Five Nights to Claim His Duchess (The Marriage Bargains #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“Have you ever beheld such a creature? She is quite the loveliest thing in the room.”

“Lovely, I grant you, though I confess the whole affair strikes me as peculiar. A man does not commonly parade a second wife about as though she were his first Season’s prize.”

“Oh, but have you not heard? She is a widow, and of good blood, a country family, but a good one. He means only to see her properly established. One can hardly fault a gentleman for wishing his own wife received.”

Diana Fernside kept her place near the wall and pretended not to hear a word of it.

It was not difficult to guess of whom they spoke.

There was but one woman in the ballroom tonight worth such a quantity of whispering, and she stood at its bright center with her gloved hand upon the arm of Lord Westleigh, Diana’s father, who had not, in the whole course of the evening, looked once toward the corner where his daughters stood.

A small hand tugged at hers.

“Diana.” Arabella’s voice was very low, the way it went when she was trying to be good and finding it hard. “Why does Papa not look at us? We have been here ever so long.”

Because he has forgotten he has daughters at all, Diana thought. Because for he has had eyes for nothing but her.

“Hush, dearest. Papa is only very busy tonight. He has a great many people to greet.” She drew her sister a half step closer to her skirts.

“But he said he was going away on business.” Arabella’s voice was small and quite bewildered. “He said himself that he should be back before the roses came. And then he came back with—” she faltered “—with her.”

Diana held her breath. Then it came.

“Who is she, Diana? Why have we never once heard of her?” The small hand tightened in hers.

“He has been home a fortnight and he has not so much as—” She stopped, and her chin trembled, and she got the rest of it out in a whisper.

“He never introduced us at all. She has been at his table every night, and I do not know her name to say it.”

Diana closed her eyes for the space of a breath.

“He did not tell me either,” she said quietly.

Her father had gone on a trip and returned with a woman and she had learned from a maid, Betsy, that he married her on his trip.

She had not bothered to ask him, she learned that the answer, if it came at all, would only annoy her.

Arabella’s head came up.

“I did not learn it from Papa, Bella. I learned it from a maid.” She kept her voice very even, because the child was watching her face and would take everything from it. “That is how I came to know we had a stepmother at all.”

The child’s eyes had gone round. Arabella was quiet for a moment. Then, very low: “Is it because we did something wrong?”

Oh, my darling. Diana crouched down and took her sister’s face between her hands.

“Listen to me. It is nothing you have done. Nothing at all, do you understand me? Papa is being foolish, and grown men are permitted to be foolish, and it has nothing whatever to do with two girls who have been perfectly good all evening.” She smoothed a stray curl back behind Arabella’s ear and made herself smile.

“And you needn’t fret over any of it, because you have got me.

You will always have me. That has not changed and it never shall.

Now stand up straight and stop chewing your lip. ”

She rose, and set her hand on the small shoulder, and looked out across the ballroom at the bright center of it where her father stood.

It had been the maid, Betsy, who had pressed tonight’s gowns into their hands that very afternoon. The pale muslin for Diana, the white for Arabella because no one else beneath that roof had thought to see them dressed for the occasion of their own father’s celebration.

By rights Arabella ought to have been abed in the nursery; no child of eight belonged at a ton ball past ten o’clock.

But word had come down that morning, in the new Viscountess’s own hand, that both Miss Fernside and Miss Arabella were to attend, prettily dressed, and were to be present without fail.

Diana barely understood the command then. She was beginning to understand it now.

The music thinned and fell away. At the raised end of the room, her father lifted his glass, and the company turned toward him as one body, and Lady Westleigh clapped her hands once, lightly, as though she could scarcely contain her joy.

“My dear friends.” Octavia’s voice carried beautifully; it was trained to charm.

“You cannot know what it means to me to stand among you tonight. I came to this great city a stranger, and I have found in it”—she pressed her free hand to her breast—“a home. A husband who is, I do not blush to say it, the very love of my life.”

A murmur of approval ran round the room.

“And more than a husband.” Here she turned her lovely face toward the corner by the wall, and her smile widened, and Diana felt every eye in the ballroom turn with it.

“I have been given two dear daughters, whom I mean to love as my very own. Come, my darlings. Do not hide yourselves away. Come and let our friends see you.”

She has given us nothing, Diana thought, but cold looks since the hour she crossed our door. And now she names us darlings before the whole of London.

There was no choice in it, and Octavia had known there would be none.

To refuse, to stand fixed against the wall while two hundred guests waited and watched, would shame her father and brand her a sullen, ungrateful creature before the entire ton.

Diana wrapped her hand more firmly around her sister’s small fingers.

“Come, Bella,” she murmured. “Hold your chin up and smile. It shall be over soon.”

They crossed the floor together beneath the weight of all those eyes. Arabella’s hand trembled in hers.

When they had reached the dais, her father said nothing, only smiled in that loose, vague way he wore so often of late. It was Octavia who spoke.

“I have one happy piece of news more to share, since we are all of us among friends.” She laid her gloved hand upon Diana’s shoulder; it sat there light as a bird and twice as cold.

“Our eldest, Miss Diana Fernside, is to be married, and married soon. His Grace, the Duke of Rosewood, has asked for her hand, and the wedding is to be held within the week.”

For the space of a single breath the room was perfectly silent.

Then it was not.

