Page 4 of The Duke’s Only Desire (The Dukes of Darkness #3)

A monster.

James was right, Sophie decided the next afternoon as she sat staring across the carriage compartment at Shay, using the cold as an excuse to pull her fur wrap tighter around herself for protection. That was exactly what he had become.

Only a monster would have come charging back into her life at the worst possible time, destroying her engagement party, and making her the subject of gossip and scandal. Only a monster would have resurrected the old contract that should have died with Colsworth and Malvern. Only a monster would have expected her to marry him that morning or bankrupt her family.

But then, only a monster would have sent that letter five years ago telling her he cared nothing for her and never had beyond a simple obligation to his brother to be pleasant to her, and now free of that obligation, he never wanted to see her again. Leave me alone, Sophie. Do not ever contact me again or I will burn your letters without bothering to read them.

He was a monster, all right, and it had nothing to do with his scars.

In all the years before he sent that letter, whenever she let herself dream of her wedding day, Seamus Douglass had always been the man she’d imagined standing at the altar, waiting for her to alight from the open carriage and walk down the aisle to him. The parish country church would have been filled with friends and family, decorated with roses and wildflowers, and shining beneath the bright morning sunlight of a warm summer morning. He would have smiled upon her with adoration when she promised to love, honor, and obey, and when they were pronounced man and wife, he would have cared nothing for propriety and kissed her right there on the church steps, before laughingly running with her to the carriage from which he’d throw handfuls of coins to the waiting children. Then they would be off together, husband and wife, to join the wedding breakfast at the Granville estate where they would celebrate for hours with dozens of people they loved and who loved them. There would have been an orchestra, of course, and she would have danced with her father before waltzing with Shay. And that night, in the loving cocoon of their bedroom, they would share their own private wedding vows, written not by the Church but by the love in their hearts.

That had always been her dream wedding.

The real ceremony that morning had been nothing like that.

The silent, city church was empty of all friends and family, except for her father who sat in the front pew, his hands laced between his knees and in a shaking voice admitted that he was giving Sophie to this man. Behind him sat Devlin Raines, Duke of Dartmoor, and his new wife, and beside them Lucien Grenier, Duke of Crewe, whose wife had remained at home with his brother. Chase Maddox, Duke of Greysmere, served as best man. There hadn’t been time for Sophie to ask one of her friends to be her maid of honor—or overcome the shocked questions and shame bound up with it—and so her lady’s maid stood up for her. Oh, poor Smithson! The woman had suffered choking sobs for Sophie through every moment of the ceremony, but at least with her maid crying with such anguish, Sophie didn’t have to. She barely had the strength to mumble her vows, certain she was stating half of them wrong, with her numb tongue most likely agreeing to unlove, dishonor, and disobey.

Through it all, she kept hoping for James to come rushing to rescue her. But he never did. When the rector pronounced them husband and wife, she knew he never would.

Most likely, he had never planned to.

Immediately after signing the register, they walked out of the church and straight into the waiting carriage, with barely any time for her to say goodbye to Papa before driving off. Sophie had huddled in the corner of the seat across from Shay as the carriage drove out of Mayfair toward the Great North Road, her face turned toward the window. Determined not to cry in front of him, she had gulped in great breaths of air while biting the inside of her cheek.

They’d ridden in silence for the past five hours, taking only a short break two hours ago at a posting inn to stretch their legs, use the necessary, and buy a small basket of food to take with them in the carriage. Shay had been anxious to be back on the road as soon as possible, and despite her anger at him, she noticed he’d seemed to relax as soon as they were back in the carriage and away from the prying eyes and whispers. Still, the basket was a poor substitute for the delicious foods that should have been served at her wedding breakfast. Not that she had any appetite anyway. Perhaps she never would again.

Oh, this was nothing like how she thought married life would be! Cold, silent, miserable… If her marriage were this bad now, when they’d been married for less than six hours, how unbearable and torturous a prison would the next thirty years be?

Her raw eyes stung as if someone had rubbed vinegar into them, and the lines of Shay’s profile, with the scarred side of his face turned toward the window, blurred into fuzzy edges. Good. She didn’t want to see him. Looking at him—looking for the man she once knew—was agony.

“Trust him, my girl,” Papa had whispered into her ear when she’d hugged him goodbye. “Seamus will protect you.”

Protect? True, when she thought of what had once drawn her to Shay, she couldn’t deny that the way he’d protected her had been part of it, even the first night they met. But she wanted more from her husband than protection. A true partnership and a loving home should also have been hers.

How could anything he had done in the past twenty-four hours been the work of love?

A single tear finally slipped free, but she stubbornly swiped it away with the back of her gloved hand. She had too much pride to let him see how furious she was that he’d upended her entire life, how anguished that she could glimpse nothing in him now of the man he’d once been, when he’d been her brave soldier.

If this was protection, she’d rather have been tossed to the wolves.

