Chapter 8 #2
“Dreff.” Lady Millie shoved the silencing hand aside. “Undress.”
The hard-eyed stranger appeared amused more than offended. One such as him wouldn’t be one to take offense. His next words confirmed as much. “She is not wrong.”
“And he only says that because he cannot bring himself to admit that anyone other than himself is correct.”
Daria laughed. She was completely in love with her almost-sister.
Daria’s nape tingled; the indescribable sensation froze her smile and drew her eyes to the source of that prickling.
The Duke of Argyll’s clear, unerring gaze was fixed upon her, cold as ice and sharp as a blade.
“What the dickens, Daria?” Delia’s horror-filled eyes flickered among the prospective grooms. “You are marrying—”
Daria pointed at Gregory. “That one.”
Gone was the duke’s rare air of gravity. Gregory sketched a deep, polished bow. “A pleasure, Miss Kearsley?”
The lazy hip he dropped against his desk—perilously close to the book of prayers—extinguished whatever civility that bow had promised. “You are a Kearsley, are you not?”
Shock and fury flared to life in Delia.
“Him?” Delia whipped back around. “Whose own sister throws his honor into question?”
“Yes, Delia.” She dropped her voice to a barely there whisper. “I chose him.”
Her sister gasped. “Come not within the measure of my wrath!”
“Are…they performing a Shakespeare play?”
“It appears to be numerous ones.” Lord Rutherford favored the little girl with a wink.
“Which somehow makes far more sense than Argyll marrying, that one.”
Lady Raina gasped. “Severin!”
Delia sprung to Daria’s defense. “Knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical r…rogue—” All that fresh color leeched from her sister’s cheeks.
Her sister glanced sadly in the duke’s direction. “Oh, Daria. Do you think that his contempt shall not be bruising to you? When he hath power to crush?”
Sorrow ravaged Delia’s expressive eyes.
Daria looked where her sister willed.
The duke stood in his perpetually languid state, arms folded, posture relaxed, but still commanding. His handsome features lazily jocund. His usual heart-stopping smile—heart to all topped with his usual grin.
Practiced. Practiced is what it was. It’s what he was.
Daria cocked her head. So much went into that affect. What…accounted for the facade he presented, and how very wearisome it must be pretending every moment of one’s life? Even she’d found herself failing to wonder past it. Perhaps that was the most intentional thing about the gentleman.
Her sister’s earnest voice intruded. “Daria! Hasty marriages seldom proveth well.”
No, but then, that was the point, wasn’t it?
Understanding filled up Delia’s sun-kissed face. “No.”
Daria nodded slowly. “Yes.” It was happening. Soon.
Disbelief sent Delia reeling away. “I do not believe it!” she cried out.
Tears filled Daria’s eyes. I must be strong.
Too late, her twin instantly caught Daria’s wavering.
“You do not have to do this!” her sister cried out.
Lady Raina’s concern-filled query rent into a no longer private moment between sisters. “Gregory? Are you forcing this young woman to marry you.”
All eyes went to the Duke of Argyll. A damning silence swept over the room.
“How little you must think of me, little sister,” Gregory said pleasantly.
“And with good reason,” Lady Raina snapped.
He pressed a hand against his chest in false affront. “You wound me.”
What accounted for such strife between siblings? The air thrummed with an undercurrent of tension between brother and sister.
It exploded in the powder keg that was Lady Millie. “You wound all of us!”
Lords Rutherford and Kilburn caught the girl gently by her arms.
“Everything you do is motivated by selfish interests, Gregory,” she cried.
Panic knocked away at Daria’s chest. Her body grew hot.
It was spiraling.
“Millie,” Lord Kilburn said with a gentleness Daria believed him incapable of.
“It is true!” She fought against her human restraints. “He sent me away to live with you and Raina!”
Lady Raina rushed to comfort her sister. The older woman spoke in aching tones that caused a greater weight to settle across Daria’s breast. “Is it so very bad…?”
Raised voices rolled over raised voices and combined with Delia’s incessant cajoling. “Do not do this. Please, do not do this…”
Her pulse filled her head and pounded, and she wanted to scrape her hands over her arms. Run.
From the din of quarreling siblings in every quarter—her Shakespeare-quoting sister included. Lord Rutherford, Lord Kilburn, and Lord Lyon shouting over one another to reign everyone in, it was too much.
“May I urge calm, ladies?”
There were but two silent figures through the storm, and only one of them imperturbable.
“You tell us to be calm…”
Gregory angled his neck slowly to the left and then to the right, stretching the muscles, a model of equanimity. His calm amidst a tempest an incongruity. The sight of it broke before the dam within Daria burst. It steadied her. He steadied her.
“Of a sudden, he’ll marry a woman he doesn’t know and whom we do not know! That does not set off enormous warning bells for—”
Lady Millie’s voice faded to muted folderol.
Anxiety receding, Daria’s unblinking gaze fixated on Gregory, the source of the room’s rage.
The brittleness of Gregory’s dazzling smile.
The tight lines at the corners of his hunter’s eyes.
Daria’s pulse renewed its frantic drum. Not out of fear, but from a sudden discovery that there’d be no closing the curtains on.
He donned a veneer of insouciance the same way masquerading gentleman did dominos. He’d let his mask slip and revealed a protected corner of his soul.
“He is the worst rake!”
It is a facade.
