Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
“Five nights?”
Phillip, Duke of Kingsell, said the words as though they were a foreign coin he had bitten and found false, and in his astonishment he let his guard drop the breadth of a hand.
It was invitation enough. Valentine stepped inside the opening and drove his fist into his friend’s ribs, and not by way of gentleness either.
The breath went out of Phillip in a grunt.
He fell back a pace, laughing even as he winced, one arm curled protectively over his side.
They were stripped to their shirtsleeves in the long upper gallery that Valentine kept cleared of furniture for precisely this purpose, the tall windows letting in a light gone thin and gray with the early hour.
There was no sound in the whole great room but the shift of their stockinged feet upon the boards and the labor of their breathing.
It was an old ritual between them, standing for longer than either of them had held their titles.
They had been beating one another about the head since their first term at school, and had found, in twenty years, no better way to say the things men of their sort were not permitted to say aloud.
“Mind your guard,” Valentine said, “or spare me the complaints that follow.”
“A man cannot land a blow like that and expect his opponent to hold his tongue over it.” Phillip circled, fists raised again, the grin still hanging crooked on his mouth.
“Five nights, Rosewood. You. The coldest article in all of England, who has not paid a woman the courtesy of a second glance across a ballroom these three years together, and now you tell me you mean to spend five whole nights in the wooing of your own wedded wife. I confess I had not thought to live to see it.”
“I had little choice in the matter.” Valentine turned with him, keeping his eyes upon his friend’s hands rather than his face, as he had been taught before he was ten years old.
“The lady had settled it in her own mind to give me no heir at all. She put it to me in the plainest terms, that I ought to get one upon a mistress, discreetly, and let her raise the child as her own before the world, so that I might keep whatever women pleased me and leave her out of the whole affair entire.”
What he did not say, what he had no intention of saying, even to Phillip, was the rest of what had gone through him as he watched her; not a flicker of color in her cheek or the smallest falter in her voice.
And that some unfamiliar and faintly ridiculous corner of him had been put out by it, had sat there in the dark of the room, of all the absurd things, mildly affronted to find himself so wholly unwanted by a creature so uncommonly lovely to look upon.
I might at the very least, he thought now, with a self-mockery that did not much amuse him, have merited some little jealousy. Some show of it. But no.
“And is that so grievous a sentence?” Phillip feinted toward his left. “There is not a man of our acquaintance who would not gnaw off his own arm for such an arrangement. A wife who asks no questions and turns no locks against you. Half of White’s would weep with envy.”
“It is a great deal of bother.” Valentine caught the feint on his forearm and turned it aside.
“And it breeds complications no man of any sense invites beneath his own roof. A bastard here. A rumor there. Some woman with a grievance and a memory that does not fade. No.” He shook his head once, sharply.
“An heir got properly, upon my correctly own house, with no man alive able to whisper otherwise. That is the clean path. It is the only one I mean to walk.”
“So you do intend to seduce her.”
Valentine hit him again.
“Ah—” Phillip staggered back, wheezing, both hands flung up in surrender now, helpless with laughter. “God! Rosewood, it was a fair question and fairly asked!”
“I intend to warm her to the notion.” Valentine let his fists come down a fraction, and rolled the ache from his shoulder.
“There is nothing so sordid in it as your face would suggest. We are neither of us in our dotage. A few months of goodwill honestly built between a man and his wife, and nature may be trusted to see to the remainder.” He drew a breath.
“It is not romance I am hunting. It is an heir.”
“And it must be got this year, I suppose.”
“I am thirty.”
“Thirty is not sixty.”
“And if I am thrown from a horse tomorrow?” Valentine turned away toward the window. “It goes to my cousin. Every acre. The lands, the tenants, the seat in the Lords, the name itself . To a man who would have the timber sold within the year and the whole of it mortgaged within two.”
“So it is spite.”
“It is the work of six generations.” He was quiet a moment.
“My father taught me that a man gives himself to the thing entire or he does not give himself at all. I cannot do that with the succession sitting at my back like an unpaid debt. Every hour I put into that estate is an hour I might be handing to a cousin I cannot abide.”
And a wife had not been easy to find. His name had gone before him for years now, black and blackening by the season, until there was scarcely a respectable house in London that would suffer his suit past the threshold.
He had very nearly made his peace with it.
The matchmaker’s letter had come to him, promising a viscount’s daughter, gently born and of unimpeachable family, wanting a husband, and wanting one with uncommon haste.
Any other man might have caught the scent of the trap in that haste.
Any other man might have drawn back in plain distaste from a girl so evidently being disposed of, hurried off the shelf before the whole of the ton could ask why.
Valentine had been too near the frayed end of his patience to care what it looked like.
He had gone to see the thing for himself, and had found the trap laid exactly where he had known it would be lying, save that it had never once been the girl.
It was her family who were the entrapment; he knew that after a short conversation with her father’s new wife.
“Well.” Phillip let his hands fall and straightened, his breath beginning to come easier, and pushed the damp hair back from his brow. “Did she give you her reason? A young woman does not set her face against motherhood for nothing at all.”
Valentine was silent a moment longer than the question wanted. Then he shook his head.
“She has her reasons,” was all he said aloud. “They are hers to keep.”
Phillip regarded him with the dry, shrewd, sidelong look that had unsettled harder heads than most across the length of a bargaining table.
“You might be shut of the entire tangle by the week’s end, you understand.
Have the marriage set aside, it is unconsummated, and for a man of your standing it would be no great labor to arrange.
I shall find you some comfortable widow safely distant from London who will give you half a dozen sons and never once disturb your peace.
Say the word, and it is as good as done. ”
He went to the small table by the wall, where a pitcher stood sweating in the cold air, and poured out two glasses of water, and held one out across the space between them.
Valentine took it and drank half before answering.
“No.” He set the glass aside upon the sill. “I want her.”
Phillip’s brows climbed toward his hairline. For a moment he said nothing whatsoever, only looked at his friend over the rim of his own glass, with an expression of open and steadily kindling interest.
“Interesting,” he said at length.
“Do not make it more than it is.”
“I would not dream of such a thing.” But the corner of his mouth had folded inward, and there was a great deal of laughter waiting patiently behind his eyes.
He drank, and set his glass down beside Valentine’s, and let the quiet draw out.
“Tonight is the first of them, then. Is it not? Night one of your five.”
Valentine did not answer at once.
He was thinking, against every dictate of his own better judgment, of how she had looked the evening before.
Perched upon the very edge of his great bed as though the whole of it might give way beneath so slight a weight, done up by the maids in white lawn so fine and so sheer that it had concealed nothing worth the concealing, the entire chamber gone heavy and sweet with the scent of roses lifting off her warmed skin.
Her dark hair swept up and away to bare the long white line of her throat.
Her legs pale beneath the thin drift of the gown where it had ridden up above her knee.
The smooth curve of her shoulder when he had drawn the sleeve of the thing slowly down and laid it bare, and the small broken way her breath had stopped in her chest when he had bent his head and set his mouth against her there.
He had wanted, with an intensity that had rather alarmed him, not to stop.
It had cost him more than he would ever confess to another living soul to rise from that bed and cross the room and shut the door of his study between them.
And once he was safely behind it, alone in the dark, he had put his own hand to himself and found his relief in thinking of her, because the only other course on offer had been to fling that door wide and go back through it and take what he had that very hour given his word he would not.
He thought of her wide, dark, startled eyes. The astonishing softness of her skin beneath his fingertips. The wild flutter of the pulse he had felt beating at the hollow of her throat, quick as a snared bird’s.
“Yes,” Valentine said. “The first night.”