“Why did you do this to me?” she demanded, unable to hold back any longer, although her hoarse words were barely louder than the rumble of the carriage wheels beneath them. “Why did you ruin my life,” her voice choked when she added, “when I mean nothing to you?”

Not moving his head, he slid her a look from the corner of his eyes, pinned her beneath his gaze for an electrifying heartbeat, then looked back out the window. He said nothing.

Which only infuriated her more. If he didn’t want to talk to her, she’d make him.

“When we took our wedding vows this morning,” she pressed acerbically, “I didn’t realize we’d also taken a vow of silence.”

The only indication he’d heard was a slight curl of his lips that deepened the attractive lines of amusement at the corner of his mouth. Oh, he was still dashing, she had to admit, despite the scars, with a lazy charm that bordered on sheer magnetism.

An unbidden memory rushed over her from the last time she had seen him before the accident, during his final visit to London when they’d been alone in the garden. She’d seen that same curl of his lips right before he’d pulled her to him and kissed her, and not at all like a friend. The sweet taste of amusement on his lips had faded quickly into something spicier, something hot and hungry… Even now a low heat swirled in her belly, like warm fog rising from a river in winter, at the memory of how she’d curled herself into him to welcome the forbidden embrace.

He drawled, “I thought silence would have been preferable to speaking to me.”

“And I would have thought you knew me better than that.” But then, I thought I knew you, too. Apparently, they were both wrong.

He turned toward her, and her breath caught reflexively in her throat at the sight of his scars in the sunlight.

Rough and uneven, like stretched leather left to blister beneath the heat of the sun, his once handsome face was marred with rippling swells and indentions covering from his temple and eye to nearly half his nose, his entire right cheek and down to his jaw, only to disappear beneath his neckcloth and collar. How far over his body did those scars stretch? Was everywhere beneath his clothes the same mottled mix of dark red and white, of smooth and rough patches of skin? Did they cover his shoulder and chest, his arms and legs?

Yet she knew the brutal truth—those scars had little to do with the way he’d come back into her life, if at all.

So she repeated, resolved to continue until she had a proper answer, “Why did you do this to me? We were friends once.”

“We still are. If I didn’t care about you, I wouldn’t have forced you into marriage.”

Now that she could see his full mouth, she noted how its two sides moved out of unison as he spoke, and a faint slur that hadn’t been there before colored his words. It wasn’t strong enough that anyone else would have noticed, but Sophie did. Just as she had noticed everything about the way he moved and smiled and spoke so many years ago.

She shook her head in frustration. “That makes no sense.”

“You asked for an answer. You didn’t ask for logic.” His eyes softened on hers for a moment, just long enough for her heart to skip at another glimpse of the old Shay. “Nothing about our friendship has ever made sense. Why should our marriage?”

She opened her mouth to give a scathing retort, only to close her lips when she could think of nothing to say.

He was right, blast him. That, too, was the old Shay, the most challenging man she’d ever conversed with. His intellect had been most of the reason she’d been drawn to him, even if he sometimes wielded it as a double-edged sword. Like now.

“I don’t believe I did receive my answer,” she countered, twisting the conversation back on him. “Why did you do this?” Her bottom lip threatened to tremble, so she bit it. Hard. “I was going to be married.”

“You are married.”

“I was going to be happy.” Her quiet words were as sharp as a blade.

“You were going to be miserable.”

“You don’t know that.” Her eyes locked with his across the gently swaying compartment. “But I certainly will be now.”

His silence did nothing to challenge her assertion.

And everything to infuriate her even more.

So she pressed on. “You didn’t want to see me again. You never wanted to see me again, that’s what your letter said.” She had no choice but to whisper because if she’d dared speak any louder, she would have screamed. “When the accident happened, I was terrified for you and so afraid you were dying all alone.” The fears she’d kept hidden for five years rushed out on one long breath she couldn’t control. “I was in the village, only a mile away, yet you wouldn’t let me see you—you refused to let me see you. I begged you, begged the doctors, begged my grandmother, just to let me see you for even a few minutes. That was all I wanted, just to be at your side…just to let you know I cared about you and that I—” Her voice cracked, and when she continued, an awful anguish colored her words. “I begged to be with you. But you sent me back to London without a word, where I was forced into mourning for a man I never loved. For a man I hated .”

Tears she tried to keep in check caught in her voice and made breathing nearly impossible, her lungs constricting painfully with every breath. His face blurred, yet she could still see the grim darkness in his eyes, made even blacker with every confession she shared.

“I finally heard from you six months later. You’d sent a letter I thought would be like all the others, filled with news of how you were and little teasings to hide the gravity of the situation, just as you had done during the wars. But it was nothing like those. Those were filled with affection. But that last letter—it was pure betrayal.”

He didn’t look away, didn’t move at all except for the gentle swaying of his body that matched the carriage around them. His stony expression remained as inscrutable as ever.

