Chapter 9
Philip had been wrong—and he had only been wrong a handful of times in his life.
He tended to try not to make many mistakes, for most errors in calculation had resulted in dire consequences, like that one time when he’d pushed an advantage too far and nearly lost his leg for it.
Or that one time when he thought it was a good time to stand up to his father on one of their many disagreements. The only thing that had stayed his father’s hand then had been the fact that he had no other heir than Philip.
This time, he could lose more than an appendage he would dearly love to keep. He was losing his damned mind.
And it was all because of her.
Lady Selina Sinclair.
In the span of a handful of hours, she had managed, with the least amount of effort, to upend the life he thought he had set for himself.
Marriage had been the furthest thing from his mind then. Kissing her had not even been a consideration, even when he found her surprisingly attractive with her luminous green eyes and a mouth that just beckoned a man to sin, which should have been irrelevant in the first place.
She had not even said anything remotely suggestive. In fact, the subject they had been discussing was extremely repulsive to him. One that should have invited his intense disgust.
If it had not been for those damned lips of hers moving.
Before he knew it, he had her in his arms, about to do something he had so desperately craved.
She must have bewitched him, that sly minx. Ensnared his senses. Held his logic captive in her pretty little hands, where she could push and prod him to her heart’s content, inciting everything from blind lust to towering rage.
The worst part was that he had a grave suspicion that he might enjoy it. The pushing. The prodding. Everything.
Damn it all to hell.
Philip closed his eyes and groaned. No, he had to stay away from her and her crafty snares.
Or perhaps that was the cure to this madness. One taste of those lips, one kiss to sate his curiosity, and then he just might be rid of this insanity…
His brow furrowed slightly, the turmoil of his thoughts giving way to cold calculation even before he turned on his heel and grasped that arm that dared to so foolishly reach for him.
A choked cry pierced the heavy night air.
Bloody hell, he had made another mistake. Was there no end to how many he could make in one night?
“Your Grace!” The voice was distinctly feminine.
Brown eyes blinked at him, bright with unshed tears. Not green, thank whatever gods were listening to him.
“Mary.” He frowned at the woman before him, dropping her wrist as if it had been on fire. “What the hell are you doing here at this hour?”
The woman rubbed her wrist with a pained smile. “I… I came to see if Your Grace needed me…”
Philip took one look at the woman before him—large brown eyes, a generous mouth, wisps of dark brown hair escaping her frilled cap. And the topmost buttons of her maid’s uniform undone.
The suggestion could not have been any more obvious had she stripped herself before him.
Unfortunately for him, he was not in the mood for such games. Not from her, at least.
He sighed. “Mary, we have spoken about this. You agreed to the terms.” He lowered his voice. “You needed comfort, and so did I. But even then, I asked if you understood. You said that you did. If you had not, you and I would never have… Anyway, that time is over. As you well know.”
He had not invited her to his chambers since the funeral. She had offered here and there, usually when she caught him alone, but he had not accepted. Indeed, it seemed he had to keep reminding her that their temporary agreement was over.
“Oh, I know, but I thought… considering the strife of the day, you might find yourself in need of comfort again. Seeing you with a pistol in your hand, Your Grace—I can’t deny that it did something to me, and I should very much like that to be satisfied,” she replied, fluttering her brown eyes, her bosom pressing against his arm.
Her persistence was not welcome, least of all tonight.
When he did not immediately respond, she added in haste, “But of course, I understand what we both agreed on. I know it was temporary until we both felt better. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy one another whenever the mood strikes.” She smiled. “I am in such a mood tonight.”
“Mary,” he said in a harried, tight voice, “I am not. What we enjoyed together was a fine thing, a timely thing, but you must forget it.”
“Your Grace, that will be hard to do,” she murmured, biting her lip, still trying to seduce him despite his rejection.
He supposed he should have known better than to take her word for it, when they were briefly lovers, that she would go back to the way things were without protest.
As she moved her hand to the fastening of his trousers, he caught her wrist and met her sultry gaze with a cold, hard stare.
“I am grateful to you for your companionship during a troublesome time, Mary, but do not test me,” he warned. “It would be best if you kept your distance from now on.”
He had tried to reason with her before, and ordinarily it worked, but there was something different about her tonight. A greater determination. A sense that she did not want to take ‘no’ for an answer.
She gave him a wounded look. “Your Grace, if I—”
He raised his hand, cutting her off. He was running out of the patience required to indulge her. “It is late, and the night is cold. You should head back to your room. And do not think to come knocking on my door again.”
It was not his intention to be unkind, but he did not want this to become a problem. Theirs had been an affair of venting frustrations and vexations, a means to unburden themselves of unwelcome anger and grief, channeling it into passion instead of something worse.
He was beginning to wish he had never invited her in when she had knocked on his study door with an indecent proposal shortly after his return from war, shortly before his father was put in the ground where he belonged.
She had been mourning a broken engagement. He had been tormented by his father’s ghost. Two angry souls seeking solace in each other, both agreeing that it would just be for a short while.
Mary smiled tightly. “As you wish, Your Grace. I wouldn’t wish to be an inconvenience.”
She bobbed a curtsy and turned away, her footfalls heavy with dejection.
Philip sighed and raked his fingers through his hair. What was wrong with him tonight? A woman was practically offering herself to him on a silver platter, and he felt absolutely nothing, save for maybe some mild frustration, and not of the titillating kind.
