Page 38 of Duke with a Lie (Wicked Dukes Society #4)

“Go to the devil, King. No one invited you here.”

He was still in the country, rusticating as he had been for the last month.

And he had no intention of returning to London any time soon.

The farther he stayed away from Rhiannon, the better off he was.

Indeed, the farther he stayed away from every bloody living and breathing person, the better off he was.

To that end, the servants followed him about like shadows, too afraid to speak to him directly. And no one was meant to pay calls upon him.

Least of all the smug, arrogant friend who was idly examining the contents of his writing desk now.

King held up a used fork and sniffed the end, making a moue of distaste.

“Gads, is that a fish bone down there amongst your correspondence? You’re a complete beast, Richford.

And if you must know, I invited myself, because you’ve been acting damned odd ever since the house party.

Someone has to watch over you, poor stinking puppy that you are. ”

He glared at his friend, wishing the study would hold still. It wasn’t that he was deeply in his cups. But his bottle of gin was half empty again. Eh, mayhap he was a trifle disguised.

He cleared his throat. “I am neither stinking, nor do I resemble a puppy in the slightest. Who appointed you my father?”

“No one, but alas, you haven’t many options when it comes to friends who hold you in great esteem and are also free to look after your sorry arse.

Riverdale is involved in some manner of contretemps over a woman, Brandon and Camden are happily in love, and Christ knows what Whitby is about these days.

Sniffing the skirts of cookery school owners, apparently.

I heard something concerning him begging her to marry him or similar rot. ”

“Good for them. I’m busy, as you can see.” He held up the volume for his friend’s examination. “You have leave to carry on with whatever it is you were doing before you ventured here. I will just return to my poetry.”

“Whatever it is I was doing,” King repeated, tsking. “You say this as if I haven’t dozens of important tasks to keep me occupied. Tasks that don’t involve spending my time calling on a friend who has turned into a stinking drunkard over the past month.”

“You have important tasks? What are they? Buying a new waistcoat? Haranguing some poor chap over the cut of his trousers?”

King’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being an arse, Richford.”

“I am an arse.”

Sweet God, he was worse than an arse. He was the devil incarnate. It didn’t matter if what he had done had been for Rhiannon’s sake. Her stricken face would haunt him until the day he finally met his grim reward.

“An arse who appears to have been wearing the same shirt for at least the last two days. I’m reasonably certain I spy the remnants of more than one meal marring it, and you smell like an animal suited to the barn rather than a duke to the manor house born.”

Nettled, Aubrey glanced down at his shirt, sure he was about to prove his friend wrong.

However, there were stains. Several of them, in fact, indeterminate spatters that could have indeed been from more than one meal.

He might have known if he could recall precisely what and when he had last eaten, but as it happened, he couldn’t.

He brushed at the stains, but it wasn’t any use. They were quite set in.

“It’s only one stain,” he lied before performing a discreet sniff of the air. “And I don’t smell like an animal better suited to the barn, curse you. That’s a scurrilous accusation. How do you know it’s not the salmon bones you’re smelling instead of my person?”

“Bloody hell. There are more bones than just the one?”

Aubrey peered down at the myriad objects scattered over the surface of his writing desk. “There could be a fucking chicken roaming around in here for all I’d know.”

King shuddered. “Ye gods, man. I’ve never seen you like this. First, haven’t you any damned chambermaids? Who is meant to be cleaning this filth?”

“Of course I have chambermaids.”

“Then they ought to be sacked and replaced,” King groused.

“But I don’t allow them in here,” Aubrey explained.

“Then they ought to enter when you are elsewhere,” his friend said as if he were explaining a simple fact to a small child.

Aubrey wanted more gin. Where was the damned bottle?

For some bloody reason, he was thinking about the scent of jasmine now and how Rhiannon’s hair had glistened, unfurled on his pillow in the lamplight and the way she had spoken with such fervent certainty of Eos and Tithonus and their ill-fated match.

“Did you hear me?” King wanted to know.

“Of course I heard you, but I am ignoring you.” He scattered a pile of books in the corner of his desk, sending one tumbling to the floor.

