Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
“My dear Sterling,” Jasper Bowring announced as he entered Hector’s study.
Hector rarely needed company, but when he did, he always wrote to The Duke of Berkshire, his only friend who never failed to show up.
“I am starting to regret writing to you.” He glanced at Jasper, who shrugged.
“I came as soon as I heard you had ruined your life with marriage. Oh, and thank you for the wedding invitation.” He bowed in a mocking manner.
Hector scoffed. “It was a private affair; I invited no one.”
“I am deeply wounded.” Hector heard Jasper’s steps cross the carpet with easy confidence. “It was your wedding, and I was not permitted to stand nearby and look handsome.”
“That is precisely why you were not invited,” Hector replied smoothly.
“Married one morning and already cruel the next day,” Jasper muttered.
Hector heard the chair creak under Jasper’s weight. A moment later came the soft clink of glass. Jasper had found the decanter, as he always did.
“You may pour one for yourself,” Hector said.
“I already have.”
Hector’s jaw tightened. Jasper made himself at home, like no other man would have dared. He was glad that he had a confidant. When he told Jasper about his nieces, his friend arranged for private investigators to find them.
After a moment of silence, Jasper spoke again. “All joking aside. It was frightful receiving a letter that you are to wed, right after learning that you had a sister and nieces.”
Hector turned then, enough that Jasper’s shape gathered in his sight.
His friend had dark hair and blue eyes; he remembered him mostly from when they attended Eton together.
He was more like family to Hector. He would have loved to have his brother by his side during the wedding, but he had to keep it private for the girls.
“I did what had to be done for the children,” Hector eventually said.
Jasper did not answer at once, as a tense silence settled between them.
“How are the children?” Jasper asked.
Hector looked toward the fire. “They are alive, fed, warm, and safe.”
“I asked how they are, not whether you have completed an inventory,” his friend muttered.
Hector let out a huff of breath. “I do not know.”
He disliked how the truth sounded, but Jasper said nothing.
Hector shifted his grip on the cane. “I have no idea how one speaks to children.”
“Did you try speaking without your usual expression?”
“Everyone has been twitting me over my expression of late.” He frowned, then quickly released his brow as he remembered Her Grace’s words and her soft fingertips on his rough skin.
“And rightly so. Have you seen yourself, old friend?” Jasper raised a glass in Hector’s direction.
Hector exhaled through his nose. “The older one, Aurora, wants nothing to do with me.”
Jasper sat heavily into an armchair opposite Hector. The drink in his hand swirled dangerously but did not spill. “How old is she?”
“She is four years old.”
“Ah. A formidable age.”
Hector leaned back in his chair and let go of the cane as he began to relax in familiar company.
“She hides whenever I enter a room.”
Jasper chuckled. “And adults do the same. You have not taken it personally before.”
“Yes, but it is affecting her. When she is nervous, she stutters.”
Jasper’s glass stopped halfway to his lips.
“Is it that bad?” he asked concernedly.
“No. Not always. It worsens when she is pressed.” Hector hesitated.
He had no wish to discuss the child as though she were a case to be managed, yet silence did her no service.
“She fights it. That is what I noticed. She tries to force the word through because she believes failure will bring consequences.”
Jasper’s voice was quiet. “And will it?”
“Not in this house.”
The simple agreement did more than sympathy would have. Hector looked down at the blurred dark line of his cane. “Poppy thinks I do not understand.”
“Poppy?” Hector realized too late what he had called her, and he could see the grin on his friend’s face.
Jasper did not miss it. “Forgive me. Are we speaking of the new Duchess of Sterling, or have you acquired a flower with opinions?”
“My wife,” Hector corrected, and regretted that as well.
Jasper’s amusement grew, bright and merciless. “I assume she has a nickname for you too?”
Hector turned fully toward his friend, who was laughing carelessly. “Do you have a purpose in coming here?”
“I had several. Being excluded from a wedding has left me in deep distress that can only be mended by gossip.” Jasper leaned back. “Tell me about the baby.”
Hector preferred the shift less than he should have. “She is very small.”
“Most babies are,” Jasper said drily, but Hector ignored him.
“She has no name.”
“What do they call her?” Jasper did not tease this time.
