Chapter Two
Gerrit Boon Jaak Van Draak, the fifth Duke of Dulverton, swallowed a mouthful of champagne and then grimaced as the revolting beverage trickled down his throat.
“You will break that glass if you squeeze it much harder, Your Grace,” his uncle, Baron Bas van Renesse, teased in a jovial voice.
Gerrit scowled and gestured to a servant who was passing with a tray.
“Take this.” He thrust the mostly full glass at the wide-eyed lackey.
Once the servant had scuttled away, Gerrit glared down at his uncle, a man he’d only met once before tonight.
“You said Lady Mariska would be here at ten o’clock.
It is now thirty-seven minutes past ten. ”
A faint smile pulled at the older man’s thin lips, as if something about this annoying situation amused him. “When have you ever known a woman to care about time?”
Gerrit’s scowl only deepened at the pointless generalization.
“Have patience, Your Grace.”
“I have been patient for two years,” he reminded his uncle. “I weary of—”
“Ah, there is Lady Palmer,” the baron interrupted.
A stout, well-dressed woman of middling years pushed her way through the crowd. She was red-cheeked and flustered, and her apprehensive gaze flickered to van Renesse and then to Gerrit and quickly away again.
Even Gerrit, abysmal when it came to reading other people’s expressions, could see the woman was distressed about something.
Lady Palmer dropped into an impressively low curtsy for a woman of her age and girth. “I am terribly sorry to be late, Your Grace, but—”
“Where is Lady Mariska?” Gerrit demanded, raising his voice to speak over her.
Meeting people’s eyes was something that had never come easily to Gerrit—something about it had always felt almost like a physical touch to him—but his father had insisted the reaction was a weakness, so Gerrit had struggled for years to overcome his aversion.
The woman recoiled at either his harsh tone, pointed glare, or both, and van Renesse clucked his tongue and chuckled nervously. “You will have to forgive His Grace. He has forgotten his manners in his excitement to meet his prospective bride.”
Excitement? Gerrit’s hands clenched into fists at his uncle’s fatuous description of his current frame of mind. He opened his mouth to castigate the older man, but Lady Palmer recommenced babbling.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace, but the heat in the ballroom was so oppressive that Lady Mariska went out to the garden to take some air.”
Gerrit’s jaw shifted back and forth, and he narrowed his eyes, keeping Lady Palmer pinioned. Why did he think she was lying? “She has only just arrived and is overheated?”
Lady Palmer swallowed hard. “Er… yes?”
“That sounded like a question.”
“No, no. She was feeling uncomfortably flushed.”
Gerrit snorted and turned to van Renesse. “What a tender bloom you have brought me, Uncle.”
Van Renesse quailed beneath Gerrit’s scathing tone and then gave another of his annoying chuckles.
He reached out to pat Gerrit’s arm before recalling how much he hated being touched and hastily withdrew his hand.
“Mariska is a modest girl, Your Grace. The very characteristics that will make her such a conformable, obedient wife also render her shy in public. She has only recently left a strict religious environment. This”—he made a gesture to encompass the room around them—“is the sort of sophisticated function that terrifies innocent young women.”
Gerrit had to admit there might be some truth to the other man’s words. Even though the girl was one-and-twenty—one of his conditions for the marriage—her family had kept her at the convent to ensure her virtue, something they had decided on after the last broken betrothal.
How must this glittering ballroom—overflowing with ogling peers and silk-clad women falling out of their gowns—appear to a girl who’d been cloistered away from the world for most of her life?
As Gerrit looked around him, men and women, one after another, quickly glanced away rather than meet his gaze. He gave a rumble of displeasure. He hated being the center of attention and any pity he might have felt for Lady Mariska was speedily dissipating.
“If she is so bloody retiring then why the hell did you suggest meeting here?” Gerrit demanded, turning away from the gawking party guests back to his uncle.
“It was a mistake, Your Grace, and I see that now,” his uncle said, his placating tone incensing Gerrit even more.
A sudden unwanted notion struck Gerrit like a punch to the face. “Is Lady Mariska perchance hiding in the garden because she is here against her will?”
His uncle swallowed. “Er—”
“Tell me the truth,” he snarled before van Renesse commenced spewing lies. “I will not have a repeat of the last fiasco.”
“This will be nothing like the last time,” van Renesse hastily assured him. “Lady Mariska was very excited to come to London.”
