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He stared blankly at her for a long minute, and she half expected him to ignore her.

Richard had not done well with orders, at least since he went off to college and returned as a man of his own. So, she was surprised when he rose from his seat. His shoulders were a little hunched, dwarfing his usually tall figure. He staggered past her towards the door like a drunk.

Perhaps he was drunk because the stench of alcohol she caught as he moved past her was so potent she was convinced that it could kill.

Turning on her heels, she left his study and instructed the servants to draw a bath for the Duke and clean his study.

She sat at the breakfast table, waiting until he joined her. He dragged his feet in, like a man being dragged to his slaughter, and dropped into the seat opposite her without bothering to greet her or acknowledge her presence. That act further cemented her theory that he was not himself. It was no news that Richard loathed her, but he at least made sure to acknowledge her, and he valued propriety above his hatred, at least.

Now, he had taken to pushing his food around on his plate, hunched over as if there was an invisible weight on his shoulders preventing him from keeping his back straight.

“Do you not like your food?” she asked. When silence greeted her, she tried again. “Perhaps you can sit up straight. Slouching is unseemly.”

That got his attention, as he fixed her with rage-filled eyes.

“Why? Because it offends your sense of propriety? This is my house, Madam, not a dinner party. Nobody cares if I sit up straight like a rod was stuck up my arse.”

Johanna flinched at the vulgar word, but he was too angry to care.

“Nobody cares if I do not use the right spoon to eat my soup or if I am holding my fork too tightly. I am tired. Tired of all these rules. I am too exhausted to adhere to these worthless rules. Besides, I think you are the worst person to educate on propriety or the lack of it. I wager you require the lecture more than I do, with the numerous scandals you have under your belt,” he said bitterly, before popping a piece of potato into his mouth and proceeding to chew it viciously.

The force of his outburst left her speechless for some time. He might hate her, but he never used outright vulgar words when speaking to her because his training strongly suggested that he should be mindful of his language when speaking to a lady. Not that he thought her worthy of the consideration. The fact that he had abandoned even that tenet of propriety was concerning.

“Propriety is everything, Richard,” she said in an admonishing tone. “It is what makes us nobility. It is what differentiates us from the common folk. You should know this; you are a duke, after all.”

“And did Father care so much about propriety?” he asked, a cold smile touching his lips. “He was, after all, a duke as well, wasn’the? I do not think the two of you cared about propriety as much as you preached it.

“Did you value propriety so much when both of you were comfortable having your lovers come in and out as they wished? Or when you both seemed to be running a competition for who had the most love affairs? You are hypocrites, both you and Father.”

He dropped his cutlery, so it fell onto his plate with a noisy clatter, briefly startling her.

“We definitely were not saints,” Johanna began, clearing her throat, her head bowed so that she avoided his eyes. “We did care about propriety and our reputations. That is why we were most discreet with our affairs. We kept it away from the eyes of the ton.”

“Truly?” he asked in a darkly amused voice, sitting up and then leaning forward on his elbows, his angry eyes meeting hers. “You truly think you were discreet? What about the servants? You did not think they had eyes?”

“They dare not—” she began.

“You must be delusional if you believe that you can control them. How did you think that your secret affairs became known to the ton?”

“It is just a rumor. No one believes it, since no one can provide proof,” she said with a triumphant smile.

Richard’s sardonic smile turned into one of disgust. “The two of you were very shallow and weak.”

“Language…” Johanna warned.

“You did not care about your marriage or your only son. Instead, you were more concerned with what the ton would say, checking if they noticed what you did and making sure that your masks remained intact. Making sure that all your dirty deeds remained buried in the estate so that nobody could guess how broken we were under the surface.

“That is why you were obsessed with etiquette lessons. You could not be bothered to care about your son’s upbringing, except for his manners, so that I would be the perfect foil to silence all the whispers. So that it would be difficult for them to believe that you were so terrible when you had a perfect son. I have to give it to you and Father. You two were excellent manipulators. It is high time I stop allowing you the privilege of manipulating my life.”

“You paint us as the villains,” Johanna said defensively. “But we were young once, too, and in love before our marriage turned into one of convenience, and we each turned to other lovers for comfort. It is common among the nobility—I am sure you know.”

“Yes, I do, but I doubt that those families abandon their children to pursue pleasure, and it is laughable that you did not think meworthy of your affection, but you thought me worthy to be your decoy. The perfect son who threw all the rumors about you into shadow. No matter what story you came up with to help you sleep at night, the truth remains that you valued your reputation over your own flesh and blood, and if that is not the height of hypocrisy, I do not know what is.”

With that, he stormed off, walking blindly until he found himself in his study. He went in, splashed some whiskey into a glass, and drank it at once. The burn in his throat cleared his thoughts.

He had always thought that he could not be with Selina because he didn’t want to be like his parents. He didn’t want to hurt her and turn her into a bitter person because of his need to have her for himself, but perhaps he was seeing everything the wrong way.

Yes, he was his parents’ son, and he had a healthy fear that he might turn out like them, but if there was one thing he had noted from his argument with his mother, it was the fact that he was nothing like them.