Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
ROWEN
“I do not wish to marry her.”
“Ridiculous.” Scowling, Rowen’s father settled in the great chair behind his desk. “No one wishes to marry, but we must marry. I was fortunate in that I found my wife agreeable. In fact, we were fond of one another and were able to live in contentment.”
A tight smirk etched over Rowen’s face as he stood in his father’s study.
Fondness and contentment meant the Duke and Duchess each lived their own lives far away from one another.
Only several times a year were they under the same roof, if a dinner party, ball, or any other important social, political, or royal event called for it.
“Alas, your mother was taken from me much too soon.” His father sniffed at his snuff box.
“Your marrying your cousin will cement the family, strengthen our investments, and protect you from whatever schemes her brother can conjure. Your reputation is everything. Above all, it is better to be respected and feared. After the wedding, my nephew will stop his insinuations and insults.”
“You and Arthur agreed to this without me? I’ve only just returned after years on the continent. You cannot possibly expect that I—”
“You will do as you are told. You are past nine and twenty. It is time for you to take on more responsibility, and this is the first step.”
“I took on responsibility in Naples, working under His Majesty’s Minister to that court as you’d arranged.”
“And you did very well. When you are titled, you will have that post as I did once. Marrying Arthur’s sister is most beneficial.
Once you are married, Arthur will no longer be able to taint me, or you with his poisonous whispers at court, for if he does, he would taint his sister. Do you not see that?”
“Yet I fear it will only make him preen and demand all the more, Father. I cannot abide him.”
“Neither can I. Which is why we must squelch him completely with this marriage.”
Rowen clamped his jaw shut and turned his attention out the window to the rolling green park.
Indeed, his cousin was quite the opposite of him.
Arthur had married at eighteen to a girl he loved, and together they already had five children.
He fancied himself a bloody beacon of morality and principles, whilst he considered Rowen and his father to be no better than self-indulgent rakes besmirching the hallowed name of Oakley.
“I daresay, it’s a wonder Arthur never became a curate and cemented his insufferable self-righteousness.”
“Arthur is much more worldly and ambitious than that, my boy. Don’t ever forget it. You are an isolationist, Rowen, as am I, but this is your life’s task.”
“Task,” Rowen hissed out the hateful word.
“Marry, then do what you like,” his father snapped at him.
“Only make sure you beget a son. And mark me—provide your wife with all a female requires so that there will be no whinging. A peevish wife will be the death of you, trust me. I allowed your mother certain freedoms, and she enjoyed them discreetly.”
The Duke had allowed his wife the freedom to take lovers, which she did by all accounts.
Never in town, where His Grace kept his mistresses, or here at Tidesfar, but at their remote estate in the north and on the Continent.
In fact, she’d been in Venice with a lover when she’d taken ill with fever and died.
Rowen scrubbed a hand across his chin. The thought of bedding his cousin, having to live with her, slaked a cold sheath of disgust over his skin. He found her unattractive, undesirable, her laugh loud and stinging like her brother’s, her conversation colourless.
Furthermore, Louise was nothing like his independent and liberal mother. She would surely balk at the lifestyle his parents had enjoyed. He turned back to the Duke. “Is this engagement in writing yet?”
His father glanced up at him from a letter. “A solid promise that cannot be rejected. We’re gentlemen here. Family.”
Family. Bloody hell.
The Duke went back to his correspondence. “The agreement shall be signed after my family party.” He let out a coarse chuckle. “Knowing my nephew, he’ll come with documents in hand, if not his own solicitor.”
“Mmm.” Rowen turned the ledger on his father’s desk and tapped it. “I must tell you, I am concerned about your mistress and her son.” The previous evening, Rowen had examined the house ledger and found a glaring expenditure.
The Duke waved a dismissive hand in the air. “A trifle. It was the lad’s sixteenth birthday last month, so I gave him a few coins.”
“You call that a few coins?” Rowen huffed. “Father, I encountered his mother in a milliner’s on Bond Street the day before. She was most eager to inform me of her plans.”
The Duke squinted in the sudden glare of the sun through the window. “Her plans?”
His father’s mistress had known precisely what she was doing when she saw him. She’d expected a reaction from Rowen. He had given her none. Only the look that made lesser men step aside.
“Mrs. Bellamy told me that now you are in your sixtieth year, and not as hale as you once were. You require her constant attendance more than ever, and so she intends to reside with you at Tidesfar permanently.”
“I don’t need a nursemaid.”
“Certainly not. She also informed me that her son has been indispensable to you in my absence. That he has attended you during your dizzy spells, and occasions when you’ve chanced to forget—”
His father’s face darkened. “He wasn’t supposed to tell her!”
“It makes one wonder what else he’s told his mamma.” Rowen crossed his arms and leaned against his father’s desk. “I fear that once she is here for the family party, she will never leave.”