Gregory Goodheart, the Duke of Argyll, was a veritable Vitruvian Man, and himself the artist behind the masterpiece. Unlike all the women riveted by his good looks and dashing nature, Daria found herself compelled by the enigmatic mystery about him.
As if he felt her scrutiny, Gregory angled his head quick, too swift for Daria to glance away.
His eyes collided with Daria’s.
His broad shoulders encased in the finest black wool coat went taut.
“It is not his fault,” she whispered her revelation aloud, trapped by the energy passing between them. “Stop.”
Did she seek to silence herself in seeing more in the man she was about to marry or the noisy spectators?
Gregory’s gaze pillaged her spiraling thoughts, turbulent wonderings, and the emotions she could not name. It mocked her. In a silent dare? Or a blitheness as fabricated as the rest of his persona?
Lady Raina raised her voice to be heard in the fray. “If they are each here of their own choosing, I see no need to do so in such a clandestine—”
“Stop!” Daria’s cry peeled around the duke’s crowded office.
Panicked, Daria glanced around at the powerful peers and peeresses she’d silenced. She dragged her sharp thumbnail along the soft pad of her index finger and fixed on that distracting motion. It didn’t have the calming effect it usually did.
She landed herself in a place she’d never been and never wanted to be—at the center of people’s focus.
And once you say your vows this day, a place you are destined to remain until you die…
The tremble that started in her legs moved quickly to the rest of her limbs.
“Daria?” Delia asked with a sister’s gentleness.
Daria flexed her palms to keep from shredding up the flesh of her finger.
Perspiration slicked her palms while the moisture left her mouth. “I said…stop,” she repeated tonelessly. “I am here of my own will.” Daria glanced at her marked finger and swiftly placed them behind her back to hide the violent shaking.
Their wedding guests slid subtly dubious glances around at one another. Why, even his closest friends and partners, Lord Rutherford and Lord Kilburn’s features cast doubt upon her claims.
What did it say about the people in Gregory’s life? How…lonely. How sad.
“Gregory has not coerced me,” she repeated with greater force. “There is nothing at play here.”
Delia took her lightly by the wrist. “Daria,” she murmured.
Inspired by Lady Millie’s earlier spirit, Daria freed herself of that manacle. “You will disrespect him so?” she asked the room at large.
Gregory’s family and friends looked properly chagrined.
It wasn’t enough.
She looked to her bridegroom. Silently, Daria compelled him to take them to task as only a duke surely could.
With an air of boredom, Gregory lifted a single shoulder in a shrug that said her defense was neither needed nor wanted.
Daria firmed her jaw. By God, she was a Kearsley. Kearsleys stood with Kearsleys, and in marrying Daria, Gregory became one of them too.
“You do us both great disrespect.” Overtaken by anger on his behalf, Daria swept into the middle of the room, her skirts whipping satisfyingly about her ankles. “You not only besmirch Gregory’s honor, but you will also treat me as a child, ignore my voice, and reject my decision?”
“Daria,” her sister spoke quietly, “if his own family feels so, that should be warning enough for you.”
Frustration and anger nearly blinded Daria, but not enough that she missed his friends’ pitying expressions.
They believed Daria nothing more than a hysterical woman. And yet she challenged them with words, while they and their fellow lords met with pistols at dawn and an aim to murder. The unfairness of it all.
She clenched and unclenched her hands on either side of her, fighting to control the emotion that threatened to overwhelm her, and took a different approach.
“I am a wallflower with a modest dowry,” she said.
“Gregory is a duke who wants for nothing,” Except loyal friends and family.
“What reason would he have to force me into marriage? Hmm?” Daria looked pointedly at each of them.
She stopped on Lord Rutherford. Not because of any coldness in his gaze, but a warmer emotion. Then, so faint as to blink she would have missed it, the marquess nodded.
Taking a breath, Daria bowed her head in return.
At least, Gregory had one true friend.
Encouraged, Daria addressed the rest. “You suspect something nefarious in Gregory’s motives, but there is none.” She brought her shoulders back. “In fact, you should know it wasn’t the duke who asked me—”
“To speak up on my behalf,” the duke called out loudly, drowning Daria out. “This touching, albeit unwarranted defense, comes entirely of her own volition.”
Confused, she blinked. “That wasn’t…”
Gregory brushed past his partners and sisters and joined Daria. Without a word, he united their hands.
A lightening-like flash surged from where they touched; his powerful fingers enveloped her smaller ones, conferring heat that soothed corners of her being previously untouched and undiscovered—before now.
Daria stared unblinkingly at his long, sun-bronzed digits; her gaze honed on the very faintest dusting of gold hair upon his knuckles.
Riveted, she drew his hand nearer. A prominent greenish-blue vein traversed a path from his littlest finger.
It led like a point to a half-moon scar, white from age.
She frowned. What was the story behind that mark?
Angling it in the light to better aid her examination, she noted the defined line of a muscle that ran from his three middle fingers and the way those thin cords… eased when he pulled away.
Gregory tucked those same knuckles under Daria’s chin and tipped her gaze up. “Are we doing this, little raven?” he murmured, giving her a fleeting caress.
A foreign heat settled low in her belly, but it was a warmth a woman, even the most innocent of ones like herself, recognized as desire.
And desiring this man, her rake of a husband who left a trail of broken hearts in every ballroom and bedroom he passed through, threatened Daria far more than her eventual death in the coming days.
“Are we doing this?” Lord Lyon asked peevishly as no true man of God would.
Run.
Daria’s throat moved. “We are doing this.”