Chapter 22
Hector was not easily intimidated. He was stronger than most men, even with his damned leg, and even before he was a duke, he’d been a blacksmith.
Nobody ever recognized how much arguing came with smithing work, but there was always someone in the forge, trying to tell you how to do your job. Hector knew perfectly bloody well how to stand up for himself.
And yet, he had to admit it: Xander Lightholder made Hector’s hackles rise like few other men ever had.
It was a stupid feeling, of course. The man was an aristocrat, which meant that there was a vanishingly slim chance of him deigning to bloody his knuckles.
And Hector would win in a physical altercation, mostly because he knew how to fight dirty in the kind of way you learned in village streets when other boys thought your leg made you an easy target.
Xander wouldn’t have learned any such thing at Eton.
And it wasn’t as though Hector was intimidated by nobility on principle.
For one, the Lightholders might be powerful and connected, but Godwin didn’t technically have a rank any higher than Hector’s own.
Not to mention that Hector had never held with the idea that high birth made someone better than anyone else.
So. It had to be Clio. It had to be that Xander was Clio’s family.
Except that was stupid, too, because he’d argued plenty with Aaron Watson, and he was Clio’s brother, not her cousin. He was the closest family she had, and Clio clearly loved her brother atop that.
The longer Xander sat quietly, though, not staring Hector down but not not staring at him, either, the more Hector had to admit something else entirely.
Something had changed between his wife and him. Something between her admitting her fears, laughing with him in the dark, and curling up contentedly at his side.
It had changed him.
And now—goddamn him—he wanted stupid bloody Xander— goddamn—Lightholder to fucking approve of him.
This was not good.
“Can I offer you a drink?” Xander said when they’d been sitting in silence so long that Hector felt as though his head was about to explode with the awkwardness of it.
“God, yes,” he said without thinking, sounding rather desperate for it.
Fortunately, though Xander chuckled, and by the time he’d poured two tumblers of very nice scotch, Hector was feeling less as though he wanted to claw off his own skin.
“I’m going to tell you something about my family,” Xander said, crossing his legs comfortably as he leaned back in his chair. “Something that I think will help you a great deal.”
Hector was immediately on his guard again.
“Very well,” he said cautiously.
Xander took a slow sip of his drink. He was rather compelling, for what that was worth. Hector tried to take mental notes, as he could benefit from some of this smooth arrogance that demanded compliance, at least when it came to wrenching back his title from his brother.
“I did not want to marry my wife,” Xander said eventually, shocking Hector, not just because this was a very revealing thing to say to a near stranger, but also because Xander and Helen Lightholder made eyes at one another every chance they got.
“You … didn’t?” Hector prodded carefully.
Xander laughed, the sound full of genuine humor.
“No,” he said. “You might have noticed this about her, but Helen hasn’t a subtle bone in her body.
She says what she wants and means what she says.
It makes people furious. She is not at all suited for a life in the full eye of Society, and my family name guarantees her one. ”
Hector wasn’t stupid enough to comment. The words that Xander was saying all sounded bad, but his tone was so drenched with love that they couldn’t actually be bad.
“Clio’s brother, Aaron, didn’t want to marry his wife,” Xander continued. “The details there aren’t quite so clear to me as in my own circumstance, but Phoebe has never met a risk she didn’t love, and Aaron just wanted everyone to leave him alone after he returned from the war.”
“Right,” Hector agreed cautiously.
“My cousin Hugh,” Xander said, seeming to be really enjoying himself at this point. “Well, can you guess what I’m going to say next?”
Hector was not pleased to be given a part in this little drama.
“Was desperate to marry his wife?” he said dryly.
“Ha. No. No, he found himself the guardian of three little girls—and if you think my children are wild, you ought to spend an afternoon with those little hellions—and felt obliged to give them a maternal figure. He did not want any wife, let alone the specific wife he ended up with.”
Hector just grunted and took a sip of his drink.
This was a great deal of buildup, and it could not possibly be going anywhere good.
If not for his stupid, stupid desire for Xander’s approbation, he would have walked out of here ages ago.
God, marriage had ruined him. He used to be so good at being rude.
Maybe Xander realized that Hector’s patience was growing thin, because he smiled at him over the rim of his glass.
“Do you know what myself and my two cousins all have in common?” he asked after taking another draught of his drink.
“What’s that?” Hector asked, curious despite himself.
Xander smiled expansively. “We all love our wives beyond reason.”
It was obviously true—well, Hector hadn’t met this Hugh character, but it was clear enough about the other two—but it still felt remarkable to hear a gentleman admit it so openly.
The Lightholders were the aristocrats to end all aristocrats, and yet here Xander, their patriarch, was so easily throwing out centuries of tradition around aristocratic marriages.
And yes, that was interesting, but Hector failed to see what, exactly, that had to do with him.
“And many happy returns to you, then,” he said, for lack of anything better to offer.
Maybe being the head of a large family imbued one with special powers, because the look that Xander gave him felt nearly paternal, for all that Lightholder couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Hector.