“She was excited to come to London?” Gerrit repeated, his temper yet again spiking at the older man’s evasive words. “I did not ask about her view on foreign travel. How excited is she to become my wife, Uncle?”
Van Renesse eyes slid to Lady Palmer.
“Fuck!” Gerrit grated.
Lady Palmer swooned, and his uncle took her arm to steady her. And then the bastard dared to cut Gerrit a chiding look. “Your Grace, that is hardly—”
Gerrit pointed his index finger in the other man’s face, stopping less than a quarter of an inch from van Renesse’s nose. “Shut. Up.”
Lady Palmer gasped at his vicious order, but his uncle pursed his lips, clearly deciding discretion was the better part of valor.
The urge to throttle the smaller man was so strong that Gerrit was almost dizzy at the uncharacteristic swirl of emotions.
He glared down at van Renesse, whose eyes lowered to the floor in silent submission, a gesture that did nothing to calm Gerrit’s rapidly growing fury.
Not only had he paid an immoderate sum to both his uncle and the Palmer woman to arrange this betrothal, but he had wasted his time on this journey to London.
He despised being in the City at any time of year, but especially during the height of the Season.
And to make matters worse, he was currently standing in a bloody ballroom!
The compulsion to stride from the sweltering, crowded ballroom where he was obviously a figure of morbid curiosity was almost overwhelming.
But the clarion call of duty was even stronger.
God damn it! He needed a wife. He needed an heir.
Thanks to his idiot ancestors he felt strongly compelled to take a Dutch wife.
He was sick and tired of thinking about the subject and did not want to be thinking about it again for another bloody year.
And if he left now, that is exactly what would happen.
Reining in his fury and gritting his teeth, he turned to Lady Palmer. “Does Lady Mariska wish for this betrothal, my lady.”
She jolted at his question.
“I would have the unvarnished truth,” he warned when she hesitated. “And I would have it now.”
Lady Palmer cleared her throat. “Lady Mariska is young and innocent and inexperienced, Your Grace—”
“I am aware of her age and condition. That is not the question I asked.”
“She is not opposed to the match,” Lady Palmer hurried on, flinching at whatever she saw on Gerrit’s face—likely the murderous rage he was feeling. “At—at least not entirely.”
If she had meant her words to be reassuring, they failed spectacularly.
It was all he could do to keep from throwing back his head and howling like the savage beast he so resembled.
“Lady Mariska has had almost two years to reject my offer,” Gerrit seethed, his voice impressively quiet given the emotions rampaging within him.
“Why has she waited until three weeks before our wedding to voice her reservations?” His voice had risen by the time he reached the end of his question, and people around them were gawking.
Gerrit did not give a damn.
“Answer me,” he bit out.
“I—I—” Her voice broke off on a sob.
Van Renesse patted her arm while murmuring, “There, there, my dear.”
Gerrit briefly squeezed his eyes shut. What a fucking mess.
He cut a scathing look at the crowds around them, his eyes lingering on the clusters of young women who had drifted ever closer since his arrival but now skittered away like frightened rabbits.
Any one of them would marry him—regardless of how hideous he looked—and he could have a wife with a brat in her belly by the end of summer.
But no. He had to take a Dutch bride.
He gritted his teeth.
Lady Mariska was his third betrothed, not including Christina the bitch, his first wife.
He had never even met the other two women as one had died at the age of seven-and-ten and the other had eloped with her music tutor at eight-and-ten. Gerrit was the least superstitious person he knew, but even he could not help feeling that any betrothal to him was doomed to failure.
After the catastrophic debacle of his first marriage—which his father had arranged—Gerrit had added two iron-clad stipulations to their family’s longstanding tradition. First, the woman in question must be no younger than one-and-twenty at the time of their marriage.
And second, he wanted a letter from her, not her parent or guardian, agreeing to the union and denying any outstanding emotional entanglements.
This current betrothal had progressed with almost suspicious ease. He had written one letter to Lady Mariska—assuring her that he would only marry her if she gave her written consent—and had received a brief missive from her in the affirmative.
An unpleasant sensation began to creep through him like a slow-moving chill. It took him a moment to identify the emotion: It was indecision.
Gerrit loathed feeling uncertain and took every measure to avoid it by arranging his life with such rigid precision that snap decisions were rarely required. In Gerrit’s life, there were no what ifs or maybes. Things just were.
Until tonight.