The Duke's Accidental Wife (Dukes of War Book 7) (6 page)

An armoire. She fought to stay calm. She had an armoire of her own. An entire home full of things that mattered. She lifted a palm toward her papyri and painted vases. “As for the rest of my things?”

He drew back slightly. “You would wish to put these…
items
on display at Ravenwood House?”

She curled her fingers into fists. Of course her collection would not be welcome.

“You would prefer me to hold onto my townhouse and keep them here?” she returned archly.

Something shifted in his eyes. “You may keep your townhouse, Miss Ross. It will remain yours in every way that matters.”

No, it would not. She smiled through clenched teeth. Although it was not his fault, he could not deny the truth.

Nothing would be hers anymore, in any way that mattered. She had spent years building a stable life for herself by investing her modest inheritance in the four percents and her beloved museum. Now, none of that mattered.

One week from today, she would become the Duke of Ravenwood’s property.

Chapter Five

Ravenwood glared at the blank page mocking him with its unblemished purity.

He was alone in his office, seated behind his father’s stately escritoire. When he was a child, he would often climb up into the thick leather chair and scrawl a few lines in his journal.

During his adolescent years, particularly after the loss of his parents, those scrawled lines had ceased being a recapitulation of his day. He didn’t wish to
dwell
on his grief and anger; he longed to escape it.

And so he had turned to poetry. Expressing things he
wished
would happen, rather than life as it really was. It was an escape, yes, but it also provided a brief moment of hope in days that otherwise would have none.

Days like today.

He was about to wed a woman he didn’t even know. A woman who didn’t know
him
—and perhaps never would.

The boy who had scribbled in his journal, the man who anguished over every dissonant couplet, that wasn’t the Duke of Ravenwood. It was Lawrence Pembroke. A man with dreams and sorrows, fears and fury, apathy and abject love. ’Twas the secret side of himself he only allowed to breathe for a few moments every morning before carefully locking it away in a hidden drawer within his desk.

Today, even his recklessly romantic side had run out of hope. There was nothing left to write. The dreams inside those worn journal pages were destined to remain just that. Empty dreams.

A knock sounded upon his office door.

Ravenwood closed the stubborn journal and locked it inside its secret panel. “Come in.”

Mrs. Brown, the housekeeper, cracked open the door but did not venture inside after her curtsey. “Pardon the interruption, your grace. Just wanting to see if you had any additional requirements for the wedding breakfast. There’s still time to send Martha on another run to the market.”

Ravenwood rubbed his face. What did he know about planning wedding breakfasts?

He’d already changed the menu twice. Even though a love match was not his fortune, he wished the breakfast to at least be tolerable to the bride.

Yet the only meal he’d ever seen Miss Ross consume was what his sister Amelia had served at her dinner party—namely, Ravenwood’s favorite foods, because she’d intended to manipulate him into attending that cursed charity gala.

He would no doubt look like a perfect cad by featuring his own favorite supper dishes at a wedding breakfast, but it was the best he could do. He would not write to his bride—or worse, his sister—in search of advice. His was
not
a love match, and he refused to look like a romantical fool.

“Perhaps some canapés,” he said at last. Footmen had been serving trays of them at the auction. They might be one of Miss Ross’s preferred appetizers, or they might simply be the easiest thing to have on hand at her gala. In any case, at least it was another option. “That will be all.”

“Yes, your grace.” Mrs. Brown bobbed her respects and quickly closed the door.

Her footsteps were soundless on the carpet in the corridor, but Ravenwood had no doubt she was moving with all haste to inform Martha of her impending return to market.

Such was the power and the curse of being duke. Everyone did everything with all haste in their eagerness to accede to his commands. Had he proclaimed,
We shall serve worms in mud sauce
, such a menu would have been executed without question.

His title was not solely to blame. Being the sort of duke that he had become also had much to do with the matter.

Inheriting at a young age meant he’d had to try that much harder to live up to impossibly high expectations. To be taken seriously. To be respected.

Since then, he’d been called many things. Cold, proper, haughty, imperious, dismissive. These were not insults. They were character traits of a man who appreciated order. It was all he knew. He had perhaps grown into an outwardly hard man, but not, he felt, an unworthy one.

Until last night.

He pushed to his feet and strode from his office to an unassuming little sitting room on the opposite wing of the manor. The room was empty, save for a single gilded portrait upon the far wall. No one entered this room but Ravenwood.

No one was allowed to.

He assumed his customary position before his cherished painting and stared into its dry, cracked depths. When his uncle Blaylock had become guardian to two orphaned siblings, the man had rolled up this canvas and tossed it into a dark closet so that he could use the magnificent frame to showcase his own family.

