Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
Christine’s life after Greystone was a whirlwind.
Bracing herself for what would come next, she found herself unprepared for the barrage of modiste visits for a wedding dress, visits to the local vicar of the parish within which Duskwood lay.
She was shown the wedding bands and the special license that Tristan had obtained.
Christine felt that he had exercised a great deal of ducal authority and political string-pulling to arrange their marriage.
When it finally came, it was something of an anti-climax. Attended by the servants of Duskwood only, the ceremony flowed past and was culminated with a kiss that stole her breath and a whispered promise that she would be safe. From external threats and from him.
Tristan swept into the breakfast room the next day like a storm.
“Have you finished breakfast?” he demanded.
“I have,” Christine said.
“Good. Do not dawdle, we are leaving.”
“Leaving? For where?”
“That will become clear when we arrive. But leaving will occur now.”
Christine stared at him in disbelief. He looked like he had been working all night and had risen from his desk to come down to the breakfast room. He put a hand through his hair, barely taming it. His eyes were bright. Christine felt his excitement for whatever their errand was.
“Have you found Charles?” she asked, breathlessly.
Is it better that Charles is found, and I no longer need to wonder where he is? Or that he remains free and unharmed? Charles destroyed us. He is my blood, but he did not behave as if he were.
“No, this is something far more pleasant. A wedding present.”
She rose, putting down her linen napkin. Tristan pulled open the door and waved his arm to indicate she should precede him. She left the room ahead of him.
The carriage rocked and sighed like a ship leaving harbor, wheels hissing over the damp road as Greystone fell away behind them and London’s smoke thinned to a blue haze on the horizon.
The morning had opened its palm to a pale, water colored sky. Hedgerows slid past, slick with rain and newly washed cobwebs. Inside, the air was warmer than the world beyond, smelling faintly of leather, lamp oil, and the clean starch of Tristan’s linen.
He sat opposite; one boot braced on the seat opposite. One palm rested loosely upon his thigh, as if motion barely touched him. Despite that, each rock of the carriage seemed to carry his shoulder to press against hers. To shift his thigh slightly enough to make contact.
Christine let her hand slip to the seat between them and touched his leg as the carriage rounded a corner. Neither acknowledged the contact.
The light caught in his hair and made dark waves of it.
His face held that calm he wore like armor.
It was not indifference. It was discipline.
She had let silence run for nearly a mile, measuring it, testing it, and hoping it might yield more than words would.
It did not. So she abandoned hope of subtlety.
“Where did you go,” she asked at last, “last night?”
He looked up as if from a long way off. “Pardon?”
She hated the heat that climbed her neck.
“At the final dinner. You vanished. Everyone noticed.”
“Everyone?” A wry crease appeared beside his mouth, “The Dowager Duchess will be gratified.”
“Tristan.”
He studied her for a moment, then turned to the window and watched a line of elms lift their black hands to the sky. “Gillray House.”
“To do what?”
“Tidying.”
He said it in the tone men used for the movement of pawns. A faint pat upon the shoulder of a matter dispatched.
“Tidy what?”
“Loose ends.”
“Could you be any more ambiguous?”
Her voice fluttered and steadied, a bird finding a branch.
His eyes returned to her. “I instructed Lady Gillray to have your belongings prepared. I prefer not to leave pieces of your life in a house that wished you ill.”
A complicated ache went through her. It was relief at being considered and a warmth of pleasure. There was also anger at being managed… and something warmer and more treacherous than either.
Is this the beginning? Am I to be merely a trophy with no more power than the suits of armor he no doubt has decorating his house?
“You might have told me.”
“I might,” he agreed, “but you would have argued that you should attend, and I wished to avoid a scene.”
“You wished to avoid me,” she said, more sharply than she intended.
That, at least, tugged a thread in him. The calm shifted. “Never.”
He pulled something from the seat beside him. It was a folio of thick paper tied with twine. He set it on his knee.
“Speaking of scenes,” he went on, gentling the moment with a change of subject.
He untied the twine and handed her a slip of paper, written in block capitals, in the neat, cold hand of a clerk. Her name leapt at her from the page.
