Page 77 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

She would, at the very least, adamantly repudiate all involvement.

Of course, everyone had still been aware that the unparalleled beauty Lady Gwyneth Atherton, Duchess of Redmayne, was a faithless whore. Women held their husbands closer when she’d walked into a room. They’d kissed both her cheeks then whispered malice the moment her back was turned.

And worse, everyone had likewise understood that her husband, Piers’s father, had been pathetically besotted with her. That when the money had run out, or the passion, or the novelty, she’d abandon her current lover and sweep back home to Castle Redmayne reeking of gin and unmentionably shameless things.

As a boy, Piers would rejoice upon her return, he’d missed her so. He’d been inured to the whispers, but not to his lovely mother’s doting. She’d present him with a gift, her azure eyes sparkling as he opened it. She’d lean down to embrace him, expecting his adoration, his forgiveness, which he both quickly provided.

His kind father would be so delighted to see her, so overwrought with joy at holding her… and then her inexorable melancholy would set in, and the cycle would begin again.

Until one day, when Piers was sixteen, Gwyneth had gone to Italy with some dashing count fifteen years her junior, and had stayed away nearly a month longer than usual.

Upon her return, his father had ordered a feast prepared. They’d all celebrated and enjoyed the spectacular wine she’d brought back with her. It’d been a lively, lovely evening.

Piers had found his father the next morning, hangingby the neck off the very balustrade from which he’d announced his engagement to Alexandra.

His mother had met her next lover at the funeral.

Still, even in the face of accusation, Gwyneth Atherton had adamantly controverted her frivolous dalliances. Had maintained that the gossips were particularly jealous of her wealth and status. Or that a man she’d denied had started malicious rumors.

Lies. Always lies.

Rose had been such a breath of fresh air when contrasted to his mother’s honeyed tongue. She’d been brash, bold, and brutally direct. He didn’t care for a woman’s supposed purity or virtue. In fact, his former fiancée hadn’t been a virgin, either, but she’d announced it to him right away. Admitted she was also a slave to her passions, and had desired none so much as him.

He’d fallen for her impish ways and her challenging honesty. He’d believed her when she’d spoken of love, of marriage—when she’d claimed his title meant nothing to her—because she told uncomfortable truths. He’d assumed her the antithesis of his mother.

How wrong he’d been. For they’d both been liars.

One had merely denied her actions, the other justified them.

The years had taught Piers not to care so deeply, and not to forgive so willingly. His eyes had been opened to every calculated gesture of the feminine sort. Or so he’d thought. He’d become hardened to the coy machinations of sycophantic damsels in need of a husband.

Or wanting a duke.

It was why he’d chosen Francesca.

Partly, yes, to honor the wishes of a departed father, and partly because she hadn’t particularly wanted him. Theirswould have been a comfortably contemptible life. He’d never have expected affection from her. Only children.

He’d vowed so long ago that his interactions with women would forever be biological and acquisitive. Until a sweet, seemingly innocent archeologist had, once again, taught him the abject agony of hope. She’d charmed him, captivated him so thoroughly with her artless, beguiling naïveté.

What he wouldn’t give to be Ramsay in that moment, all cool composure and stone-faced dispassion.

But then, passion had always been his downfall, hadn’t it? Since Piers was a boy, he’d chased his appetites with a rampant enthusiasm bordering on recklessness. He didn’t consider the consequences, because they rarely applied to him.

Nothing was ever denied him. Not just by the status of his birth, but by the force of his will. He wanted what he wanted. He did what must be done to get it.

He possessed an incessant need to conquer everything. To climb the tallest mountain, to explore the deepest trench. To forge the longest river. To pit his own strength and skill against the most lethal of apex predators.

And for what?

What did it mean to him? What sort of man had it made him? Why did he care?

Why did he careso fucking much about everything and everyone?

This weakness of his had earned him nothing but wounds. Deep, unhealed sores wrought by the elegantly sharpened claws of nature’s absolute craftiest creature.

Frailty, thy name is woman.

God, but his wife was an entirely excellent sort of fraud. A consummate actress. An ingenious observer of men.She’d known just what to do, exactly what to say, how to touch the only tender, masculine parts of him he’d managed to salvage. How to reach past the barriers he’d erected around his heart and play upon the chivalric tendencies he’d always been prone to.