The rescued painting contained the only family portrait of Ravenwood, his sister, and their much-loved parents.

It was an unusual piece because the artist had captured more than the family—he’d included the entire room in the background. From the vase of roses on the windowsill to the one-of-a-kind furniture before the fire, every aspect had been faithfully represented.

Ravenwood had been young at the time it had been painted, but he remembered why they’d chosen this small sitting room to star in such a portrait. The little parlor had belonged to his mother. She would invite her children into it every evening, to listen to her read aloud for an hour before the nursemaids packed them off to bed.

The duke would complain good-naturedly that listening to his wife’s voice was ever so much slower than simply reading the book himself—but he never once missed an opportunity to sit in his brocade hand-carved chair before the fire, listening along with his children.

Uncle Blaylock had sold that chair, and everything else depicted in the portrait. He’d turned the cozy sitting room into a showcase for hunting trophies. Instead of housing memories of the best years of Ravenwood’s childhood life, the room became a shrine to death. To loss.

The moment he reached his majority, he’d banished his uncle and the animal carcasses from Ravenwood House forever.

He hadn’t been able to locate the one-of-a-kind furniture pieces the room had once boasted, nor recreate the sense of love and family it had once had. He and Amelia had been alone against the world back then.

After she’d married, it was just Ravenwood.

For another hour, anyway. He consulted his pocket watch to be certain, then sent one final gaze toward the painting.

The last people to see him as Lawrence and not the Duke of Ravenwood gazed back at him from the scarred canvas. The last people to truly know him.

All anyone saw now when they looked at him was what he allowed them to see.

He wished he could be more. He appreciated being a duke—it made him feel close to his father, who had been the most exemplary duke of
his
time—but he wished it didn’t preclude him from also being a man. From having conversations deeper than “Yes, your grace” and “As you wish, your grace.”

He wanted love. He wanted a family. He wanted warm nights before a crackling fire, reading aloud with his wife as they took turns cuddling their squirming children in their arms.

Not the lonely, loveless upbringing he and his sister had endured after their parents died. He wanted the warm, joyful days of love and laughter. Of family.

He didn’t want a house he merely owned. He wanted a home where he
belonged
.

And yet, in an alarmingly short period of time, Ravenwood House was about to be invaded by yet another stranger. Someone else would live within these same walls, her very presence ensuring he would never be able to fully put down his guard, even in his own home. He would no longer feel comfortable.

He stalked from the sitting room toward his dressing chamber. He might not have planned to marry her, but he would not dishonor Miss Ross or his duty as a duke in any way. In half an hour, he would be ready and waiting beside the altar.

And his life would never be the same again.

Chapter Six

The Duke of Ravenwood stood in the blue parlor in the rear of his estate awaiting the arrival of his bride for the second time this year.

On the previous occasion, he had been about to marry his dead friend’s paramour…until the very-much-alive brigadier returned against all odds to stop the wedding.

Ideally, Miss Ross would have no such skeletons in her past.

Edmund and his wife were seated in the front row to show their support. They were even more in love now than they’d been when Edmund had first gone off to war. When
all
of them had gone off to war. Every single one of the childhood friends that Ravenwood cared about most.

Everyone but him.

He’d felt like a failure at the time. As if he were hiding behind his title rather than putting his loyalty to the Crown first.

But managing a dukedom was no small responsibility, and Ravenwood had no heirs. If he were felled by an enemy rifle, the title would pass to none other than his Uncle Blaylock.

Ravenwood would die before he let that happen. And he’d take Uncle Blaylock down with him.

An emotional reaction to the rules of primogeniture? Absolutely. One of the few Ravenwood had ever allowed himself.

He was furious at his sister for having manipulated him into attending that ill-fated charity gala, but of course he had still invited her to the wedding. She was his sister. The only person who ever came close to knowing the true him.

As much as Ravenwood disliked time spent with most people, these past long months had been lonely without his sister.

The elder by a few years, Amelia had managed the daily minutia of Ravenwood House from the moment their parents had died. Aunt Blaylock might have
thought
she was pulling the strings, but even an adolescent Amelia had been a force of nature.

It was likely because of the Blaylocks’ presence in their lives that Amelia had learned to pay close attention to every detail, to rule with cunning rather than commands.

The best thing about having a sister like Amelia was that she managed to handle everything Ravenwood hated in such a way that he didn’t even need to know about it, much less deal with it. He was not required to mediate drama amongst the staff or attend public events where he would be forced into awkward conversations with people he didn’t even know.

Amelia was always so good at her job that it had been easy to forget it
wasn’t
her job. Until the day she’d met her husband and left Ravenwood House behind.