Page 8 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 8

A fter an evening spent lying awake while she was afflicted by various, ahem, sensations in her body—sensations that seemed to flare anew every time she heard even the faintest sound from the duke’s chambers on the far side of her wall—Persephone was not at her very best the next morning.

She didn’t merely feel tired, either. She felt…sensitized, as though she’d rubbed her skin against something rough and come back a little tenderer for it. It wasn’t an entirely good feeling, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad one, either.

Good, bad, or otherwise, the feeling was decidedly distracting.

Thus, she was enormously startled when, as she stared into her teacup at the breakfast table, a little voice piped up from near her elbow.

“Are you our new aunt?”

Persephone jolted, splashing tea onto the tablecloth.

She really needed to stop being so oblivious. Or perhaps the Blackwoods were unnaturally stealthy.

“Oh, no,” said a second small voice. “Did you burn yourself?”

Persephone looked over to see two little girls standing side by side.

The resemblance between them was strong, though they were not identical by any means. The two girls had the same dark brown hair, the same round, chubby little faces. But one had bright blue eyes—the same blue Persephone recalled seeing in a number of the wedding guests the day prior; a family trait, apparently—and the other had the same dark eyes as did the duke.

Moreover, the blue-eyed sister had about five dozen little bows in her hair.

This was the sister who had asked about the burn.

“I did not,” she told the little girl, dabbing at the mess with a napkin. The poor staff. Persephone’s recent trials had left her with a new appreciation for the perils of laundry. “Fortunately, I have been quite lazy over my breakfast and the tea has gone stone cold.”

The little girl looked surprised, then offered a shy smile, just as Persephone had intended. She might not be as focused as she might have wished, but she hadn’t forgotten all her tricks, and she knew well that children responded well to learning that the adults around them didn’t take themselves too seriously.

“As for your question,” she said, turning to the other child, “I suppose I am indeed your new aunt. I am unpracticed being an aunt, so you shall have to be lenient with me as I learn the role.”

The dark-eyed girl gave an excited shimmy.

“Oh, we are very good at having aunts, so we shall do a very good job of teaching you,” she said happily. “And you shall probably be even better than Aunt Daphne, because she is so young, and everyone knows that the best aunts are old.”

“Hey!”

This came not from Persephone, but from the young woman lingering near the doorway, a third little girl standing beside her. This girl had darker hair than the other two, but the same light blue eyes as her sister. The elder of these two was, Persephone assumed, her husband’s younger sister, Lady Daphne Blackwood.

Persephone pushed to her feet and bobbed a curtsey before remembering that this was her house now, not to mention that she technically outranked a duke’s sister. Some habits were hard to break, and she’d spent many years, as a baron’s daughter, being on the lowest rung of the aristocracy’s hierarchy.

Lady Daphne looked mortified.

“Oh, please don’t,” she said, holding out her hands in a gesture of supplication. “I know some families prefer to maintain formality, even in their own homes, and perhaps that’s your experience?—”

In a flash, Persephone suddenly wondered if she’d ever heard her parents address one another by their Christian names. She couldn’t recall a single incident.

“—but we need to be a united force against these little hellions, thus we must embrace one another as sisters posthaste.”

Persephone was spared from this unexpected bit of warmth from the duke’s sister—Persephone had a variety of feelings about her new husband, but she hadn’t precisely been bowled over by his friendliness—by a trio of protests from the girls.

“We aren’t hellions ,” said the little girl at Lady Daphne’s side, her tone somewhere between a whisper and a shout.

“That’s right, Martha!” said the dark-eyed sister. She then whispered to the one with the hair bows, “What’s a hellion?”

“A kind of monkey,” said the sister with the bows knowingly.

“We are not monkeys, Daphne!” the dark-eyed sister protested.

Martha, the little girl clinging to Daphne’s skirts, smiled in a way that suggested that she knew this was not the precise definition of “hellion,” but remained silent.

Daphne, for her part, raised her eyebrows.

“Lucy Blackwood,” she told the dark-eyed sister. “There are not numbers high enough to count how many times I have caught you climbing something you ought not be climbing. If the term ‘monkey’ doesn’t fit, then I don’t know what does.”

“Don’t listen to them, new auntie,” she said, slipping her fingers into Persephone’s. “I am the bestest girl in the world, probably.” She paused, considering. “Tied with Martha and Grace, of course.”

