Chapter Seven #2
She gave a watery, miserable laugh. How appropriate was it that she would have to bare her soul—and her greatest humiliation—to a man whose life she had ruined?
A proper punishment, indeed.
***
“Would you care for something to drink, Dulverton?” The Duke of Chatham gestured to a collection of decanters on a small round table.
Gerrit was more tempted to drink than he had been in years. Decades, even. But he had a laughably low tolerance for spirits and behaved like an idiot after just one glass. He suspected he could behave like a fool all on his own today.
“No, thank you,” he said abruptly. The meeting with his uncle and Lady Palmer had been ghastly.
It had also been expensive. Regardless of the fact that Lady Mariska’s emotions were engaged elsewhere, Gerrit had claimed the decision to end their betrothal was his.
Jilting a woman was outrageous, but he could weather the storm of familial disapproval far better than poor Lady Mariska.
Not only had he needed to offer recompense to Lady Mariska’s family for reneging on the contract, but both van Renesse and Lady Palmer had wanted their palms generously greased before he could get them out of his house.
It was a meeting Gerrit never wanted to relive, and yet here was another miserable encounter even worse than seven-years transportation because the outcome would be a life sentence.
Good God. Would this day never end?
“I wanted to talk to you about Kathryn before you see her,” Chatham said.
Gerrit was immediately wary. “Talk about what?”
“My sister-in-law is an impulsive young woman but—”
“Not so young, I think.”
Chatham’s eyebrows rose at his comment.
“What?” Gerrit demanded.
The other man looked annoyed, but said, “She is no schoolroom chit and will be three-and-twenty on her next birthday.”
Gerrit grunted, somewhat surprised she was so young. Despite her immature behavior and youthful appearance, her world-weary expression had been the sort he associated with an older woman.
“I know this is a mess of Kathryn’s making, but I refuse to condemn her to an unhappy marriage simply because of one thoughtless act,” Chatham said.
Gerrit bristled. “Condemn her? Are you saying you oppose an offer from me?” He felt both offended and hopeful. Perhaps he might leave here today without being betrothed to that red-headed hellion.
“I’m not saying that at all,” Chatham replied, crushing Gerrit’s fragile hope.
He gave an irritable huff. “I would have plain speaking, Chatham. I am not a man who appreciates subtlety.” Or understands it, for that matter.
Chatham’s mouth twitched. “Of course, Your Grace.”
Gerrit squinted. Was the man smiling? God only knew what he found amusing in this situation, because Gerrit saw nothing to laugh about, but then he’d frequently been accused of possessing no sense of humor.
Not so surprising for a man who’d been stigmatized the Duke of Dullness by his contemporaries, a name that had caused him agony when he’d been a boy.
But his boyhood was far behind him, and it had been decades since he’d been ashamed of who and what he was.
If others saw his inability to chatter like a magpie in social situations as amusing or dull that was their concern.
“Here it is in plain speaking, then,” Chatham said. “I know it is a longstanding tradition that the Dukes of Dulverton marry women of Dutch descent.”
“Correct.” It was hardly a secret.
“Marrying Kathryn will break that tradition.”
“Correct,” Gerrit said testily. Did the man think he was so dull-witted as to not realize that? “What the hell is your point, Chatham?”
The other man’s face hardened. “I want your word that you will not bear a grudge against her for breaking that family tradition.”
“Bear a grudge?” Gerrit repeated, genuinely confused. “Why would I do such an illogical thing?”
To Gerrit’s complete mystification, Chatham laughed. “My wife told me you were not the sort of man to engage in illogical behavior.”
“Your wife? How would she know? I only met her for the first time last night.”
“I suspect it was just an educated guess.”
There was something about Chatham’s smirk that told Gerrit he was, yet again, missing some conversational nuance.
But he could not bring himself to care about that at the moment.
Instead, he dragged the conversation back to the matter at hand.
“I will treat Lady Kathryn with the same respect and consideration that I would any woman.”
“Thank you. That was my main concern.”
“Was there something else you wanted to discuss?” Gerrit prodded when Chatham kept staring at him.
Chatham appeared to shake himself. “No. No, that was it. I will fetch Kathryn.”
Gerrit nodded and the other man left the room.
He stared at his hands rather than the shelves full of mismatched books that surrounded him.
But even though he was not looking at them he could hear them jeering at him.
His unease at the distracting noise—for lack of a better word—was something he felt often whenever he was outside his home.
After all, the world was an extremely disorganized and unsymmetrical place.
The duke’s library was worse than the Earl of Sutton’s ballroom.
Perhaps that was because a ballroom was, by its very nature, lacking in symmetry when it was being put to its specified use.
A library, on the other hand, was a place for quiet reflection.
But there would be none of that in this cacophonous chamber.
Gerrit’s gaze slid from his hands—one of which rested on each knee, exactly an inch from his kneecaps—to his exquisitely polished Hessians, his eyes widening with revulsion at the random scatter of blood-red roses on the thick pile beneath his boots.
Although he jerked his gaze away immediately, the haphazard rug pattern branded itself on his mind’s eye and he had to squeeze his eyes shut until silver sparks on a field of black velvet purged the image from his brain.
“Your Grace?”
Gerrit’s well-tutored body unfolded from the chair at the sound of a female voice.
“Your Grace, Lady Kathryn,” he said as the two women approached. He frowned at Lady Kathryn’s red-rimmed eyes. Did she have a summer cold, or had she been weeping? Gerrit determined to keep a safe distance from her in the event it was the former.
“I will sit in the window seat so that you two may talk privately,” the duchess said, her plain, expressionless face far easier for Gerrit to look at than her beautiful sister’s, which was positively seething with emotion.
Lady Kathryn gracefully lowered herself onto the settee, and Gerrit flipped up his tails and resumed his own seat. Lady Kathryn gazed at her feet, giving him a moment to study her unobserved. Was she being forced into this? Is that why her eyes were red?
He would be damned before he married another unwilling female.
“Are you here against your will, my lady?”
Her head whipped up and Gerrit’s belly clenched when he met her brilliant green eyes, which fairly blazed in the sunlight. The vivid translucent shade brought to mind the emeralds he’d dug in the Wadi Sikai Valley on one of his trips abroad.
Eyes like emeralds? Gerrit blinked at the uncharacteristically fatuous thought.
“I am here of my own free will, Your Grace.”
So, it would be marriage, then. Gerrit took a deep breath and opened his mouth.
“But there is something you should know that might change your mind about—about what you are about to ask.”
Good God. What now?
Thankfully, he only thought the words. Aloud, he said, “What do you mean?”
She swallowed. “I am not a virgin.”