The Heart of a Duke (35 page)

He glanced again at the clock.

Perhaps their meeting hadn’t yet taken place?
Perhaps their betrothal was still not agreed upon?

For the first time in ten years, not logic or
reason propelled Michael out of the room and into the
foyer.

He bellowed for a servant.

“
I need my mount
readied!”

The servant hurried off to do his bidding,
smartly recognizing that Michael was not a man to
counter.

He had a betrothal to stop.

Aldora stared down into her nearly empty
teacup.

What would she do when she finished the last
of the brew?

Oh, she supposed she could serve herself a
second cup but that might look gauche to the Marquess of St. James.
It wasn’t really that she cared so much what he thought, but she
cared that her mother was glaring quite pointedly at her and would
surely snatch the teapot, and well, that would be terribly
humiliating.

“
His Lordship asked you a
question, Aldora,” her mother snapped.

Aldora jerked her attention up toward the
marquess. She expected to see impatience in his frosty blue gaze
but oddly found a flicker of warmth and something else. Something
that looked an awful bit like commiseration.

“
Aldora!”

“
Forgive me, my lord. I’m afraid
my mind wandered.”

He inclined his head. “I admit that I was
curious as to whether you prefer London to the
countryside.”

“
I abhor London,” she
blurted.

Her mother groaned like an animal in pain, an
indication that Aldora had managed to provide the incorrect answer.
The marquess was gracious enough to ignore her melodramatic
mama.

Aldora bit the inside of her cheek, tempted to
ask him what the appropriate answers were for the questions he’d
peppered her with all afternoon.

“
Tell me more about that, my lady.
I’ll admit, I’ve never met a young lady whose ever admitted
anything but love for the city.”

“
Then you never met a lady who was
telling you the truth,” she muttered.

Her mother’s gasp was lost in the marquess’s
unexpected bark of laughter.

Aldora glanced up at him for the first time
that morning with real interest. It would appear that St. James was
not as stuffy as her dear friend, Valera had insisted.

Mother hurried to explain. “What my daughter
means is—”

The marquess held up a staying hand. Mother
snapped her lips shut like she was a chastened child in a
schoolroom.

Aldora smiled. Perhaps there was something
redeeming about His Lordship, after all.

He turned back to Aldora, his patient
expression indicating that he waited for her to
continue.

She ticked her chin up a notch. If she were to
marry the man, she should at least be honest with him—in this,
anyway.

“
I hate London. The air lacks an
elemental purity and cleanness that one finds in the country. I
miss the lush fertile land to ride on, the crisp water to toss
stones upon.” Her throat closed up as she remembered her childhood
home, the Tudor estate in Leeds, which they’d lost to father’s
debts. It had been the one place she had been truly
happy.

Mother tittered nervously behind her hand. “My
daughter over exaggerates her sentiments, my lord. She—”

“
May I have a moment alone with
Lady Aldora?”

Mother’s eyes went wide in her face. She
stared unblinking like a night owl before wordlessly exiting the
room.

Aldora tamped down the swell of panic that
crested as her mother left her unchaperoned with His Lordship. She
half expected her mother to defy all convention and pull the door
closed in her wake, but alas it would appear not all sense of
propriety had escaped her desperate mother.

She distantly registered the marquess rising
and crossing over to the window. He parted the curtain and peered
out into the streets below.

“
I wanted to speak to you alone,
my lady.”

Aldora’s fingers twisted in the fabric of her
skirts. She stared down at the crumpled blue fabric and forced
herself to relax her grip. She smoothed her palms along the creased
satin. “Did you?” She was mere moments away from everything she’d
hoped for, everything she’d dreamed of for her sisters and brother.
There should be a euphoric feeling of elation. Relief. So where was
it? Why was she left with nothing more than this suffocating,
cloying sense of…absolute wrongness?

His Lordship dropped the curtain back into
place and peered over his shoulder at Aldora. His penetrating blue
eyes pierced through her and she shifted, feeling like he knew her
secrets, knew her love for Michael, her scheming to wed him for no
other reason than because of the title he possessed.

“
I came here to ask you something,
my lady.”

Oh, God
.
Here it comes
. Nausea churned in her belly until she had to fold her arms
protectively under her waist. She could not do this. “My lord, I
cannot do this.”

His eyes narrowed.

Aldora’s choppy breath made speech impossible.
She counted to three and stood. “My lord, you must forgive me.”
Sheer bravery leant her legs the energy to move in his direction.
“I cannot marry you.”

The marquess’s brows snapped together. “I beg
your pardon?” he barked.

“
It is not that I don’t want to
wed you. You’re a fine man.” Of course, not really knowing him, she
couldn’t say that with any absolute sincerity. “But I cannot wed
you.” She took a deep breath and said the words that would serve as
the death knell for her family. “You see, I love
another.”

The air seemed to leave the marquess on a
sudden exhale. “Well,” he said.

Aldora thought to the first time she’d met
Michael; he’d not stood on ceremony with her. He’d been teasing
and…and real. And in a society filled with glittering falsities and
deceptive cheer, there was something so very important, so
elemental to one’s survival and that was realness.