The whispers came all at once, a low rushing wave of them, and they were nothing like the soft indulgent murmurs of before.

“Rosewood? Surely she cannot mean Rosewood.”

“The Duke of Rosewood—good God. The poor child.”

“Within the week? Why, that is no courtship at all. A special license, then—one does wonder at such unseemly haste.”

“What manner of father gives his own daughter over to a man like that? They say he—” and the rest was lost behind a fan, but Diana did not need to hear it. Everyone knew what they said of the Duke of Rosewood.

The floor seemed to tilt beneath her slippers. At her side, she heard Arabella draw a sharp little breath.

“I beg your pardon,” Diana said. Her voice came out quite steady; she would never afterward know how. “I am to be married?”

Octavia turned to her with an expression of the tenderest concern, an expression Diana might have believed entirely, had she not stood near enough to see how little of it reached the woman’s eyes.

“Oh, my dear girl.” She said it gently, fondly, pitched just loud enough to carry.

“I know how you love your dear papa, and how you dread to leave his side. But you are three-and-twenty now. It is past time you were properly settled and made a lady of, unless you should like to be left upon the shelf, and laughed at for an old maid?”

Diana swallowed. She held her breath behind her teeth and did not let her face so much as move, because there were two hundred people watching, and because Arabella stood trembling against her side, and because to weep here, now, before all of them, was the one thing she would not do.

Her father laughed, an easy, careless laugh, as though his wife had made some clever jest, and raised his glass higher.

“Enough of business,” he declared. “We have come here to be merry. Let us have the music again!”

The instruments struck up. The floor began to turn once more. And just so, before all the world, the matter was settled, and her father turned his shoulder to her.

She found him near the terrace doors, a little apart from the press of dancers, the Viscountess at his elbow as she was at his elbow always now.

“Papa.” Diana kept her voice low, mindful of the company, but she could not keep it from shaking. “Papa, I must speak with you. What was that? What have you done?”

“Diana.” He frowned at her over the rim of his glass. “This is neither the time nor the—”

“I will not marry him.” The words came before she could weigh them.

“I will not. I will not leave Arabella, and I will not be handed to a man like the Duke of Rosewood. You must know what is said of him, everyone here knows it, you heard them yourself. You cannot mean to give me over to such a man as that.”

“Now, do not be cross with your dear papa.” Octavia’s hand fluttered toward her arm. “The fault is all my own, my dear. I only thought—”

Diana did not so much as glance at her.

“Papa, I am asking you.”

For a moment something flickered in his face, some ghost of the father he had been, years ago, before grief had hollowed him out and left a stranger sitting in his chair. Then it was gone, and his jaw set hard.

“You had two full Seasons,” he said, “to make a match of your own, and you turned up your nose at every gentleman I set before you. Two Seasons, Diana. Your stepmother has been kindness itself to trouble herself over your future when you would not, and this”—he gestured at her with the glass, slopping wine over the rim—“this is the thanks she has from you. You are an ungrateful girl. You always have been.”

“Ungrateful?” The word tore loose, too loud; a head or two turned nearby, and she lowered her voice with an effort that cost her everything.

“She has been in this house two months, Papa, and already she orders my whole life as though I were a parcel to be posted off. You did not so much as ask me. You did not even tell me yourself—”

His hand came up to slap her.

She saw it rise, and she knew, with a sick lurch of her stomach, precisely what it meant; she had simply never once in three-and-twenty years believed her father capable of it. Her eyes squeezed shut. She braced for the blow.

It did not fall.

When she opened her eyes, the Viscountess had caught his wrist in both her gloved hands, and her face had crumpled into a perfect picture of distress, and there were even tears, real tears, gathered bright and trembling along her lashes.

How does she summon them so quickly? Some cold, far-off part of Diana wondered.

“Oh, my lord, do not, I beg of you, do not. Not here. Not over me. This is all my doing, every bit of it.” Octavia pressed his lowered hand between her own as though in prayer.

“If it grieves her so very much, then let us cancel the arrangement. I never meant to bring such trouble into your house. I shall write to His Grace myself, this very night, and—”

“There will be no cancellation.”

Her father wrenched his hand free. His face was dark with wine and temper.

“The girl is spoiled,” he said, “and she is making a spectacle of herself, and she will be married within the week as it was agreed, and there is an end to it. I will hear no more upon the subject.”

Diana stood very still. Her cheek had not been struck, and yet it burned all the same, as though the blow had landed somewhere far deeper than skin.

She turned her head, and there, a few feet off, half hidden behind the spill of a curtain, stood Arabella.

The child had followed her. She had seen it all.

Her small face was white, her lips pressed hard together, her eyes brimming, and she was fighting with everything in her small body not to let the tears come, because her sister had taught her that a lady did not weep where others might see.

Something in Diana went quiet then. Quite cold, and quite clear.

She drew a slow breath. She crossed to her sister and gathered the small cold hand into her own, and she did not look back, not at her father, nor at the woman weeping her false tears beside him.

“Come, Bella,” she said softly. “We are going.”

And she walked her sister out through the bright, laughing, glittering crowd, every step of it, and did not once let them see her break.

Seven days, she thought. In seven days she would belong to the Duke of Rosewood, and Arabella would be left to that woman, and try as she might, Diana could not see a single way under heaven to prevent either one.