“My point,” he said levelly, “is that Clio is very much one of us. I referenced the gentleman, but the ladies of the family are very much the same. They are all quite happy in their marriages—in love, even—even in the cases where such a thing seemed entirely impossible.”
Oh. So, it was this kind of talk. Hector was initially so relieved to understand what was happening that it took him a moment to start to feel annoyed.
“Listen,” he said, trying very hard not to sound excessively rude, because Xander might be dead wrong, but he clearly meant well. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here. But Clio is different.”
“Oh?” Xander’s word was light, but it was a clear provocation.
Hector didn’t know what in the hell was wrong with him that he gave in to that provocation, but maybe this was just another part of whatever spell his wife had woven over him the night before, because he answered.
“Clio is …” He took another sip of his drink to buy himself time, enjoying the way it burned down his throat. “She loves her family a great deal. She didn’t want to come back to England, but she did, because her brother worried about her.”
Something in him prickled at the thought of how much love Clio had to give. Of these people who surrounded her, who gave it back in return. And then there he was, in their orbit.
“But she didn’t want to.” He made himself continue. “She wants to see the world. She wants to be independent.”
Xander wielded his silence like a weapon, and Hector had once been able to do the same. He didn’t know what was wrong with him now that he couldn’t.
“She knows her worth,” he said, the words thick in his throat. “It wasn’t as though she didn’t have offers of marriage before. Hell, the day I met her, she’d had one man throw himself at her so desperately that he went fairly mad when she rejected him.”
Hector had never thought that he’d feel any kind of sympathy for Lord Gwanton, and he still definitely hated the bastard, but if there were ever a reason to go a bit off your head, being rejected by Clio was that reason.
“Besides,” he added. “She’s well connected, wealthy, and God knows she’s beautiful. Even the idiots—the ones who failed to notice that she’s also sharp as a tack and as determined as they come … Even the fools couldn’t fail to notice her worth.”
“But?” Xander prodded, his expression unreadable.
“But she wouldn’t accept them,” Hector went on. He didn’t know why he felt so desperate that Xander should understand. “She knew what she wanted. So, she didn’t marry.”
Xander spread his hands. “And yet, now she has.”
Hector shook his head, not in rejection of this clear truth, but in the implication that underlaid it.
“Because of the scandal,” he said, as though Xander didn’t already know. “Because some fool made a fuss over her and I standing together in the street, and the bloody ton can’t stop their tongues from wagging. And now—"
He cut himself off.
And now she’s trapped.
He couldn’t say it.
Xander looked thoughtful.
“Well,” he said reasonably, “that’s not exactly right, is it?”
“Of course it is!”
“No,” Xander insisted in that same maddeningly calm tone.
“She could have weathered that. People do like to talk, but they would have gotten over it eventually. No matter how close you stood together, standing in the street eventually loses its appeal, as far as stories go. No, that was not the scandal that led you and Clio to the altar in the end.”
Hector supposed he ought to be grateful that Xander didn’t say, The real scandal was that you ruined her at a house party, since Hector rather doubted either of them would survive the embarrassment of it.
“The event with the carriage was the inciting incident,” he said through clenched teeth instead.
Xander shook his head. “And yet,” he said, as though this was any point at all.
“And nothing,” Hector snapped. Approval be damned.
But Xander refused to be baited. He gave Hector a very patient look.
“Do you know what I think?” he asked, then failed to wait for a response before continuing. “I think that Clio is actually rather like me. I think she wants—no, craves—a home. And love. And I think she is so afraid of admitting those things that she pushes them away at every turn.”
He paused, turning his empty tumbler around in his hands.
“I think often of the scandal that led to my marriage,” he said.
“And I think now—with the perspective of hindsight, mind you—that I did it on purpose. Because I wanted Helen, and I could not admit it to myself. So, I put myself in a situation where I could give in to what I really wanted—having her, marrying her—all while telling myself that I was doing it as a matter of honor.”
He gazed at Hector with piercing blue eyes, and Hector didn’t know if he wanted to believe what Xander was saying or if doing so might truly ruin him once and for all.
“So, I ask you,” the Duke of Godwin went on, “to consider why Clio didn’t just wait.
Why didn’t she just let the scandal pass?
It would have taken a while, perhaps, and she would have had to bear up against poor Aaron’s stress.
But we both know she’s strong enough to withstand it.
So. Why did she let herself be drawn into your orbit … if not because she wanted to be?”
Hector closed his eyes briefly because it was a tempting idea. It was so tempting to think that, for bloody once, someone had chosen him. And not just someone. Clio. Clio, who burned brighter than the stars.
“She did it to protect her family,” he said hoarsely after a moment. “She did it because she loves you all.”
Loved them. Not him.
Xander looked downright disappointed in him.
“Metford,” he said chidingly.
“I know my wife,” Hector insisted in that same tone, as though he had to force the words out past the gravel in his throat. “I know our marriage.”
Xander sighed.
“Perhaps,” he said.
But he did not look convinced, and Hector didn’t have the heart to correct the Duke of Godwin, because of how desperately he wanted to believe that the other man might be right after all.