The American Duchess (20 page)

He listened to her in silence, his back still to her as he stared out the window. He listened. And he did believe her. What he could not forget, however, were Adam Lancaster’s words, “She only married you to please her father. She loved me, but she married you because her father was dying.”

 That was what the Duke believed too.

“Adrian .. .” Her voice was trembling. She was on the brink of tears.
He turned
to her, a little wearily, a little impatiently.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe you.”

She looked at his beautiful, reserved face and the tears began to slide down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am such a bad wife, but I do love you so. I don’t know why Adam did what he did tonight. I thought he had forgotten all that, as I have.”

“What did you say?” His voice held a note she had never heard before.

The tears came even faster and she tried to wipe them away with her wrist as she answered. “I said I know I am the wrong wife for you. You deserve someone who is regal and dignified and who knows how to entertain and how to be a duchess. I try, but I never learned those things, and I know I’m not the right wife for a man like you. You can’t even discuss your work with me, because half of it I don’t understand and the other half I don’t agree with.”

She gave up trying to wipe away her tears and let them fall unregarded as she lifted her face to look at him. “But I love you,” she said. “You could search this earth over and you’d never find anyone who could love you more.”

He came across the small space that separated him from the bed. “Is that the kind of wife you think I want?” he asked harshly, “the kind of person you have just said you are not?”

Her tears had stopped and lay now sparkling on her upturned face. “Don’t you?” she asked faintly.

“No!” His voice was unusually loud, almost violent. “I do not want a wife like this bloodless paragon you have just described. I do not want to come home and talk politics to my wife when I have been talking nothing but politics all day long to endless rows of ambassadors and government ministers. I want to come home to someone who is alive and vital and who has seen and done and spoken about things that are
not
politics. I want to hear a voice that is different from the voices I hear all day, and half the night too, at receptions and balls. I want to come home to you. I want to be married to you. Don’t you know what it means to me to know I have you”—his eyes swept over her face, her thinly veiled breasts, her bare arms and shoulders—”waiting for me, sharing my life, my bed, mothering my son? Do you really think I would have let you go, even had you wanted to?”

Tracy had never seen his emotions so nakedly revealed, never heard him speak in such a voice. Her heart had begun to hammer once again, but not in fear this time. She stared at his face, and what she saw there caused a great tide of joy to begin
to
well up within her.

“I thought you loved Lancaster,” he was saying, and his voice had still not returned to its normal cadence. “All this last week, I have felt like murder. If this were the sixteenth and not the nineteenth century, I would have put a bullet into all six feet three inches of him.”

Strangely, Tracy’s democratic instincts were not at all outraged by this very feudal statement. In fact, the glow within her spread to her face, which now looked illuminated from within. Even the tears on her cheeks seemed radiant “I didn’t know,” she said, “I didn’t know you loved me like that
.
”

His eyes were darker than midnight “How did you think I loved you?”

She shook her head a little. “I don’t know. I guess I thought you were fond of me and would be loyal to me, but I never thought you loved me half as much as I loved you.”

“You wouldn’t have married me if your father hadn’t wanted you to.”

“No.” She got off the bed and went to stand before him, putting her arms around his waist, resting her cheek against his shoulder. “You fascinated me,” she said softly. “You were unlike anyone I had ever met. But I would not have married you.”

She pulled back a little and tipped her head to look at him. “But by the time we returned from our honeymoon, I thought that the greatest bliss life could offer me was to be your wife. Surely you know that? Adrian? Surely you know that your touch is sweeter than heaven to me, your presence all that makes my life worthwhile.”

He was staring down at her with a look that suddenly recalled to her his expression when he had looked at her after Billy was born. “Tracy,” he said only. “Tracy.” He pulled her against him, holding her so tightly that she could scarcely breathe. She didn’t complain, however, but locked her own arms around him and pressed her cheek into his shoulder. They remained that way for a long, silent minute. Finally she moved, and his hold on her relaxed a little. She put her hands up to his neck cloth. “You forgot to get undressed,” she said.

His eyes smiled down at her. “So I did.”

Her fingers were busy at his throat and he raised his hands to cover them. “Let me do it,” he said. “You’ll take too long.”

It did not take the Duke long at all and this time their lovemaking, which had always been passionate, swept them both into a blinding, shattering rapture that was beyond what either had ever experienced before. It was a very long time before they had any inclination toward rational conversation.

“I think you had better go see Lancaster tomorrow,” he said much much later.

She yawned a little as she stretched herself alongside him. Finally, lying still now, “Why?”

“I don’t want to see him and he certainly won’t want to see me. One of us, however, has obviously got to pack him off home.”

“I guess so,” she murmured, her mind clearly not on Adam. Then, “Today, not tomorrow. It must be morning by now.”

“Mmm.”

Softly she asked,
“Did you mind what he said about the money?”

His fingers, which had been caressing her scalp through her hair, stilled. “Yes.”

“Don’t. It doesn’t matter. I married you at Papa’s wish and you married me because of Papa’s money. Neither motive is important now. Why we married doesn’t count.” His fingers began to move again on her head and she said slowly, “That was why you made Papa set up the trust fund, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I did not want you to think . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Well, I don’t,” she said tranquilly and yawned again.

“You’re not tired?” he said reproachfully.

“I’m exhausted!”

His mouth came closer to hers. “Are you sure of that?” he asked softly. Her lips were warm and yielding under his and he raised his head a little to look down at her, a faint smile in his eyes. “Are you quite, quite sure?”

It seemed, after all, that she was not.

Copyright © 1982 by Joan Wolf

Originally published by Signet (ISBN 0451153642)

Electronically published in 2008 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228

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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.