Chapter 5
What sort of madhouse had he entered?
And then her scent found him. Chamomile and mint. Clean and herbal and so unexpectedly domestic that it bypassed every fortification he possessed.
He had been aware of it before, that first afternoon when those gray eyes had met his across the drawing room, but proximity made it something he could no longer dismiss.
It stilled the restless engine of his mind.
The perpetual calculations, the strategies, the lists that churned from waking to his brief, exhausted sleep.
They did not vanish, but they reduced. She reduced them.
He could not account for it and had no great desire to examine it.
He only knew that standing close enough to count her eyelashes, he felt, for the first time in longer than he could name, like a man who had briefly set down a very heavy load.
He had no use for the feeling. But she was looking up at him, and his hands uncurled at his sides.
“What is your name?” he asked, his voice rougher than he intended, nothing like the clipped authority with which he conducted business. “Your Christian name.”
“Josephine,” she said, and the word was barely a breath.
“Alistair,” he replied, and the sound of his own name in this room, this library where his father had once sat as a boy enduring lessons he never spoke of, felt like both a surrender and a declaration.
He reached out to grasp her elbow and draw her closer. She came willingly, a small intake of breath the only indication that the contact had surprised her, and then her face was tilted up toward his, and his mouth found hers, and the last of his resolve slipped beneath the waterline and was gone.
The kiss began gently, tentatively, the careful first contact of two people who had been holding themselves apart and had suddenly, recklessly, stopped.
Her mouth was soft and warm and tasted faintly of mint tea, and there was an uncertainty to her response that told him, with a conviction that lodged in his chest like a blade, that she had not been previously kissed with any tenderness.
That thought undid him more thoroughly than any act of deliberate seduction could have done.
He cupped her face in both hands, tilting her head back, and kissed her again with a thoroughness that had nothing tentative about it.
She made a sound against his mouth, a soft, startled whimper that was not protest but discovery, and her fingers came up to grip the front of his waistcoat as though the floor had shifted beneath her.
He felt the precise moment she stopped thinking.
Her body softened against his, her lips parted, and the kiss deepened into something raw and graceless and entirely mutual.
His arm went around her waist to pull her flush against him, and …
He stilled. He was not an inexperienced man.
He knew the architecture of a woman in her stays, knew those lines the way a man learns anything he has paid close attention to.
These were wrong. The familiar taper of waist to hip was altered, a subtle fullness where the lines should have drawn cleanly inward.
No amount of structured mourning wool could entirely conceal at this proximity, not from bodies pressed together and paying this close level of attention.
He pressed her closer, his palm flat and certain, and there was no mistaking it.
He yanked his mouth from hers in astonishment.
“You are with child,” he accused, his mind reeling with the implications.
The blood drained from Josephine’s face as she blinked up at him, still befuddled from their kiss. “You cannot …” She stopped as if to draw courage. “You cannot tell the old woman.”
“She is bound to notice sooner or later!”
Josephine bit her lip, looking up at him with those cool, gray eyes that made him feel so rooted to the moment. Once again, he experienced the calm she solicited from the very depths of his over-lively soul.
“Perhaps we can wed?”
It was his turn to blink in confusion.
“It will render the baby legally meaningless. If it is a boy, you will be its father. Even if he inherits the title, you will be in control!”
Alistair frowned, noting the desperate edge to her tone.
He might worry that the young woman was an accomplished seductress if not for the awkwardness of her kiss.
If not for the babe, he might have thought her to be an inexperienced maiden.
With no small measure of horror, Alistair considered the unappealing thought of his uncle and Josephine engaged in bed sport as he began to suspect Jerome Oxley had been a selfish and untalented lover.
Giving his head a quick shake to divest himself of such undesirable notions, he grabbed hold of the thread of their discussion. She had proposed marriage to ensure his legal dominion over the title.
“And why is that important?”
“Because … you have …” The widow seemed anxious. “You can loosen the dowager’s grip over me, over the girls. We need you.”
He did not want to be needed. He had already gone through something like this once before.
A young man enjoying his university studies, only to be summoned home after his father collapsed.
Suddenly, Alistair had to take the reins of his father’s textile empire, had to take care of his mother, four younger brothers, and his sister when he would not even reach his majority for six more months.
Fifteen years ago, his life had turned upside down. Now it was turning a second time.
A potential heir could free him from these responsibilities, but his gaze fell on her wan face and he observed genuine fear in the crystalline depths of her fascinating eyes.
Recalling his reaction to meeting his four wards, Alistair had a sinking feeling that he was already trapped in a family quagmire and it was far too late to pull loose of the mud sucking at his boots.
He thought about the neglect his cousins had suffered at the hands of the late duke.
And, if the widow’s inference was anything to go by, the bitter old dowager was just as dangerous to their peace of mind.
But he did not have to like it or accept it willingly.
“What is this? Are you some sort of sacrifice to protect the girls? An offering to tempt me into a marriage?”
Her large gray eyes filled with tears. “We need you,” was her singular reply, and Alistair growled in frustration.
“So our attraction is a pretense!”
The widow blushed, looking away with an expression of shame. “Not wholly.”
It was an admission of guilt, and Alistair was taken aback at the feeling of betrayal that coursed through him to settle as a heavy brick in his gut. The Oxley girls needed his blunt and his leadership, and Josephine was the bait to ensnare him in this family melodrama.