“She is so sure of herself that she dared tell my son so?” His face reddened and seemed to swell.
Rowen’s head slanted. “I daresay she’s hoping to marry you now that you are old and infirm at sixty.”
“Such impudence,” his voice snarled. “And this is not the first instance. This is why I am intent on reminding her of her place.”
“Has something happened?”
His father’s face morphed into a sneer as he shifted in his armchair, but he did not reply.
“Father?”
“Of late, I am unable to…no matter what she does, I am unable to—oh, don’t make me say it, boy…”
His father could no longer swive, was no longer capable of an erection, nor, of course, of completion. A disaster for a man like the Duke.
“I understand. Did she mock you?”
“She did,” he spit out. “She laughed. Treated me like a child.”
“Intolerable.”
“Doesn’t happen all the time…”
“Of course not.”
The Duke’s eyes narrowed. “I punished her for it.”
“I have no doubt.” His father always refused to be bested. And by his mistress?
The Duke’s eyes narrowed as he spoke, savouring the memory. “I forced her to submit to one of my servants while I stood over her and directed every movement. It was…memorable.” He reached for his snuffbox. “In truth, I am quite tired of her.”
“Apparently, so is your cock.”
“Quite so.” His father laughed in that sharp and controlled way of his that still made prickles race up and down Rowen’s spine, as when he was a boy and his father would brandish his cane on Rowen’s backside with relish. “Quite so.”
“Why don’t you simply tell her it’s over? Why bother with her coming to your party at all?”
“That’s no fun. No, I have arranged a surprise for her. A grand one at that. A spectacle, if you will. One which will brook no denial that she has lost her place forever. One that will surely cut her deeply and with great fanfare.”
Rowen knew his father enjoyed games. The glee in his snarl meant he wanted to personally experience his mistress’s humiliation, the crashing of her hopes, and then to cut her from his society forever.
“What kind of surprise?”
“You’ll see.”
Rowen smoothed back an errant lock of his hair. The Duke’s showmanship and manoeuvring hadn’t changed one bit. Rowen had been away for years, and nothing had changed. He was impatient for this weekend to be over with, then he’d return to town and stay there.
“And then, what of her son?” Rowen asked in a careful, delicate tone of voice.
“Francis is no longer a child, and he knows he depends upon my favour.”
“Does he know you are done with his mother?”
“Of course not.”
“Have you promised him something?”
“I have.”
Rowen grit his teeth. “More money?”
“I did find a suitable position for Francis, but nay, the little devil does not wish to be a curate.”
“I expect not.”
His father drained his glass of brandy. “He needs somewhere to live. He’s of age now. I am giving him a house nearby. ”
“A house nearby? Amongst the tenants?”
“Of course not. A proper house.”
“Father—”
“Francis can be very useful, and this way, he shall remain obedient to me, and me alone. He has been attached to his mother’s petticoats for far too long. I will only give him the house if he cuts her off.”
To separate them was to conquer, was it not?
The Duke rested his head on the back of his ornate chair. “Ah, she is about to learn a grave lesson.”
Whatever this spectacle his father had planned for Mrs. Bellamy, Rowen very much looked forward to it. But having the bastard living nearby in his own house? Insupportable.
The Duke’s hand cuffed Rowen’s arm tightly. “Listen to me—” His father’s lips pulled together. A look he often gave him to underscore his unyielding will. “You shall be agreeable with your cousin Arthur. Most especially with Louise. She will be your wife.”
“I do not wish to marry her.”
“He has been making all kinds of insinuations about me at court, about how I live my life.”
“What does it matter when almost all the ton know what you are, and none of them dare say a word or turn their backs on you for they all enjoy much the same and are beholden to you in their secrecy.”
“But he is sullying the air for all of us with his tedious rants and accusations, and I shall not have it. Making his sister your Duchess will oblige him to shut his mouth forever.” He released his grip on Rowen.
“No matter his righteous moral indignation. Well played, Father.”
“Mmm.”
“Certainly, he never ceases to point out that we have wronged him, that we owe him. You did take a good chunk of his father’s inheritance when he passed...”
“He was my younger brother. It was within my rights to do so.”
“And I must pay for your indulging your rights by marrying her?” Rowen raised his voice.
A sharp smirk lashed the Duke’s thin lips. “Do not snivel at me, boy. Come now–what is a wife?”
When Rowen’s mother had died, Rowen had been but six years of age.
He clearly remembered his father had shown no signs of grief or emotion, only a pale disappointment.
After, whilst the Duke had openly entertained an endless parade of lovers, an endless parade of nursemaids and tutors had tended to Rowen until, within the year, he’d been sent off to school permanently.
The Duke returned his attention to a freshly opened letter. Rowen bowed his head at his father and stalked from the room.
Indeed. What is a wife?