But you had no such problems with Lady Selina earlier, the voice in his head taunted him. You wanted nothing more than to pin her to the wall and devour her.
He groaned and ran his hand over his face to brutally scrub away his filthy thoughts. Drag his mind from the gutter, if needed.
None of it worked.
He wanted her just as much as he did when he had her all but cornered against the glass wall, her warmth searing him like the sun beating down on the desert. Mary’s advances might have dampened his lust, but it was back to roaring as soon as his thoughts turned to Selina.
He needed to get away from this place. Get away from her. If only for his sanity.
The fearsome Duke of Ashbrook, Rakehell of the Ton and Defiler of Innocents, running from a young lady barely out of the schoolroom.
Entire ballrooms all across London would be in shock if they heard of it. Gambling halls would erupt in collective laughter. Zachary would never let him hear the end of it.
And through it all, his father must now be spinning in his grave upon learning that his only son was intent on marrying the daughter of his archnemesis, if only to spite him well into the afterlife.
Misery loved company, and if Philip could make his father any more miserable than he most probably was in hell, then he was more than up to the task.
A knock at the door interrupted Selina’s attempt to see how long she could hold her breath in a basin of ice-cold water. An attempt that had nothing to do with trying to cool her duke-induced fever.
“Who is it?” she asked tremulously.
Not him. Anyone but him.
“It’s me,” came Lizzy’s marginally more welcome voice.
“Just a second!” Selina grabbed a cloth and patted her half-numb face. “Come in!”
The door opened slowly, and Lizzy poked her head into the room. Perhaps she had expected to find something she did not want to see, being the Duke’s sister and all.
Would I have invited you into the room if your brother and I were—
She swallowed thickly. She wasn’t completely sure what came after that, but her imagination had some ideas. That was the problem—getting her imagination to stop conjuring up the possibilities.
There would be kissing, probably. She knew that much from the secret, prohibited novels that she and her book club friends had pored over, devouring every tidbit of information about what it meant to ‘lie’ with a man.
Everything else was rather… metaphorical. Tricky to decipher without the anatomical context.
“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” Lizzy said. “Why did you run off like that?”
“The beef did not agree with me,” Selina replied too quickly.
Lizzy sank down on the edge of Selina’s bed, absently trailing her hand over the freshly laundered coverlets.
“I wondered if perhaps my brother had done something to upset you.” She paused. “He has been away from society for a long time. He isn’t exactly versed in the rules.”
“Are you supporting him now? You, who never had a nice thing to say about him?”
It was because of Lizzy that Selina had been terrified the entire ride to Ashbrook Manor.
Terrified of the monstrous, cold, unfeeling, humorless Duke that she had crafted in her mind with all the pieces that Lizzy had fed to her over the course of their friendship.
Terrified that he might kill her father, her brother, and her without flinching.
“He isn’t nice,” Lizzy replied flatly. “And I am not championing him. I was worried about you. Worried he had offended you in some way.”
If almost kissing her was an offense, then Selina was offended. If touching her waist and face was upsetting, then she was upset. If shrinking away from her with that hard, cold look in his flinty eyes was an insult, then she was insulted.
But she couldn’t tell Lizzy any of that.
“It is this entire ordeal,” she said instead. “The walk in the gardens made it seem too real that this is to be my life now.”
“You are not happy to be here with me?”
Selina couldn’t look her friend in the eye. “If I were just visiting, I would be ecstatic. But this is my life, Lizzy, and two men have decided how it will go.” She shook her head. “All because of a stupid letter.”
“Oh…” Lizzy dropped her gaze, uncharacteristically chagrined. “You make an excellent point.”
Selina tossed the cloth she still held in her hand. “What were you trying to show me in the gardens? Something you thought Melody would like?”
The third member of their trio seemed like a safe distraction.
“It was a darling little mushroom,” Lizzy replied, brightening. “A purple one! I can’t say I have much interest in mushrooms, but it was the most perfect one I have ever seen.”
“Did you pick it?”
Lizzy shook her head. “I thought I should leave it in the ground.”
“Very wise.” Selina tried to force a smile. “Once plucked, it will wither. Or become rotten and unpleasant. I’m not sure which.”
She had never thought she would relate so much to a mushroom. Now that her fate had been decided for her, would she wither or rot?
It is not as if I will flourish when Philip recoiled from me like that.
It would have been better if she had been left in the metaphorical ground.
“What was your father like?” she asked abruptly.
If Philip would not tell her, Lizzy surely would. Maybe that would be the key to unlocking Philip’s true character… or perhaps his reason for doing what he did by accepting the engagement.
She remained convinced that she could have explained the letter away if she had just been allowed to speak and if her father had just listened for once in his life. But it was too late for that sort of thinking now.
It took her a second to notice that Lizzy had gone quiet. Not just in voice but demeanor. Withdrawing from the question like a tortoise tucking its head back into its shell.
“I should let you rest,” Lizzy said, getting up in haste. “You have had a trying day, and I am just making it worse.”
She was gone before Selina could call her back and demand an explanation as to why neither sibling seemed capable of saying anything about their father.
Was he really worthy of my father’s unrelenting hatred?
If so, was it possible that such devilry existed in their bloodline?
The male one, to be exact.