“Yes, we are the very bestest,” agreed the girl with the bows—Grace.

Daphne rolled her eyes in a way that suggested that she loved the girls very much—and that they regularly caused this kind of cheerful chaos.

But Persephone had dealt with much larger groups of much rowdier children. She might not know how to handle her enigma of a husband, but she knew how to manage three little girls who, for all their spirited nature, seemed kind, well-intentioned, sweet.

“Right,” she said brightly. “Well, I know now that you are Lucy—” She pointed, and the girl gave a delighted spin. “—Grace—” A grin. “—and Martha.” A smile. A shy one, but a smile, nonetheless. “And I am Persephone, Persephone Blackwood.”

“Yay, yay, a Blackwood like us!” Lucy cheered, swinging merrily off Persephone’s arm.

“Aunt Persenophe,” Grace said.

“Persephone,” Persephone corrected gently.

“Perseonphe,” Grace said with greater conviction, then with a frown.

“Per—seph—o—nee,” Daphne tried. “It rhymes with my name, or near enough.”

“Per—sen—o—phe,” said Grace, lisping a little on the S, due to one her missing front teeth.

“How about Percy?” Persephone offered before the child could get frustrated. “Will that work?”

“Aunt Percy,” Grace said with evident relief. She grinned a gap-toothed smile. “Would you like one of my ribbons?”

“I would adore one,” Persephone said, genuinely touched. She let Grace pin a bright pink bow to her hair. It hung a little haphazardly, and it no doubt clashed terribly with her red tresses, but Persephone took it as a sign that she was being accepted by this sister.

That was two down, one to go. Martha had detached her little arms from around Daphne’s legs, but she hadn’t come any closer.

“Do you have anything you’d like to ask me, Martha?” she asked the little girl softly.

Martha shook her head.

“Do you think you would like to play with me today—to show me how to be a good aunt?”

Martha nodded, a smile blooming on her face.

And that was three. When Persephone held out her free hand, Martha approached, a little cautious but steadily.

“Right,” Persephone said when she was in a cluster of dark little heads. “What should we do today? The weather is fine—do you think we ought to go outside and play in the garden?”

In Persephone’s experience, the offer to play outside was one that children almost unilaterally accepted with good cheer. She was therefore shocked to see three expressions of doubt—four, actually, as she looked up to see Daphne wearing the same expression on her face.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea…” Daphne said hesitantly, a touch apologetically.

Lucy was less circumspect. “We aren’t allowed ,” she said with a dramatic sigh.

Persephone felt her eyebrows raise.

“Are there…some lessons you need to attend to first?” she asked, searching for a reason.

Grace shook her head, ribbons bobbing. “No, Uncle Hugh said we could take a break this week because he got married.”

“Are there…dangerous plants in the garden?” Persephone wouldn’t have guessed that the duke had a passion for botany, but, then again, she didn’t know him very well at all.

Daphne looked uncertain. “No, but I’m sure there are some dangers…”

Persephone looked at her new sister by marriage. She looked at the three little girls, who all seemed to be bursting with energy—even Martha, whom she already recognized as the quietest of the trio.

She decided that her expertise with children outweighed the need to not cause any discord in her newfound family.

“Right,” she said brightly. “Well, your uncle did tell me I would be looking after you—” She said this primarily to the girls, though she darted a glance at Daphne, who was looking decidedly trepidatious. “—so I think we shall endeavor to enjoy some sunshine without encountering anything dangerous.”

This last bit was for Lucy’s benefit, as Persephone could practically see the ideas brimming over in the girl’s mischievous gaze.

“Maybe a picnic?” she added. This was for Daphne; surely she would not object to something so sedate and uncomplicated.

Daphne looked like she wanted to object, but she did not, as she was shouted down by three excited voices insisting that they would love to have a picnic, had they ever had a picnic? Would it be like in stories? Could their very best doll come eat, too?

Thus, it was decided.

Persephone asked the staff to prepare a simple, cold luncheon that could be enjoyed out of doors, and arranged to have a simple blanket and some cushions arrayed in a part of the garden that was little more than a patch of lawn. There was nothing dangerous present at all, and Persephone was feeling very pleased with herself as the girls gamboled around in the sunshine, Lucy and Grace chasing one another back and forth while Martha pored over a brightly illustrated collection of tales for children. Persephone, for her part, sat in the shade (Lord knew she didn’t need more freckles than she already possessed) with Bertha, the girls’ favorite doll.

