Chapter 10
Frances’ heart would not stop slamming against her ribs.
He was standing in her doorway in his shirtsleeves, his cravat loosened at the throat, and for a moment that stretched far longer than it had any right to, neither of them moved.
Frances was aware, with a sudden and excruciating clarity, of every single thing about herself that was wrong for this moment—the nightdress, thin and pale against her skin.
Her hair, unbound, falling past her shoulders in loose waves that Miss Ripley had brushed out not ten minutes ago. Her bare feet on the carpet.
The Duke’s gaze moved over her in a way that made the blood rise to her face and the air in the room feel considerably warmer than it had been a moment ago.
She pulled her dressing gown tighter around herself with both hands and knotted the sash with more force than was strictly necessary.
“Your Grace.” The words came out sharper than she had intended though she was not entirely sorry for it. “I did not expect you.”
He said nothing for a moment. He was watching her hands on the sash, and then his eyes came back to hers, and whatever he was thinking was locked behind the same composed expression he wore to every occasion, apparently including the doorways of bedchambers he had no business appearing in unannounced.
The frustration she had been carefully containing all evening suddenly surged forward.
The empty chair at dinner. The long afternoon wandering through a house that did not feel like hers with a husband who had vanished into his study as soon as they arrived and had not come out since. Her wedding day spent alone.
“What do you want?” she asked and lifted her chin.
Something shifted in his expression. A flicker of surprise, perhaps, that she had spoken to him so directly.
Good. He should be surprised. He has earned it.
The Duke stepped into the room.
Frances felt as if the room had shrunken.
It had been a perfectly reasonable size two minutes ago, large enough for a bed and a writing desk and a dressing table and several chairs, but now, it felt as though someone had moved the walls closer together.
His presence took up more space than his body accounted for.
Frances held her ground. She was not going to step back. She was absolutely, categorically not going to step back.
“I believe we have matters to discuss,” he said. “We are husband and wife now.”
The words landed in the small distance between them, plain and undeniable, and Frances felt the heat climb further up her cheeks and hated herself for it.
“Are we?” She held his gaze. “I had nearly forgotten, given how little I have seen of you today.”
“I had affairs that required my attention.”
“On your wedding day?”
“Affairs do not observe social calendars.”
“Nor, it would seem, do husbands observe dinner.”
His jaw clenched. The tiniest movement, barely noticeable, but Frances had spent enough time with this man to understand what that particular jaw setting indicated.
He was choosing his words carefully which meant she had struck a nerve, and that realization brought her a satisfaction that was perhaps not entirely appropriate, but one she was going to enjoy nonetheless.
“You are right,” he said. “I should have joined you. I did not, and I apologize.”
Frances blinked. She had not expected that. She had been bracing for a defense, for the cool logic he deployed so readily, and instead, he had simply apologized. Plainly and without qualification.
It was deeply inconvenient. She had been working up to a proper argument, and he had taken away her opening move.
“Well,” she said, and then, because she could not think of a suitable response to an apology she had not anticipated receiving, “well, good.”
Brilliant, Frances. Absolutely devastating.
The Duke clasped his hands behind his back.
It was a gesture she recognized from their previous encounters, the stance of a man arranging himself for something.
“Regardless of my failings this evening,” he said, “the fact remains that there are matters we must discuss. Matters that cannot be postponed indefinitely.”
“What matters?”
“You are my duchess now.”
“You have said that already.”
“And a duchess,” he continued as though she had not spoken at all, which was a habit of his that she found particularly maddening, “is expected to provide an heir.”
Frances went very still. The heat in her cheeks changed, shifted from embarrassment to something that burned hotter and sat deeper, and she felt the breath catch in her chest before she could stop it.
An heir.
She stared at him. He stood there with his hands behind his back and his expression calm, as if he had just made a casual comment about the weather or the drainage in the south field, and something inside her chest suddenly caught fire.
“Is that all I am to you?” The words came out before she could measure them, and her voice shook, just slightly, just enough that she heard it herself and was furious about it. “A vessel for your heir?”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is precisely what you said.”
“I said that providing an heir is an expectation. I did not say it was the sole purpose of our arrangement.”
“Our arrangement.” She let the word sit between them. “Is that what you call this? An arrangement?”
“What would you prefer I call it?”
“A marriage, perhaps. Though I confess the distinction may be lost on you.”
His eyes narrowed just enough for her to notice, and she did. That noticing made her heart do something it had no business doing—beat faster instead of slower, which was the wrong way entirely.
