Chapter 5
What manner of madhouse had he stumbled into?
He turned toward her, intending to inquire further. Instead, her scent reached him. Chamomile, with mint beneath it. Clean and herbal, carrying an unexpected suggestion of home that slipped past his defenses.
He had noticed it once before, that first afternoon her gray eyes met his across the drawing room, but this close it became impossible to set aside.
It quieted the ceaseless machinery of his thoughts, the endless calculations and strategies and lists that ran from the moment he woke until his brief, worn-out sleep finally claimed him.
None of it vanished exactly. It simply grew quieter.
She was the reason for that quiet, though he could not explain why and felt little urge to try.
All he knew was that, standing near enough to count her eyelashes, he could barely hear the relentless workings of his own mind.
He had no use for such feelings, of course, but she was looking up at him all the same. His hands, curled into fists a moment ago, opened at his sides.
“Your name,” he said, his voice coming out rougher than he meant it to, nothing like the crisp authority he used for business. “Your given name.”
“Josephine.” The word left her on barely more than a breath.
“Alistair.” Speaking his own name in this room, in the library where his father had once sat through boyhood lessons he never once discussed, felt like surrender and declaration at once.
He caught her elbow and drew her nearer. She came without resistance, a catch of breath the only sign that his touch had caught her off guard, and then her face tipped up to his, and his mouth found hers, and whatever remained of his resolve sank beneath the surface and did not come back up.
The kiss began slowly, carefully, the first yielding of two people who had spent days determined to keep their distance.
Her mouth was warm and faintly sweet with mint tea.
When she answered him, there was a shy uncertainty in it that made his chest tighten.
She reacted to tenderness as though she had never learned to expect it.
That single realization undid him more completely than any calculated seduction ever could have.
He took her face in both hands, tipped her head back, and kissed her again, deeper this time, with nothing tentative left in it at all.
She made a soft, startled sound against his mouth, not protest but discovery, and her fingers found the front of his waistcoat and gripped as though the ground had tilted beneath her feet.
He felt the exact instant the tension left her body.
She relaxed into his embrace, and the careful tenderness between them gave way to a breathless, imperfect urgency.
His arm slid around her waist to draw her nearer.
His hand froze against her side. He was no green boy.
He knew a woman’s figure well enough. Something was amiss.
The clean line from waist to hip had gone soft, a fullness where it ought to have drawn narrow and clean.
No amount of stiff mourning wool could hide that, not held this close, not from a man paying this much attention. There was no mistaking what it meant.
He tore his mouth from hers, stunned.
“You are carrying a child.” The accusation left him before he could think better of it, his mind already spinning through what it meant.
The color left Josephine’s face entirely as she blinked up at him, still dazed from the kiss. “You must not—” She stopped, seeming to gather her nerve. “You must not tell the old woman.”
“She will notice, sooner or later, whether I tell her or not!”
Josephine caught her lip between her teeth, watching him with those cool gray eyes that always seemed to anchor him so firmly to the present. Once more he felt that peculiar calm she drew up from somewhere deep in his restless, overworked soul.
“Perhaps we might marry?”
Now it was his turn to blink, uncomprehending.
“It would make the child’s claim meaningless in law. If it is a boy, you would be his father. Even should he inherit the title, the control would be yours!”
Alistair frowned at the desperation threading through her voice.
He might have suspected the young woman of practiced seduction, if not for the clumsiness of that kiss.
Absent the child growing beneath her stays, he would have taken her for entirely untried.
With no small discomfort, Alistair shoved away the unwelcome image of his uncle and Josephine as husband and wife before his mind could finish forming it.
He shook his head sharply, as if the motion alone could dislodge the thought, and caught the thread of their conversation again. She had proposed marriage to secure his legal command of the title.
“And why does that matter to you?”
“Because … you have—” She seemed suddenly anxious. “You could loosen the dowager’s hold over me. Over the girls. We need you.”
Being needed held no appeal for him. He had lived through this once already.
He had once been a young man content at his studies when his father collapsed, and he was called home without warning.
Overnight, Alistair had inherited the reins of the family’s textile fortune, along with a mother, four younger brothers, and a sister to look after, and he had not even reached his majority for another six months yet.
His whole life had overturned fifteen years ago.
Now it seemed determined to overturn a second time.
A potential heir might release him from all of it. But his gaze dropped to her pale face, and he saw real fear there, unmistakable in the depths of her striking eyes.
Thinking back on his own reaction upon meeting his four cousins, Alistair felt the sinking certainty that he was already mired in this family’s troubles, too deep now to pull free of the mud closing over his boots.
He thought of the neglect his cousins had endured under the late duke’s care.
And if the widow’s meaning held true, the bitter old dowager posed just as great a threat to their peace as Jerome ever had.
None of which meant he had to like it, or accept it gladly.
“What is this, then? Are you offering yourself up to protect the girls? Some manner of bait to lure me into marriage?”
Her wide gray eyes brimmed with tears. “We need you” was all she said in answer, and the words pulled a growl of frustration from him.
“So the attraction between us is nothing but pretense!”
Color rose in the widow’s cheeks, and she looked away, shame plain on her face. “Not wholly.”
It amounted to a confession, and Alistair felt betrayal wash through him and settle like a stone in his gut. The Oxley girls needed his money and his leadership, and Josephine had been dangled before him as the lure to snare him into this family’s drama.
He wrenched his focus back to the matter at hand, because feelings were a luxury he could not afford just now, and there were questions still wanting answers. “How far along?”
She blinked, as though she had braced herself for reproach and the sheer plainness of his question had caught her unprepared. “Four months.”