“You need to allow the chambermaids to clean up, or you’ll have rats in here soon,” King said with great disgust.

“I am thirty years old, King. I am aware of the inner workings of the domestics. But the trouble is that I don’t want to leave my study.

I am comfortable here, you see. Mrs. Brumley tried, believe me, and on no fewer than four separate occasions, to have one of the maids come in and tidy up my mess, but they annoy me and then I begin to bellow, and it all goes to hell. I’ve sent three of them away in tears.”

“And the fourth?”

“I don’t recall. Perhaps I made all four weep. Hmm. It would certainly be fitting if I had.” Aubrey shuffled through some correspondence, then tipped over an inkwell. “Fuck. That is going to quite ruin the rosewood unless someone mops it up. Have you seen my gin?”

“Oh, you mean this little thing?” King held up his bottle.

“Yes, that.” Aubrey reached for it across the desk, sending a stack of plates to the floor in the process. “Give it to me, curse you.”

“It’s half past ten in the morning, Richford.”

“Then why the Christ are you at my house? Shouldn’t you be sleeping off the aftereffects of one of your potions?”

King tossed the gin bottle across the room, where it landed in the hearth with a dramatic crash. “I should be, yes. But presently, I’m concerning myself with a drunken fool who is apparently sleeping and living in his own rubbish.”

“I’m not sleeping here,” he said, aghast. “I go to bed for slumber.”

“Then why have the servants not cleaned the fish bones and dirty plates from your desk?”

“Because I only go to sleep when I’m tired. Half past three or later. When I’m so tired I can scarcely make it up the stairs before I pass out. The maids are all abed. Then I wake before them.”

This explanation sounded perfectly reasonable to Aubrey. He was in a hell of his own making. He was miserable. He had broken Rhiannon’s sweet, good, innocent heart, and he deserved to be cast into the fiery bowels of Hades for his sins. He would never forgive himself.

“If you continue on this way, it shall be the death of you,” King warned grimly.

Yes, and he sure as bloody hell hoped so.

Aubrey didn’t answer that, just held his friend’s gaze. “Will you go and fetch me another bottle of gin?”

“No.”

“Brandy will suffice, if I’ve gone through all the gin,” he said conversationally.

“You don’t need any more poison. Good God, Richford.” King rummaged through the mess on his desk and produced a pile of fish bones on a plate, coughing as he did so. “I’ll just be removing this before we resume speaking.”

“No need to resume,” he called after his friend.

But King ignored him, returning momentarily without the plate. Even Aubrey had to admit the smell of his study had vastly improved in the absence of the bones.

“I thought I sent you for gin,” he grumbled as his friend seated himself at last.

“As I’m not your servant and I need not heed your whims, I ignored you,” King returned, grinning brightly.

The bastard. Aubrey pinned him with a glare.

“Are you going to tell me why you’ve actually paid a call on me here? I can count on one hand the number of times you’ve visited Villiers House.”

“Since you’ve finished rummaging about for your gin like a pig rooting in the mud, I shall tell you.”

“I’m beginning to think I don’t like you very much, old chum,” he said, tapping his fingers on the edge of his desk.

“You will like me even less when I bring you the news.”

“I don’t give a damn about what is happening in the world.”

“I think you will care about this.”

Aubrey sighed. “Well, do cease being so bloody mysterious. Impart your news and be done with it.”

“Lady Rhiannon Northwick is marrying the Earl of Carnis,” King announced, his expression unreadable.

“It is being said that the wedding will be held soon. Whitby has announced his intentions to marry the former Countess of Ammondale, and it sounds as if the duchess wishes to see her daughter settled before Whit makes a scandalous match.”

Everything within Aubrey seized.

He didn’t know why. This was what he expected to happen.

What he had known would happen. Granting Rhiannon the marriage she deserved was the reason he had severed ties with her and left her free of him.

She would make an excellent countess. She deserved contentedness and a life he could not offer her.

And yet…

And yet .

Feeling raw and exposed, he struggled to keep his wildly vacillating reaction from his face.

“Why do you imagine I would care about something so trifling?” he asked King hoarsely.