“I think this has turned out quite nicely, indeed, Bertha,” she said, nibbling at one of the sandwiches the cook had prepared for their little hamper of treats.

The house might be directly in sight, but the whole thing still had the feel of an adventure. And it was just the thing to get the girls to feel more comfortable with Persephone as their primary caretaker, she thought.

It was, she congratulated herself, a job well done. She was doing the thing she’d been brought here to do. And, judging by the girls’ bright smiles, she was doing it spectacularly.

Yet perhaps hubris did beget nemesis after all, for Persephone had scarcely finished thinking such self-satisfied thoughts when a booming voice rang out across the garden.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing out there?”

Hugh knew his expression was likely too angry, too forbidding. But, caught between the choice of letting his ire show and reckoning with the furious, frantic beating of his heart?—

Well, he would choose the anger any day. Besides, it would help him get his point across.

He looked at the four young ladies in his charge—resolutely ignoring the fifth woman now in his household, who was watching over the proceedings with far too keen a gaze.

“What were you doing outside?” he demanded, clasping his hands severely behind him. “You know you aren’t permitted to do so.”

Martha’s eyes were fixed on her toes. “Sorry, Uncle Hugh,” she said so quietly that it was nearly impossible to hear her.

“We were being safe,” Grace said imploringly.

Hugh did not agree with this assessment. His heart had nearly stopped in his chest when he’d looked out over the veranda and seen Lucy standing atop a tree stump. She seemed to even be trying to balance on a single foot while doing so, her arms splayed wide to help her remain upright.

Dangerous. It was downright dangerous.

Lucy, who for all her spirited nature was not necessarily prideful, nibbled at her lower lip.

“We are sorry, Uncle Hugh,” she said.

That was all well and good coming from the children, but they were six years old. They could hardly be expected to follow rules without adequate chaperonage.

He glanced over at Daphne, who looked like she’d rather be just about anywhere else—but who did not necessarily look apologetic.

“It won’t happen again,” was the only thing she offered.

“Now, wait just a minute!”

Ah. His little wife was joining the fray.

She looked disarmingly pretty after a morning spent in the warm spring sunshine, he couldn’t help but notice. There was a brightness to her eyes and her cheeks both, and he wondered if he would feel sunny warmth radiating off her hair if he held his hand close to it.

Or if he ran his fingers through it.

The bucolic appeal of her appearance was only heightened, he was faintly dismayed to note, by the stubborn way she had set her chin.

“I understand that you are protective of the children, Your Grace,” she said, stepping forward. Well, he would have to nip that in the bud right quick. He wasn’t about to be Your Grace -d in his own bloody house.

It had nothing to do with him wanting to hear Persephone use his given name. Nothing at all.

Persephone kept speaking. “But they truly weren’t doing anything dangerous, and they weren’t unobserved. I was with them the whole time. Not to mention—what the girls and your sister are not telling you—is that having a picnic was my idea. I even insisted.”

She cast a fond look down at the three worried faces that were peering back up at her.

“And it’s very sweet of you to do so, darlings,” she told them, smoothing a strand of Grace’s hair back from her face. “But it isn’t your job to protect me, not a bit.”

Hugh was not affected by the sweetness that already echoed between his wife and his wards. Lucy, for her part, looked up at Persephone with naked adoration.

“We don’t want you to get in trouble, Aunt Percy,” she murmured out of the corner of her mouth.

God help him, they already had fond nicknames for one another? This caused an unpleasant, tight feeling in his chest.

Persephone looked up at him defiantly. “I’m sure there shan’t be any trouble,” she said, holding his eye as she spoke, ostensibly, to the girls. “Your uncle wishes me to look after you—not that I am not delighted to do so,” she added, casting a warm, maternal smile down at Lucy, Grace, and Martha. “He and I shall simply have to determine the parameters of that care.”

“Parameters,” murmured Martha, the most erudite of the girls, no doubt in an effort to remember the word for later.

“Just so,” Persephone agreed, tweaking Martha’s chin.

He was glad that Persephone and the girls seemed so taken with one another, he was. He was.

But she was bloody right that they needed to figure out how she could take care of them properly .

Which meant he needed to have a frank conversation with his wife.

“Go wash up, girls,” he instructed. “Daphne will help you. I need to have a word in private with your aunt.”