A marriage is announced between His Grace Tristan, Duke of Duskwood, and Lady Christine Davidson…
The line blurred with the speed at which her lungs forgot their purpose. The neatly inked lines were coolly confident, clinical, and certain. It made what had only been talked of thus far into a reality. It made it real for any reader. She lifted her eyes.
“This is the message that has been copied and carried to every newspaper in London and will be circulated beyond over the coming days and weeks. Announcing our betrothal,” Tristan said, a trace of triumph in his voice, the light of it in his eyes.
“You have sent these already?”
“They will appear tomorrow and then every day for a week. I have purchased the space. London’s appetite for news is insatiable, and I mean to satisfy it with something more palatable than Gillray’s gossip.”
“But you did not ask me.”
His brows lowered a fraction. “Would you have preferred the announcement held back and rumor to fill the gap? I do not care much for leaving the field to rumor. It bites worse than the truth. Besides, why would you object? You agreed to this and to the reason behind it.”
“It is not a rumor I fear,” she said quietly. “It is what truth you intend to catch in your net. Perhaps I am not so complacent about your apparent keenness for the hunt.”
A stillness passed over him, like the wind dropping from a sail. “Explain.”
She looked down.
“You are very pleased with yourself, Tristan. Forgive me, but you are. There is a glint to you, something almost…triumphant,” she forced a small, thin smile, “you look like a hunter who has found his quarry’s trail.”
The corner of his mouth hardened. “I am a hunter. It is what dukes are, whether they shoot birds or chase deer,” his gaze did not leave her, “and there is a deer abroad I would like to stalk.”
“Charles is not a deer,” she said, and heard the tremor she wished to hide, “he is my brother.”
He is my brother. I played with him as a child. He protected me and comforted me when I cried. But he also destroyed our family with his greed, with his reckless lack of regard. I do not know whether I want him to remain free or see him serve justice.
“He is a man who destroyed lives and walked away.” his voice stayed quiet, the calm restored, the discipline resumed, “My notice is a rope thrown into a dark well. It may draw him up. Better he comes to me than I go to him.”
“And then?”
“Then,” he said, and the single syllable held a thousand calculated paths.
He opened his mouth and then simply shrugged, looking away. It was a chilling moment.
He washes his hands of the moment. As though not holding himself responsible for what might happen.
“We talk,” he said, finally, brows drawing down tightly as though the words were dragged from him.
She wanted to say she believed him. She wanted to say she did not. She wanted to ask whether talk in his mouth meant a gallows in someone else’s. Instead, she folded the notice along its crease and set it back upon his knee.
“I want to see him,” she said, “I want to ask him why. But I cannot want that if it means you will harm him.”
He studied her as one might study a map for hidden roads. “You think I brought you into my life to make you watch a punishment?”
“I think you brought me into your life to hunt him. Hunters rarely mean their prey well.”
There. The blade lay on the table between them. Something like approval glinted in his eyes, approval of the courage to say it. “You think clearly.”
“You never answered my question,” she said. “Will you harm him?”
“If the law demands it,” he said.
She flinched. “That is not an answer. The law has a blindfold that slips. It sees what it is told to see. By men like you.”
He leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, the space between them filling with gravity.
“Listen to me. If Charles comes, I will not allow anyone to lay hands on you. Or him. Not until I have heard him. That much I can promise.”
She searched his face. Stone gave nothing. But his eyes were not stone. They stormed.
“And if what you hear is not to your liking?”
“Then,” he said evenly, “I will have a decision to make.”
“So will I,” she murmured, almost to herself.
His gaze sharpened. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that a wolf and his mate hunt together. If you wish my cooperation, then show me the trail you wish me to follow.”
Meaning that if you make yourself judge and executioner, Wolf, I shall not be your lady.
“I would like nothing more than to hunt with you,” Tristan said quietly.
Christine looked at him, eyes sharp, breath quick. He returned her stare with unspoken words in his gaze, constrained feelings in his carefully controlled expression.
“I am not savage enough to hunt.”
“Are you not? But I am?”
“You are wild. You have said as much.”
“Or howled it.”
“That is in the nature of wolves.”