Page 37 of Duke with a Lie (Wicked Dukes Society #4)

ONE MONTH LATER

“ Y ou’re quiet this morning, my dear.”

Rhiannon blinked and looked up from the book she had been reading to find Mater smiling brightly at her in the drawing room of her brother’s town house.

In the month since her return, Mater had been shockingly attentive.

Rhiannon could only deduce it was because her unexplained absence had sent the household—particularly her brother Rhys—into turmoil.

Mater was now making amends in the only way she knew how, by hovering.

“I am reading,” she pointed out politely, hardly in the mood to converse.

Not with her mother. Not with anyone. The less she said to everyone, the better.

Somehow, she had managed to keep anyone from discovering where she had truly spent her one week of freedom.

The excellent thing about using Great-Aunt Bitsy was that she lived a train ride away.

She was also fretfully remiss with correspondence.

She was forever doting over her ever-growing menagerie of animals and forgetting everything and everyone else.

Once, it had taken Great-Aunty Bitsy over a year and a half to respond to a letter Rhiannon had sent her asking her for her cook’s recipe for raspberry fool.

“What are you reading?” Mater asked, interrupting her musings.

Rhiannon frowned, hoping her mother had just been passing by the drawing room and didn’t have any intention of joining her. “I know you don’t care. You needn’t pretend as if you are interested for my sake.”

Mater’s face looked as if it were about to crumple, her eyes welling with unshed tears behind her gold-rimmed spectacles. “But I do care. Must you be so cruel?”

Rhiannon sighed and laid her book in her lap. “It is a volume by Lord Tennyson, if you must know.”

She had been searching for answers and solace in poetry. Not just in poetry either. But in ruminations, distractions. In society and alone. In prose too. She had dabbled in drawing and painting, in sewing and playing the piano. She had even taught herself to play the harp.

To no avail.

There were no answers, no explanations for what had happened, save the obvious. The Duke of Richford was everything he had warned her he was, and she had failed to listen. She had paid the price with her heart.

“Since when do you like poetry so?” Mater asked, frowning as she sat on a settee opposite Rhiannon.

Blast.

Since she’d engaged in a discussion about a Greek goddess and the mortal she loved with Aubrey. Since he’d broken her heart. Since she’d been trying desperately to seek reasons and hope.

“Perhaps it is a new interest,” she said. “Am I not permitted one?”

“Of course you are permitted, my dear.” Mater rearranged the fall of her skirts. “One is always entitled to new interests. Indeed, have you seen my most recent collection of ferns? I cannot say why, but I find their little Wardian cases so agreeable.”

“You have at least twenty of them in the library,” Rhiannon pointed out, perhaps a bit unkindly.

The library was also strewn with other bric-a-brac that had held her mother’s fancy, however briefly.

Mater loved to collect things. Objects, animals, plants, rocks, shells, dead insects.

Whatever it was in any given moment, Mater became particularly obsessed with it, governed by the need to obtain more and more the way some were driven to gluttony or others to gambling.

Once she started, she couldn’t get enough until she eventually wandered off to her next obsession, leaving the scattered remnants of pinned butterflies and taxidermy frogs posed as if they had enjoyed a Bacchanal in her wake.

“It is only eighteen Wardian cases,” Mater said defensively. “Though there are yet a few more ferns I should like to collect and preserve. They are so very cheerful, are they not? One can’t help but smile to see them.”

“It is better, I suppose, than your bout with conchylomania,” Rhiannon agreed.

“I still adore my shells. Truly, daughter. Must you make it sound as if I were possessed of a sickness? I am like a curator of a museum or library. If I were not here to preserve such treasures, I shudder to think what would become of them. And I simply like tending to things.”

“Things rather than your children,” she pointed out before she could think better of it.

Mater’s face fell. “You know that I love you and Whitby very much.”

“Of course I do.” She forced a smile, reminding herself that she didn’t want to bring up the unwanted subject of her disappearance a month ago yet again. “And we love you as well, Mater.”

It had taken her mother almost the entire week to even take note that Rhiannon had gone. That knowledge still rather stung.

“I suppose you think that Great-Aunt Bitsy would have made a better mother to you than I have done,” Mater continued, her tone morose. “I cannot even be jealous of her, for she is as beloved as a mother to me, and I am grateful, in a way, that she has come to be so revered to you as well.”