A flash of nerves crossed Persephone’s face, but she quelled them right away, drawing back her shoulders into an even more stubborn posture. Christ alive, he’d seen that attitude in her when she’d come to Underworld.

But that had been born of protectiveness—of her useless father, of course, who didn’t deserve it one bit—and this was the opposite. This was putting the girls at risk!

And yet the girls seemed already besotted with her, if the way they hesitated following his command was any indication. Instead of doing as he’d bid, they looked up at Persephone with worried expressions.

Christ. Hugh knew he cut an intimidating figure but this… It felt like another blow to his battered chest.

“It’s all right,” Persephone reassured the children. “Go with your Aunt Daphne and I’ll speak to your uncle.”

He didn’t care that she hadn’t said his name. Not at all.

“And then, perhaps we can read a story together or play with Bertha some more, hm?”

The girls each nodded, disentangling themselves from Persephone’s skirts. They followed Daphne toward the back stairs, which led up to the nursery, though Lucy did pause and shoot a fierce little frown in his direction before she departed.

Persephone’s expression was very much the same as she looked at him, hands planted firmly on her hips. If he hadn’t been so worried about how this conversation would go, he would have found her defiance adorable. Like a kitten.

But before he got to that?—

“Who the hell is Bertha?” he demanded. “You cannot bring strangers around the girls without consulting me, you know.”

Her expression went flat, almost pitying.

“Bertha is a doll,” she said. “Their favorite doll, apparently. Lord knows why—the thing is terrifying, if you ask me—but nevertheless unlikely to cause any harm or engage in any wrongdoing due to being, I repeat, a doll.”

Ah. Blast it. Well, that was him told.

He decided that this misstep did not necessarily cost him the moral high ground.

“Fine,” he said. “Bertha may remain.”

Persephone twitched in a way that suggested she only barely won a battle against rolling her eyes.

“But,” he went on, “the girls cannot muck about out of doors. It’s not safe and they are ladies .”

She was definitely pitying him now. He disliked it so intensely that it vibrated in his bones. It made him want to show her that he didn’t deserve such pity, that he was above such an emotion. He wanted to show her that he was the kind of man who had left her gasping and breathless the night before with only his kisses—that he was the man who could, who would leave her crying out her pleasure, leave her limp and sated in his arms, and who would continue doing so until she swelled with his child, her belly round and lush and?—

“We were on grass,” she said, tearing him away from his thoughts. “The greatest danger they were likely to face was getting stains on their skirts.”

She muttered something begrudging about laundry that he chose to ignore.

“Lucy was standing on a tree stump,” he countered. “She could have fallen.”

This did not have the desired effect.

“That tree stump was nearly a meter around and was no more than two hands’ widths high,” she shot back. “If she’d fallen—onto grass , I remind you—she would not have suffered any great harm.”

“Harm can come at any height,” he argued.

Persephone was unmoved. “Should you prevent her from taking the stairs, then? They are much higher. That will be a problem, though, since she’s currently up in the nursery. Should she remain up there for all her days to avoid any whiff of peril?”

She was being hyperbolic and purposefully difficult.

“Stairs don’t give you splinters,” he pointed out, as reasonable as she was outlandish.

She did not seem to agree that this was reasonable, alas.

“Splinters,” she echoed incredulously. “You’re worried about…splinters.”

“Splinters can get infected,” he said grandly. He was starting to suspect he was losing this battle. The mistake had been arguing with her. He didn’t need to argue with her. He was in charge here; he needed someone who he could trust to care for the girls adequately, so that he could keep his stained hands away from them. He just needed to tell her what to do and have her do it.

He was about to do just that when Persephone, apparently of a mind, also changed tactics.

“Do you have much experience with children, Your Grace?” she asked. Her question was insultingly gentle.

“Have you already forgotten the three girls living in my home?” he demanded. “Besides, you have met my sister, Daphne—I have had a hand in raising her since she was a child!”

Her skeptical look suggested that she knew what he was leaving out, that he’d left the girls primarily to Daphne’s care, and that his sister had been tended by nurses and governesses. He’d been present throughout her childhood, but he’d remained a brother more than a parent. They’d clung to one another, becoming inseparable—but they’d never drifted away from being brother and sister first and foremost.