Hector was unsure whether he should tell his friend, as he was not in the mood to be teased, or worse, for the girls to be the center of a jest. He could hardly get over the sister he had not known.
It broke his heart that someone else was born from his father’s appetite and then abandonment, like he was.
Only in his sister’s case, she died too young, and her children passed from grief to institution to him.
His father had reached beyond the grave and made more ruins for her and her mother.
He left them in poverty and continued to live as though they had never existed.
Hector had spent much of his life refusing to be shaped by that man.
Yet here again was the old inheriting harm done, and him left to pay for it.
He cleared his throat. “Her Grace and Aurora call the baby Princess.”
He expected Jasper to seize upon that and turn it neatly, making it into some joke. Instead, his friend drank, set the glass down, and said, “There are worse names to be given by someone who loves you.”
Hector had no answer. The fire shifted beside him. A small collapse of coal sent sparks muttering behind the grate.
“Your wife loves them, does she not?” Jasper asked curiously. “That is why you married her.”
Hector thought of the duchess’s soft hands, so quick and sure when touching his brow and again when touching Aurora’s hair in comfort.
He remembered how her voice changed from iron to warmth without losing strength.
“Yes, she loves them. I am afraid that she loves too much; it is becoming infuriating.”
“Love often is infuriating, or so I’m told.” Jasper gulped his brandy down in one swig.
“She contradicts me in my own house.” Hector’s mouth hardened. “And she assumes the worst of me.”
“Do you make the best in you easy to find?” Jasper pointed out.
Hector turned away before his face could betray anything. Jasper waited.
Hector should not have continued, but he could not help himself. “I found myself wondering what color her eyes were.”
He held his breath as he felt the shift in the room.
When Jasper spoke again, he heard the smile in his voice. “Shall I have a look for you?”
Hector’s head turned, and his shoulders locked.
Heat moved through him with such force that for one absurd second, he considered ordering Jasper to leave his house.
The jealousy he felt was unreal, but he did not want his womanizing friend near his wife.
The thought of Jasper standing close enough to tell him whether her eyes were blue or green or brown set something primitive free in his mind.
“No,” Hector said flatly.
Jasper chuckled.
Hector forced his fingers to loosen. “You will not go near her for the purpose of satisfying your amusement.”
“My dear fellow, I have many purposes when going near beautiful women. Amusement is only one.”
Hector got up and took one step away from him.
Jasper laughed. “There he is.”
“Do not provoke me, Jasper!”
“I am not provoking you. You do realize,” Jasper said with a wide grin, “that husbands are generally permitted to look at their wives.”
“I cannot look as you mean.” Hector had not meant to say that out loud.
He thought of his duchess that morning and how he refused to look at her face. She had been close enough that he would have made sense of it all, but he could not do it because she was beginning to scramble his mind in ways he was uncomfortable with.
He learned the warmth of her presence, the faint scent that clung to her clothes, and the quick intake of breath she took whenever he stepped nearer to her.
He had even seen the suggestion of her mouth but not its precise curve and the lift of her cheek with the color in it.
He had wondered, with the force that unsettled him, what her skin and her face would feel like beneath his fingertips.
Would she be soft, warm, and inviting as he imagined her to be?
“Have you considered asking her?” Jasper’s question pulled him back to reality.
“To allow me to touch her face?” Hector said, appalled by confessing yet another thought.
Jasper was beyond amused.
“It has been known between husbands and wives that they may—”
“That is enough. And this marriage is not that sort of arrangement.” Hector pointed his cane at his friend.
Jasper sighed, but there was laughter still at the edge of it. “Very well. I shall not inspect your wife’s eyes. I shall avert my gaze should she enter, in deference to your delicate constitution.”
Hector moved to the door.
“Is my visiting time over?” Jasper asked with mocking despair. “I had several more remarks prepared.”
“I feel sorry for the woman who marries you someday.” Hector scowled at Jasper, who was holding his stomach and laughing heartily.
“I would be a delightful husband! Unlike y—Hector—where are you going? You cannot flee a conversation in your own house.”
Hector opened the door. “Watch me.”
“Aurora,” Hector called.
Aurora saw him before he spoke and hid. Hector knew because a moment after he arrived at their chamber, he had heard the faint scuff of a child’s shoe and the whisper of fabric dragged across carpet. Then silence.