Great-Aunt Bitsy was her mother’s treasured aunt, who had all but raised her during her own mother’s reign of absences to the Continent and all over the world. The irony of Mater’s plight was that she had taken on many of the personality traits of her own mother that she had despised.

“I think Great-Aunt Bitsy has made a fine great-aunt,” Rhiannon said mildly, still unable to tell Mater that she had made a good mother.

There were only so many lies she could be expected to tell in the span of one month.

“I do wish you would not have gone to her without warning, however,” Mater continued. “You have no notion of how worried I was. And when Lord Carnis came to call, I scarcely knew what to tell him.”

Lord Carnis.

Rhiannon wished she could summon even a modicum of tenderness when she heard the name of the man she was meant to marry, but she felt nothing.

In the wake of her return, she had been too numb to refuse when Mater had insisted upon the betrothal announcement being made.

It had seemed to reassure her mother that she was happy and all was well, and Rhiannon’s own emotions had been a disastrous wreckage, like a ship lost to the depths of the sea.

She had been content to allow Mater to make the decision for her.

What had it mattered anyway? It wasn’t as if Aubrey were going to come to his senses and ask her to marry him. He’d had time aplenty.

Now, however, she was beginning to regret her acquiescence.

“You told him that I was ill with a lung infection,” she pointed out.

“To preserve your reputation,” Mater hastened to say. “Only think of how ruinous it would have been for you if word had begun to spread through London that Lady Rhiannon Northwick was running wild about England on her own. I daresay the earl would not have wanted to wed you after all.”

Rhiannon didn’t think such an outcome would have been a shame at all. “There is something I wish to discuss with you, Mater.”

Her mother frowned. “Does it concern the earl?”

“Yes. I fear that I cannot marry him.”

Mater looked aghast at her pronouncement. “Of course you can. My dear, my hopes are high for you, what with Whitby suddenly professing to be in love with that dreadful woman who is divorced from Lord Ammondale and intending to marry her himself.”

It was true that Rhys had fallen in love.

It had happened for him during the house party.

While Rhiannon had been falling deeper under Richford’s spell, her brother had been finding love of his own.

But unlike Rhiannon, Rhys had found a love that was mutual, true, and ran deep.

She had never seen her brother so happy.

It was all quite new; he had only just declared himself to Lady Miranda, the former Countess of Ammondale, and she had accepted his proposal, but Rhiannon couldn’t be more pleased for her brother. He deserved love and happiness.

“Mater,” she warned her mother gently, “you must watch how you speak about Rhys’s future bride. I don’t think he would approve.”

Her mother made an irritated sound, puffing herself up like a hen who needed to fluff her feathers. “I do wish he would find someone appropriate. Someone suited to him. Someone who would make him a lovely duchess. There are so many debutantes who would make an excellent Duchess of Whitby.”

“I don’t think any machinations on your part will be well-received. His mind seems firmly made.”

Mater sighed. “No, I suppose not. He is a strong-headed, strong-willed man. But you see, dear girl, you are my only hope. Just think of what beautiful children you shall have with Lord Carnis. He is so very handsome.”

It was true that the earl was attractive. There had even been a time when Rhiannon had thought about having children with him. But that had been before, when her love for Aubrey had been from afar. There was no denying that everything had changed for her.

The notion of marrying at all left her feeling vaguely ill now. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stand at the altar with the Earl of Carnis and consent to love him and be his wife. Not after what she had shared with Aubrey, and not even if it had all been a lie.

“I don’t think I wish for children now,” she said.

“You will change your mind.”

“No,” she said more firmly. “I do not believe I will.”

“Think upon it, my dear. There is no need to make up your mind today.” Mater rose. “I think I shall return to my ferns.”

Rhiannon watched her mother take her leave before turning back to the book in her lap. It was yet open to the poem about Tithonus that Richford had quoted from to her.

Let me go: take back thy gift.

Oh, how those words resonated.

She wished Aubrey could take back the time he had given her. For it had only left her more broken than she had ever imagined possible.

“Sweet Christ, Richford, when was the last time you changed your shirt?”

Seated behind the desk in his study, Aubrey glared at the Duke of Kingham from across an open volume of poetry as he loomed over him.