“I am attempting,” he said, and there was something very controlled about the way he said it, something that suggested the control was costing him effort, “to discuss a matter of some importance with you. I had thought you might prefer directness to pretense.”
“How dare you?” Frances folded her arms across her chest. “You come to my bedchamber on our wedding night, having abandoned me for the entirety of the day, having failed to appear at dinner, and you stand there and tell me that my principal function is to produce your heir, and you call that directness?”
“I call it honesty.”
“I call it appalling.”
“I have not expressed myself well,” he said.
“On that we are agreed.”
He looked at her, and she watched his gaze drop just for a moment. Just long enough to be certain it had happened. His eyes moved to her mouth and then returned to hers, all in less than a heartbeat, and Frances felt it in every nerve she had.
Do not. Do not think about that.
She took a breath, held it for a count of three, then released it. “Goodnight, Your Grace.” She gestured toward the door with a steadiness she did not feel. “I believe this conversation is finished.”
He did not move.
She kept her arm extended, her hand pointing to the open doorway, met his eyes, held them, and waited.
The Duke studied her. That was the only way to describe it.
His gaze swept over her face with such intensity that her skin felt warm beneath her nightdress, despite all the layers of fabric separating them.
Frances suddenly had an irrational certainty that he could see right through everything—the dressing gown, the nightdress, and the composure she was barely holding together—all the way down to the thing beneath which she did not want him to see and which she was not entirely sure she wanted to see herself.
She did not lower her arm.
“Of course,” he said at last. “I would never do anything against your will.”
He said it quietly and plainly, without performance, and something about the way he said it landed somewhere in Frances’s chest in a way she had not braced for.
“We shall discuss the matter tomorrow,” he added and turned toward the door.
Frances watched him go. He moved without hurry, the way he always moved, with the measured stride of a man who did not rush because the world generally arranged itself around his timeline rather than the reverse.
He reached the doorway, and she should have let him leave.
She should have stood there in silence and watched him go and closed the door behind him and gone to bed, and that should have been the end of it.
“I expect you to join me for breakfast.”
The words were out of her mouth before she had fully decided to say them, and she felt the surprise of them in her own chest, a small jolt, as though her voice had acted independently of her judgment.
The Duke stopped, but he did not turn fully; he turned partway, his shoulder still toward the hallway. His profile was caught in the candlelight as he looked at her over it with an expression she could not read—that infuriating, composed, unbreachable expression that told her nothing at all.
“We can talk then,” she said. She kept her voice firm because it was the only thing she had left to keep firm. “Properly. Over breakfast. Like civilized people who happen to be married to each other.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“As you wish,” he said.
Three words. Three perfectly ordinary, perfectly polite words, and they went through her like something warm and unexpected, a shiver that started at the base of her neck and traveled the full length of her spine before she could do a single thing to stop it.
Then he was gone. The doorway was empty. The hallway beyond it was silent, and Frances stood in the center of her bedchamber, her dressing gown clutched around her, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat.
She pressed a hand flat against her chest, as though she could hold the thing still by force.
It is anger. That is all it is. He was insufferable, and I am angry, and that is the entirety of it.
She stood there for a long moment, her palm against her breastbone, her breathing uneven, and she turned the thought over carefully, examining it the way one examines a coin to determine if it is genuine.
It was not anger.
She knew what anger felt like. She had been angry at him many times—in her sister’s drawing room, at the masquerade, in the gardens. Anger was hot, sharp, and clarifying. It made her think faster, speak more precisely, and hold her ground with a certainty that left no doubt.
This was not that. This was something that caused her hands to tremble, her thoughts to lose their sharpness, and her skin to recall, with a detail she could not explain, the exact path his gaze had taken when he looked at her.
He looked at my mouth.
She pressed her hand harder against her chest.
He apologized. He said he would never do anything against my will. He said “as you wish,” and he meant it, and none of that changes the fact that he is cold and rigid and impossible, and I do not, I will not...
She crossed to the bed, sat on the edge, and looked at her hands in her lap.
They were still trembling slightly, just enough for her to notice, and she curled her fingers inward, gripping them tightly.
She told herself she would be perfectly fine, that this was just the strange day catching up with her, and that any woman would feel unsettled in her place. It meant nothing more than that.
Nothing at all.
But when she closed her eyes, she saw it again—the moment his gaze dropped to her lips, briefly and unguarded, and how it returned to her eyes with something behind it that was neither cold nor duty nor anything she had seen on his face before.
Something about her husband’s presence affected her in ways she was not ready to acknowledge, and that realization was more unsettling than any discussion about heirs could ever be.