diversion, his dance with Cassandra had catapulted both of them into scandal.

Countess Lieven had ordered the music to cease and then skewered Cassandra with one of her infamous dead-eyed glares.

Next, the countess had publicly revoked Cassandra and her twin sister Eliza’s vouchers, setting off a series of events leading to Eliza’s marriage to Harbury’s friend, the Marquess of Redver—a genuine love match—and his own, more Faustian bargain with Cassandra…

a marriage of polite convenience, but for the necessity of begetting an heir.

Reparation toward Cassandra was Harbury’s duty, and her sweet nature suggested she’d be a comfortable, biddable wife.

But, having loved his older sister’s one-time governess from the dawn of his manhood, he did not believe he could ever fully eradicate Viv, now Lady Pennington, from his heart.

So, he’d promised Cassandra all he thought himself capable of giving—his name and his home.

Now, however, standing in front of his wife’s door, his thickening blood forced him to acknowledge an alarming physical attraction to his wife, one he’d only become aware of today, when he’d taken her hand, and she’d placed herself forever in his keeping.

Since then, his very inconvenient attraction had only increased.

Desire weighted his legs, shrunk his lungs, and tore at the already gaping hole in his chest.

Want left him terrified. Terrified and yearning. He knew this feeling, this needy, possessive yearning. He hated this feeling.

Early this morning—so early the sun had yet to impose a patina of pink over night’s dark vault—Marsden had awoken him from a brandy-drenched slumber.

Humbly, Harbury had submitted to all manner of preparation and pampering.

He’d been shaved, buffed, scented, and then pressed into his starched finest, good as new—according to Marsden.

“New?” His friend Adrian had countered. “He looks like a peacock.”

“Never you mind him.” Marsden had side-eyed the marquess—an impertinence tolerated since Marsden had known them both their whole lives. “The foremost duty of a man about to wed is to be pleasing to his lady.”

His. Lady.

“Excellent advice!” Adrian had exclaimed. “Remember, Harbury—be pleasing. Even you should be able to manage congeniality for one day.”

And so, making a sincere attempt, Harbury had skated through a dizzying whirl beginning with solemn exhortations from a stern-faced bishop, and stringing through the well-wishes of a disconcerting number of ladies with painted faces and an equally bewildering number of men giving hearty, male backslaps, before ending in one, sumptuous breakfast lasting well into the afternoon.

But, in his efforts to render himself acceptable to his lady, he’d become aware of her in a new way. She was kind, lovely, and desirable. She deserved his heart—a heart he had given someone else long ago.

Now, the guests had all departed, the brandy had worn off, and other kinds of spirits whispered in the shadows. Ghosts, perhaps, of the formidable dukes who had preceded him. They urged him to plant his seed, complete the deed.

Several hundred years ago, he wouldn’t have had a choice.

Wedding guests would have been waiting below, or even inside the bedchamber, for proof of consummation.

As a lad, he’d even sniggered over a woodcut of a priest leering over a couple in bed in The Romance of Melusine.

Then, of course, he’d been young and randy and made thoroughly stupid by anything associated with rutting.

Rutting. He frowned.

Could one rut with a wife? The word felt wrong. Vulgar.

What did one call marital consummation, apart from consummation, which surely only applied the first time? Amorous congress, perhaps?

Amorous. His mouth further tightened. He should love his wife.

His sweet wife.

His gentle, biddable, careful wife, with her dark, thick chestnut hair, her long, soft fingers, and her wide, perceptive, intelligent blue eyes. His wife, whom he had known for mere weeks. His wife, whom he did not love but had still bound to him until death they would part.

He did want her, however.

His breath had caught when she’d appeared on the threshold of the church’s open doors.

His throat had further constricted as she’d advanced toward him, her gown’s silver cloth shimmering and swishing over a champagne-pale chemise.

Her contained bearing, her pale skin, and her faint-but-gracious smile created the impression of otherworldliness, inviolability.

Except now, he—in the name of ducal dynasty—was tasked with breaking the spell.

After tonight, she would be inviolable no more.

Well—he took another deep breath—he would begin as he meant to go on. Dutifully. Honorably. She was his, under the law and in God’s eyes. And, for better or worse, he would, as promised, worship her with his body.

He nodded to himself, banished the ghosts, and knocked on the door to his wife’s boudoir.

“Enter,” she called out in a voice almost too quiet to hear. After a beat she added, “please.”

Just like her to say “please.” She was always so very polite.

He entered. The sconces on either side of the bed were aglow, further softening the already delicately elegant interior.

He was alien inside her bedchamber. Hard, large, and male.

He knew how to demand, how to choose an aim and bluster his way to the end.

But to petition? To entreat? To lure? What did he know of such things?

Tonight, the skills on which he had been taught to rely were useless.

“Well…” his voice trailed. Well, what? He couldn’t simply ask, Fancy a tumble? He chose a simple greeting. “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” she replied with a blush.

The physical sign of her responsiveness sent another, overwhelming surge of desire washing over him—want, keen and focused. The wave withdrew, leaving him with increasingly leaden limbs and a tight, uncomfortable feeling in his groin.

His gaze dropped from her averted eyes to her lips. He contemplated kissing her as he wanted to kiss her—open-mouthed and passionate.

The location of his stomach shifted, leaving him queasy.

In the nascent years of his manhood when he was no longer a boy but not yet of age, he’d spent hours clandestinely kissing Vivianne—who, by then, was employed as his sister’s companion.

Experience made him bolder, and soon he’d taken to whispering outrageous suggestions into her ears.

Suggestions which left her giggling and sighing and promising him all once they were wed. But she’d married another.

Twice.

The first, after taking a bribe from his father. The second—more painfully—of her own volition.

He couldn’t kiss Cassandra in the same manner he’d kissed Viv. It wouldn’t be right. Even when church consecrated, lust without love felt like sin.

Like disrespect.

In silence, his wife pulled back the coverlet. She shifted her position, creating more space on his side of her bed. Even in the dim flicker of candlelight her white night rail merely muted her long, shapely legs, the dark patch of her womanhood, and the hints of color around her nipples.

She was lovely. Not overtly alluring like Viv, but still—

He shuttered the disloyal thought.

To be thinking now of Vivianne was not just unkind, but a betrayal, both to his wife and to his future children.

Cassandra lifted her hand. Her first finger stretched toward him while the others draped as if curling over an invisible balustrade.

He knew so little about her, but he liked her hands.

Her features she kept schooled, her posture erect, but her hands were nearly always in motion.

Those hands hinted at deeper secrets. Secrets she might never trust him enough to reveal.

The thought made him want to try harder to know her. Perhaps even…

But no. Vivianne had cut a groove in his heart no one else could fill.

He grasped Cassandra’s palm and raised her fingers to his lips. She held his gaze as he placed a kiss on the heavy gold band he’d fitted there just hours ago, and then into each of the four soft valleys between her knuckles.

Honored.

And he was. Truly.

He wanted to tell her. But he hadn’t given her any reason to believe him.