King’s expression gentled, losing some of its customary hauteur and severity. “I know that Lady Rhiannon was at the house party at Wingfield Hall, and I know you were with her.”

Shock rendered him silent for a moment. King knew? But that was impossible. No one knew. No one except himself, Rhiannon, the servants, and Perdita. But he had been certain that Perdita hadn’t recognized Rhiannon…

He grappled with what his friend had just revealed, knowing he could deny it or hold his tongue. Or he could concede the truth.

“How?” he asked instead.

King shrugged. “I have my ways. And no, I haven’t told Whitby you defiled his sister.”

The breath hissed from his lungs. He wanted to deny that he had dishonored Rhiannon, but that wasn’t true. He had. He had taken her innocence. And he would do so again if given the chance. Because that was how black his soul was. What a selfish bastard.

“Are you going to tell him?” Aubrey asked at last.

“No,” King said simply. “Because you are going to tell Whit what you’ve done.”

“It will end our friendship.”

“You should have thought of that before you touched her. But you did touch her, and what’s more, unless I miss my guess, you have feelings for her.”

“I don’t have feelings for her,” he denied harshly, longing to break something.

To send the contents of his desk flying to the floor. He wanted to destroy.

He didn’t have feelings for anyone. Love was a fiction. A dangerous delusion.

“She ought to marry Carnis,” he said, the words poisonous and bitter.

He didn’t mean them. Rhiannon marrying the earl had been indistinct in his mind, some future occurrence he hadn’t had to face because he had been in a self-induced gin stupor for the last month.

But now King had come with recriminations and the truth, making him face what would happen if he continued to rot away in the country, drinking himself into oblivion and trying his damnedest to forget Rhiannon.

She was going to become another man’s wife.

Rhiannon was marrying Carnis.

He ought to be relieved.

That was what he wanted for her, was it not? He couldn’t marry her himself.

She would take the earl’s name. Lie in his bed. Give him children. Love him.

Aubrey couldn’t bear it. He was too bloody selfish.

“Is that what you truly want?” King asked. “You want Lady Rhiannon to wed Carnis?”

“Of course it’s not,” he admitted, slamming his fist down on the desk and sending papers and cutlery raining to the Axminster. “You already know it isn’t, or you wouldn’t have come to me with the news.”

“If you want to marry her yourself, then why are you hiding in the countryside, swilling gin and living in filth?”

“Because I didn’t want to hurt her,” he blurted, the deepest, darkest parts of him unleashed. “Because I held my mother in my arms as she lay there covered in blood after my devil of a father stabbed her to death, all in the name of love.”

“Your father went mad,” King told him quietly.

There it was, the terrible truth. The last Duke of Richford had murdered his duchess. He had been so caught in the maelstrom of his own jealousy that he had believed she had taken a lover. His father had stabbed his mother to death and then shot himself in his study.

All in the name of supposed love.

“I know he went mad,” Aubrey allowed hoarsely. “But who is to say that I wouldn’t suffer the same fate? That is why I stayed away from her, why I resisted her for so long, until…”

“Until the house party,” King finished for him. “Richford, you’re not your father. Indeed, I am persuaded you’re nothing like him. What happened was horrific, but you cannot let it keep you from living.”

“I was living well enough until her,” he pointed out wryly.

“Were you?”

Yes, he was. Everything had been perfectly fine until…

“Were you happy?” King pressed.

He had been happy. With Rhiannon. She was stubborn and maddening and wild. Messy and chaotic and the sunshine to his rain. Beautiful and intelligent and so passionate.

Perfect for him. That was what she was.

And his. That, too. He couldn’t let her marry the Earl of Carnis.

She had to marry him , damn it.

“Fucking hell,” he swore, passing a hand over his face.

“You need to go to London posthaste,” King pointed out.

“Yes,” he agreed.

“But first, you need a bath, a decent meal, and a change of wardrobe,” his friend added with a pointed look of disgust aimed at his shirt. “You can’t go to her stinking like a barn, splattered in Salmon a la Chambord, and half soused.”

“No need to spare my feelings,” Aubrey grumbled.

King grinned. “That’s what friends are for.”