“
I must say that isn’t why I’ve
come today.”

His Lordship’s words jerked her back to the
moment.

Aldora pushed her spectacles up on her nose,
though it was her hearing that had failed her in that moment and
not her eyesight. For surely the marquess hadn’t said what she
thought he had.

“
I beg your pardon?”

“
I didn’t come to offer for you.
Why, I hardly even know you, Lady Aldora.”

Yes, there was that. Not that a lack of
familiarity had stood in the way of other esteemed Society
matches.

“
Oh,” she blurted. Because really,
what else was a young lady to say after that? She expected she
should feel the stinging red of shame and humiliation staining her
cheeks. Or regret. Yes, there should be that, too. And yet, oddly,
all she felt was…

Her shoulders sagged on a tidal wave of
relief.

“
I suppose I should be offended by
your reaction,” the marquess drawled, more than a touch of humor
laced his response

“
Oh, I meant no offense.”
Goodness, it was a good thing her mother wasn’t standing outside
the room. Aldora would imagine they would have heard the thud of
her body fainting dead away had she been. “I must confess to
curiosity as to why you’re here, then, my lord?”

The marquess leaned back in his chair and
folded his arms across his chest in a very marquess-like pose.
“Why, my dear. I want you to marry my brother.”

All the air went out of her. “Well,” she
breathed.

“
I’ve seen the two of
you.”

“
You have?” Her question emerged
as a garbled squeak. She tried to remember back to whether there
had been any perfectly formal and appropriate meetings between her
and Michael and came up blastedly empty.

The marquess settled his elbows upon his knees
and leaned forward. He lowered his voice. “I’m sure you know of the
scandal in my brother’s past.” When she didn’t respond, he
continued. “What happened was a horrible, tragic accident that has
forever haunted Michael. He was a victim of a foolish lord’s rash
temper and his own sense of young masculine pride. He has made a
life for himself, a life that I’m vastly proud of. Not many ladies
can see past the scandal and his lack of title to the man he has
become. You have, though. Haven’t you?”

Aldora glanced down at her tightly fisted
hands. She studied the thin green bulging vein that spoke of the
tension radiating throughout her body. Michael’s past hadn’t
mattered to her…and yet, it had too. It had to for reasons that had
nothing to do with her own happiness but her siblings’ security.
“You don’t understand.” Her words sounded lame to her own
ears.

“
I think I do.”

His immediate reply brought her head swiftly
up. There was a gentleness in his eyes when he spoke. “I’m aware of
your family’s circumstances.”

“Oh.” She closed her eyes wanting
to blot out this humiliation. She and Mother had thought they’d
been so skillful, so clever in concealing the truth and yet here it
was, public knowledge to the
ton
. She wanted to wilt beneath the
frayed Aubusson carpet that served as another stark reminder of
their financial woes.

“
You are hardly to blame for your
father’s poor decisions. Just as I’m not to blame for my father’s
decision to banish Michael.” His gaze skittered to a point beyond
her shoulder, to a place she suspected he could see only in his
mind. “And yet, I know what it is to live with the guilt of actions
that had nothing to do with me.” When he returned his eyes to her,
they were glacial blue and emotionally detached. “But this is your
choice, Lady Aldora. If you reject Michael, you are doing so of
your own volition, and I imagine that would be very, very difficult
to carry with you for the rest of your days.”

The weight of his words settled in
her heart, affirming the truth she already knew. Aldora reached up
and touched the tips of two fingers against the gold pendant that
hung from her neck. It radiated hot and heavy against her flesh,
pulsating a steady rhythm. The words Valera had uttered to Aldora
on the day of her wedding to the Earl of Ravenswood drifted through
her memory.
“I’m marrying the man of my
dreams today, Aldora. And that necklace is going to lead you to the
man of yours, too.”

The pendant had done just that. It had brought
her to Michael.

Aldora had been so desperate to make a
powerful match that dreams of finding the love Valera had with the
Earl of Ravenswood had seemed like nothing more than a child’s
dream. Only now, with the Marquess of St. James before her, Aldora
realized she didn’t want to sacrifice her happiness for her family.
She wanted Michael with a selfish, self-serving longing. Michael’s
brother was correct; if she made the decision to forsake Michael,
she would live with an aching painful regret.

Aldora forced her hand back to her lap. She
didn’t need the old gypsy woman’s reminder. She knew what was in
her heart and God forgive her, Michael was her fate.

She waited for the guilt, and yet this time it
did not come.

Her sisters were beautiful. They were
accomplished. They would make matches. Her brother was certainly
young enough to weather the scandal when her father’s failings were
privy to all of Society.

The marquess cleared his throat.

Aldora looked up at him.

“
I imagine you are concerned with
your father’s—”

She nodded curtly, effectively ending his
words. She didn’t need him to finish the sentence. The fact that he
and others knew of her family’s shame raked like hot coals along
her skin.

“
My brother has enough
money—”

“
I do not love your brother for
his money,” she snapped.

The marquess angled his head.
“Love?”

Aldora nodded. “I love—”

A loud commotion from outside the room jerked
her attention to the door.