“You said the last thing you would do was honor the contract and marry me. That all hopes of me becoming Duchess of Malvern were as dead as your brother.” She swallowed to clear the knot of emotion from her throat. Those had been his exact words, too. She’d been unable to scorch them from her mind even after she threw the letter into the fireplace and watched it burn to ash. “What you told me…” She sucked in a harsh, ragged breath. “I know the fire was an accident, that you didn’t kill your brother.” So softly, barely more than a breath now and so low she wasn’t certain he heard it—“But your letter killed my heart.”

He flinched. No, that was only an illusion, only a movement caused by the bounce of the carriage over the rough road. Certainly not because he felt any remorse over what he’d done. She wasn’t certain he felt anything anymore.

She leaned toward him and reached out, praying he would take her hand and that they could salvage something— anything —of their old friendship. “Help me understand,” she pleaded, realizing with irony that she was once again begging him to come to her, this time with his heart. “Explain to me why—”

He pounded his fist against the roof, hard and sharp. Immediately, the coachman pulled the team to a stop. Even before the carriage had stopped rocking, he’d flung open the door to jump outside. Sophie grabbed for his arm and stopped him in mid-descent, leaning halfway out of the carriage after him.

He froze and looked down at her hand on his coat sleeve.

Her hand tightened on his bicep until she felt the flexing of hard muscle beneath his clothes. But she refused to let him leave. “You’ve shackled us together for the rest of our lives.” The intensity of her pounding pulse was so painful she could barely tolerate the prick of needles it shot through her with every beat. “With a woman you never wanted to marry nor ever see again. Why ruin our lives that way? Why do that to us—to yourself—if you—”

“Sir?” Shay’s valet appeared at the side of the carriage, having dropped quickly to the ground to assist them. Pearson’s puzzled gaze swung between them, surely thinking something was wrong. Oh, how wrong things were! And not one of them could be fixed by a valet.

“We need a moment for a bit of fresh air,” Shay announced in a loud voice to Pearson and the driver. He removed Sophie’s hand from his sleeve and stepped away from the carriage to stand alone, several feet further down the road, where he stared inscrutably off into the snow-covered distance.

Pearson held out his hand to help Sophie to the ground. “Your Grace?”

She shook her head as she settled back on the seat, defeated.

“Do you need anything, ma’am?” he asked. “Extra rugs or anything from your travel bag?”

Another shake of her head, and she blinked hard as she stared past him at Shay’s back, afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop the tears this time. She blurted out in pain, “How can you stand to work for a man whose soul is so black that he would force a woman to marry him and ruin her life?”

Pearson’s large frame filled the doorway. Leave it to Shay to have a valet unlike any manservant she had ever seen before. He was as large as an ox with bulging muscles barely contained beneath his thick wool coat, and he behaved more like a bodyguard than a body man. But the expression on his face was one of compassion for her as he reached to pick up the rug that had slipped to the floor at her feet.

“He didn’t ruin your life, ma’am,” he corrected gently as he held out the rug to her. “He saved it.”

Her hand froze in mid-reach. “What do you mean?”

He began to speak, then hesitated and shook his head. “I’d be overstepping, and the colonel would have my hide.”

The colonel. That was why the valet was so commanding, she realized as she accepted the unwanted rug. They must have known each other in the wars, and Shay had hired him after the fighting ended to keep him from being another one of the oh- too-many former soldiers who couldn’t find employment. Not a bodyguard, she realized, but a battle ally. Shay must certainly have thought he needed one for his life post-accident.

“You’ll need to ask him yourself, ma’am.”

“I have,” she muttered, her shoulders slumping. “He won’t tell me.”

His mouth twisted with indecision as he cast a glance down the road at Shay. Then he lowered his voice. “Perhaps you should ask him to tell you about Clara LePaige.”

The name wasn’t familiar. Was she someone Shay loved? “Who is she?”

He shook his head, resolutely refusing to say more. But as he turned to leave, he confided, “I’ve known the colonel since the days when we fought side by side against the French, and his soul isn’t nearly as black as he thinks it is. Perhaps you can show him that.”

Then, with a parting tug to the brim of his hat, he left her to go to Shay, to find out if he could provide any assistance.

From the carriage, Sophie watched the two men, who said not one word to each other but simply stood shoulder to shoulder and stared together across the bucolic English countryside as if they half-expected Napoleon’s royal guard to jump out from behind the trees at any moment. To live life feeling as if you were constantly besieged… Sophie shuddered and pulled the rug over her legs. Such a life would be horrible. But it didn’t give him the right to make hers just as bad.

Finally, Shay slapped Pearson on the back in silent understanding as if the two men had just ended a long conversation when not one word had been uttered between them. He tugged at his gloves as he returned to the carriage while Pearson circled to the back to ride behind with the tiger.

“We’ll travel about another hour before reaching the inn where we’ll stay for the night,” Shay told her. “I’ll ride on top the rest of the way.”

Before she could protest, he closed the door, shutting her inside the compartment, and quickly turned away to climb up to the driver’s seat. The team started forward with a loud crack of the whip.

Within moments, the carriage was on its way again, once more moving toward the cold and icy north where the rest of her life awaited her.