“Right,” she said, still in that soft tone, the one that suggested she was working very hard not to insult him. It had the opposite effect. “The thing is, if you try to protect children from all danger, from all harm, it will not actually protect them.”

Hugh felt an instinctive flare of alarm at this, then decided she was probably talking absolute shite. Because he was magnanimous— not because he was curious—he let her continue.

“What they will do,” she went on, “is merely go to increasingly clever efforts to hide their mischief from you, which, ultimately, only puts them at greater risk. So perhaps Lucy might have fallen from that tree stump. Maybe she would have even gotten a splinter. But I would have been right there. I would have brought her inside, had her soak the splinter in hot water. I’d have given her a witch hazel compress. If necessary, I would have called a physician, though I doubt it would have come to that.”

She gave him a meaningful look.

“If I had utterly forbidden her from playing on that really quite safe tree stump, she might have waited until my back was turned. And then, if she’d fallen and gotten a splinter, she would have hidden it to avoid a scolding. Nobody would have cleaned it. Nobody would have tended it or kept an eye on it. And then, yes, she might have gotten an infection.”

She gave him a look that said she expected him to bow to this superior logic.

And he supposed that perhaps maybe she had the smallest, tiniest bit of a point.

Except for how obviously the better answer was to prevent any and all hurts in the first place.

“Your opinion is noted, Persephone,” he said stiffly. “And yet, the children are my wards. They are not to play in the garden.”

She threw up her hands. “You cannot keep children inside forever, Your Grace! They are not dolls!”

Certainly not. He’d never seen a doll vomit all over his second-favorite waistcoat the way Martha had done that one time she’d suffered from a stomach ailment. He’d never heard a doll scream bloody murder in the dead of night, terrifying him even from his room all the way at the other end of the corridor and causing him to rush to the nursery, certain he was about to see at least one corpse, only to learn that Lucy had merely had a dream that she was being chased by an overlarge bird.

But he’d also never seen a doll perish from a sudden illness or injury, had his wife considered that?

“They shan’t be inside forever,” he said stiffly. “You are welcome to take them on decorous walks.”

“Decorous—” She cut off her exasperated retort, then heaved a steadying breath out her nose. “Right, but you do see how there is danger in everything if one holds such strict standards, don’t you? On a ‘decorous walk’—” He thought she was trying not to sound sarcastic there, but she didn’t quite pull it off. “—one could trip, crack one’s head on the cobblestone, and perish posthaste.”

Well, that was—no. That wasn’t a legitimate worry. Hugh narrowed his eyes.

“You are being histrionic,” he accused.

Her big eyes flared wider with a flash of temper, though she quickly quelled it. Curious, that. Daphne would have stormed off on him ages ago.

How did she control herself like that? Why did she control herself like that?

“I am not being histrionic,” she said through gritted teeth. Her temper wasn’t entirely banished, then. “You are being unreasonable.”

“It’s unreasonable to want to protect children under my care?”

“It is when you’re trying to protect them from everything,” she countered. “Life is full of peril. Teaching the children to always avoid it merely means that they will not know how to manage it when it lands at their doorstep.”

It wasn’t that Hugh didn’t understand her position. It was just that she was underestimating him. Maybe most children would face peril one day—it was a horrible thought, but maybe it was true. But not the children under his care.

He would keep those girls safe from everything the world had to throw at them. Even if it was the last thing he did. Even if the thing they needed protection from was Hugh himself.

“I did not bring you here to argue with me, Persephone,” he said, still hearing the word peril echo in his mind. It made his tone cold as ice. “I brought you here to tend to those girls. You will do so as I tell you to, not according to whatever fanciful whims strike you that day.”

She flinched infinitesimally. But her tone was as biting as his when she retorted, “I don’t know why you think you know best in this, particularly when they aren’t even your children.”

Her words split the air between them as cleanly as a guillotine’s fall.

He saw that she felt sorry at once, saw the way the dismay crossed her face before she even took another breath.

But he could not accept that, not when her words were still ringing through him.

She was right, of course. They weren’t his children. They were Norman’s children, but Norman was dead . He was dead, and those girls were all that remained of him.

Hugh could not let those girls down. Not when they had already suffered so much in their short lives.

But he also could not look in his wife’s face and reject her words—nor could he accept them, as that would mean admitting all the ways he had failed his family, all the ways he continued to fail them with his dirty hands and bloody money.

So he looked away from her. And then he left, without so much as a single syllable further passing between them.