Four months. Conceived that December, within the bounds of marriage.
Jerome gone by January, never the wiser.
Alistair fell silent, working through the arithmetic he could not help himself from calculating, and thought briefly of returning to his chair.
But this was not a conversation for sitting down.
“You understand what this means legally.” Not a question.
“I believe so.”
“Then let me be plain about it.” His voice stayed level.
“A son conceived inside a lawful marriage holds the full rights of a legitimate heir, whether his birth comes before his father’s death or after.
En ventre sa mère. English courts have upheld the doctrine for centuries now.
Carry a boy, and he becomes the tenth Duke of Oxley the moment he draws his first breath.
Not a claim to be argued, not a candidate to be considered, but an heir already established in law.
My own position here would be finished entirely. ”
He paused.
“Your proposal, framed as you framed it, is not quite correct. Should we marry before the child is born, that child does not simply pass into my guardianship. Jerome’s claim vanishes entirely.
The child becomes my own lawful issue in the eyes of the law.
There is no posthumous heir in that case.
Only my heir, who would follow me in the natural course of things as the eleventh duke. ”
Josephine took this in without so much as a flinch. “Yes,” she said, quiet. “That was my meaning.”
“There is more.” He did not release her gaze.
“As heir presumptive to this title, the law gave me the right to be told of this pregnancy from the moment you first knew of it yourself. That is not simple custom. It is obligation, and it exists exactly to prevent the very situation you now find yourself in. I was not raised in a ducal household, but I know the law well enough.” He let the silence stretch a moment.
“I ought to have been told the instant you knew.”
She held his gaze without wavering. “I know,” she said. “I could not be certain you were a man to be trusted.”
It was, he thought, a far more honest answer than he had braced for, and it undid his anger more thoroughly than any apology ever could have managed.
He retreated. Three paces. Four. It was not distance enough.
Her taste lingered on his mouth still, warm and herbal with a faint trace of salt, and his hands hung useless at his sides, like tools whose purpose he had suddenly forgotten.
The space between them, charged only moments before with the nearness of two bodies pressed close, had turned cold and unfamiliar, as if someone had thrown open a window onto a January night.
He wanted to be angry. Anger was simple and clean.
What came instead was the sick, hollow feeling of having let himself believe, for perhaps two whole minutes, that something remarkable had happened to him, only to learn it had been a transaction all along.
A business arrangement wrapped up in trembling lips and gray eyes and the scent of chamomile and mint, and he, a man who had negotiated with rivals twice his age since before he came of age, had not seen it coming at all.
He had not wanted to see it, which was the worse offense.
She was not his enemy. That much he knew. Sorrow showed plainly on her face, the plain grief that comes of staking the only card a person holds, and losing it outright. Knowing that did nothing to blunt the sting of it.
“I think,” he said, his voice tightly controlled, every word doled out with no room to spare, “that you had better go.”
Her chin lifted. Even now, with tears tracking down her cheeks and her hands trembling, there was a dignity about her that struck him as both admirable and maddening, because it made his anger nearly impossible to hold onto, and anger was the only feeling that did not lead somewhere dangerous.
She stood before him in her black bombazine, hair slipping loose from its pins, lips still faintly swollen from his kiss, and the look she gave him was not defiance but something closer to grief.
“Your Grace—”
“Go,” he said again, more gently. “Please. There is work waiting for me, and I need to think.”
She drew herself together, the effort visible, her calm knitting itself back into place like armor buckled on again after a blow, and crossed to the door with the same graceful glide she had used entering the room.
At the threshold she stopped. He thought she might look back.
She did not. The door shut with a soft click, and the room fell suddenly, oppressively silent.
Alistair did not move for a long while. The fire had burned to embers somewhere during their talk, their kiss, the quiet rearranging of a world he no longer recognized, and the library had grown cold around him. Chamomile still hung faintly in the air, an accusation all its own.
Not wholly.
Two words. Two devastating words that told him exactly what he needed to know and none of what he wanted to hear.
The attraction, at least, was genuine. She had admitted as much herself, but it came tangled up with desperation, with strategy, with the raw survival instincts of a woman holding no other cards worth playing.
He could not build anything lasting on a foundation of need.
He had watched how it ended before. He knew exactly how the yoke settled across a man’s shoulders, how a man’s own wants went quiet, then silent, then vanished altogether, buried beneath the relentless weight of being indispensable to everyone but himself.
Being needed and being wanted were not the same thing at all.
Need was transactional. Need sounded like “you could loosen the dowager’s hold” and “we need you,” like the desperate calculations of a woman working out her own survival.
Want was an altogether different creature, and Alistair had gone without it long enough that he had nearly persuaded himself he could live without it forever.
Almost.
He dropped into the chair behind the desk and took up his quill.
The contract wanted attending to. The tenancy records wanted sorting.
The steward wanted dismissing. London wanted him.
The mill wanted him. Everyone, it seemed, wanted something from him, and in thirty-five years not one soul had ever simply wanted him.
The figures swam before his eyes, as meaningless to him now as runes carved in some forgotten tongue. He set the quill back down.
Not wholly.
He pushed the ledger aside, leaned back in his chair, and fixed his gaze on the vaulted ceiling, where carved owls looked down on him with their eternal, unblinking indifference.
Outside, the rain kept up its patient siege against the windowpanes.
The fire burned down to ash. And Alistair Fraser-Oxley, tenth Duke of Oxley, industrialist, mill owner, guardian to four cousins kept as prisoners, reluctant heir to a crumbling estate, sat by himself in his library and thought of nothing but the taste of mint tea on a woman’s mouth.
Blast it all.