He forced his attention back to the matter at hand, because feeling things was a luxury and there were still questions that required answers. “How far along?” he asked.
She blinked, as though she had steeled herself for recrimination and the plainness of the question caught her off guard. “Four months.”
Four months. Conceived in November, within the marriage. Jerome dead in January without ever knowing. Alistair was quiet for a moment, doing the arithmetic he could not stop himself from doing, and considered returning to his seat. But this was not a sitting conversation.
“You understand the legal position,” he said. It was not a question.
“I believe so.”
“Then allow me to be explicit.” He kept his voice level.
“A son conceived within a lawful marriage carries the full rights of a legitimate heir whether he is born before or after his father’s death.
En ventre sa mère. English courts have acknowledged the doctrine for centuries.
If you carry a boy, he is the tenth Duke of Oxley the instant he is born alive.
Not a claimant, not a candidate, but an heir at law.
My tenure here would be rendered entirely null. ”
He paused.
“Your proposal, as you have framed it, is not entirely accurate. If we marry before the birth, the child does not merely come under my guardianship. Jerome’s claim would be extinguished altogether.
The child would be accounted my lawful issue.
There would be no posthumous heir. Only my heir, succeeding me in the ordinary course as the eleventh duke. ”
Josephine absorbed this without flinching. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That is what I intended to say.”
“Furthermore.” He held her gaze. “As the heir presumptive to this title, I had a legal right to be informed of this pregnancy from the moment you knew of it. That is not merely custom. It is obligation, and it exists for precisely this reason, to prevent the circumstances you are now in. I did not grow up in a ducal household, but I know as much about the law.” He let the silence sit for a moment. “I should have been told at once.”
She did not look away. “I know,” she said. “I was not certain you could be trusted.”
It was, he reflected, a more honest answer than he had expected, and it disarmed him more effectively than any apology could have done.
He stepped back. Three feet. Four. Not enough.
The taste of her lingered, warm and herbal and faintly salt, and his hands hung at his sides like tools he no longer knew how to use.
The air between them, which moments ago had been charged with the electricity of two bodies pressed together, now felt cold and foreign, as though someone had opened a window onto a January night.
He wanted anger. Anger was clean, decisive.
But what he felt instead was the sick, hollow sensation of allowing himself, for exactly two minutes, to believe that something exceptional had happened to him, and then discovering it was a transaction.
A business proposition dressed up in trembling lips and gray eyes and a scent like chamomile and mint, and he, who had negotiated contracts with men twice his age since before his majority, had not seen it coming.
Had not wanted to see it coming, which was worse.
She was not his enemy. He knew that. He could see the sorrow in her face, the sorrow of gambling the only card she held and losing. That did not make the sting of it any less sharp.
“I think,” he said, and his voice was very controlled, the words measured out with no margin for waste, “that you should go.”
Her chin came up. Even now, tears tracking down her cheeks, hands trembling, there was a dignity to her that he found both admirable and infuriating, because it made anger very difficult to sustain, and anger was the only emotion that did not lead somewhere dangerous.
She stood there in her black bombazine, with her hair coming loose from its pins and her lips still faintly swollen from his kiss, and she looked at him with an expression that was not defiance but anguish.
“Your Grace—”
“Go,” he repeated, gently. “Please. I have work to do, and I need to think.”
She gathered herself, a visible act of will, the poise reassembling like armor refastened after a blow, and walked to the door with the refined glide with which she had entered the room.
At the threshold, she paused. He thought she might turn.
She did not. The door closed with a soft click, and the room was suddenly, oppressively, empty.
Alistair stood motionless for a long time. The fire had burned down to embers while they talked, while they kissed, while the world rearranged itself into a shape he did not recognize, and now the library was growing cold. The scent of chamomile lingered like an accusation.
Not wholly.
Two words. Two miserable, devastating words that told him everything he needed to know and nothing he wanted to hear.
The attraction was real. She had admitted that much.
But it was tangled in desperation and strategy and the survival instincts of a woman with no other cards to play.
He could not build anything on a foundation of need.
He knew how it ended, knew the shape of the yoke before it settled across the shoulders, knew the way a man’s own desires went quiet, then silent, then extinct, smothered beneath the relentless weight of being indispensable.
Being needed was not the same as being wanted.
Need was a transaction. Need was “you can loosen the dowager’s grip” and “we need you” and the desperate arithmetic of a woman calculating her survival.
Want was something else entirely, and Alistair had lived long enough without it that he had almost convinced himself he did not require it.
Almost.
He sat down at the desk and picked up his quill. The contract needed attention. The tenancy records needed sorting. The steward needed sacking. London needed him. The mill needed him. Everyone needed him, and not one soul in thirty-five years had ever simply wanted him.
The numbers swam before his eyes, meaningless as ancient runes. He set the quill down.
Not wholly.
He shoved the ledger aside, leaned back, and stared at the vaulted ceiling, where carved owls regarded him with their eternal unblinking indifference.
Outside, the rain continued its patient assault on the windows.
The fire died to ash. And Alistair Fraser-Oxley, tenth Duke of Oxley, industrialist, mill owner, guardian of four imprisoned cousins and reluctant heir to a collapsing estate, sat alone in his library and thought about the taste of mint tea on a woman’s lips.
Damnation.