Page 30 of Married to the Ruthless Duke

But it seemed the Duke was resolved to separate business from pleasure if he sought to also deny her the pleasures that came with marriage. She wondered briefly if he were entirely unaffected by what had transpired between them that he never wanted to broach the subject, but even though she wanted to ask, it would be entirely improper.

“I guess I should just prepare to spend the three nights, after which I get to live my life as a free woman—well, as free as a married woman can be,” she answered, beside herself.

“You would still be married to me regardless, so I would advise you to act with utmost discretion and decorum.” A dark smirk appeared on his face. He stood up and started stalking towards her with a predatory gleam in his eyes. “Besides, I think you want something more from this arrangement than you let on.”

He kept approaching her, forcing her to move backward until he had crowded her into a corner.

Coming even closer, he dropped his head to her neck, and then dropping his voice to a seductive timbre, he said, “Why else would you, a young innocent lady, be visiting a bachelor home alone without a chaperone, eh?”

His breath caressed the skin of her neck, exacerbating her acute awareness of him. It was quite some time before Helen gathered herself enough to formulate an answer.

ChapterEight

Helen left the Duke’s mansion in a daze. She had known that the Duke had approached her for marriage for political reasons. He had told her it was a marriage of convenience. But it was infinitely better to suspect that than have it confirmed to her in very clear terms.

She had just witnessed why he was nicknamed the Ruthless Duke because when it came to getting whatever he wanted, he went in ruthless pursuit, willing to do anything to get it. Apparently, she was the object of his pursuit, and she had deluded herself into thinking that she could have resisted.

The man was so intense and brooding that she wondered why he had not chosen the path most of the members of the ton had taken by raking their way through the ladies of the ton because, frankly, she didn’t think that he would have had to put in a lot of work.

The man was a magnetic field of his own. Whenever he had turned the full force of his seductive wiles on her, she was always helpless to resist. Frankly, if she were being honest to herself, if not for the Duke’s honor and his iron-clad self-control, she was sure she would have been ruined a long while ago, considering the number of times she had ended up in compromising positions with him.

Now that she thought about it, the Duke could be cold, calculating, vexing, and quite a lot of other things, but at his core, he was an honorable man because while she might be untried in the ways of the bedroom, she knew that a man who had such erotic power over a lady could use it as leverage to trap her into marriage. Many fortune hunters of the ton had used this to trap unsuspecting heiresses into marriage.

Considering the circumstances that surround the marriages of members of the ton, it was little wonder that they were bitter. The wives turned to barely concealed affairs, and the husbands amassed a string of mistresses they maintained with little money from their already failing estates.

The ton were prone to foolish behavior, in Helen’s opinion, but they tried to cover for their faults by making new dresses, slathering their faces with paint, creating ridicule rules, gossiping, and humiliating people who had a small modicum of happiness.

In essence, the ton were sad people clothed in beautiful dresses, and Helen, having noticed all of this earlier, had sworn not to have a marriage of convenience. She had sworn to marry for love, like some of her friends. And even though she was given to flights of fancy, she had hoped that fate might help her find that treasure so few people got in their lifetime. If not, she was willing to settle for at least a good friendship with her spouse.

Unfortunately, she did not think she could describe the Duke as a friend. For one, her friends did not cause the heat and desire she felt around him. She also knew little about the Duke, now that she thought about it. Besides his name, his family title, and his house, she knew next to nothing about who the man, Alexander Osbourne, the fifth Duke of Blackhill, was.

Well, she guessed some brides of the ton had even less information about their grooms, as they sometimes met their grooms for the first time at the altar. At least, Helen had seen her Duke in person—every ridiculously handsome aspect of his features that was not covered by his clothes, of course. Even if she could not have his friendship, she could count on the heat between them to keep her warm during cold nights.

Of course, he cared about her in other ways too—maybe not in the ways of a man besotted with his wife, but he was surely attentive. At least he had sent the butler to bring his carriage to take her back to her family’s townhouse under the cover of night since, apparently, he didn’t trust that she would be safe taking a hackney at such a late hour of the night.

Ha!! Dark hour. It was barely eight o’clock. She would prefer to think that was out of care rather than being a manifestation of the overbearing nature of his character.

When she got back home, she opened the door and tiptoed past a sleeping Mr. Biggins. The poor man was obviously snoring up a storm on a seat at the entrance. It wasn’t easy working as a butler at his age—another servant was supposed to assist him, but her father had dismissed the other one when he was caught harassing maids in the house and had declined to hire another. He argued that they had very few guests, anyway.

Now that Helen thought about it, their financial problems must have started long before that time. Trust her father to keep all that secret because he didn’t want his daughters to worry their ‘pretty’ heads.

Helen rolled her eyes at that thought. She would prefer to be informed about a situation that affected her and her future, thank you very much. She wouldn’t blame her papa, since members of the ton thought money to be a vulgar topic and not fit for polite discussion. They preferred to sit with their spines ramrod straight, drinking tea while their households and estates collapsed into ruins behind their backs.

That picture was quite funny. Helen chuckled while ascending the stairs.

“You must have had an adventure for the ages this night, going by the way you are smiling from ear to ear.” The sound of her sister’s voice caused her to jump in surprise. She almost missed her step and had to hold on to the banister to avoid falling.

Placing her hand on her chest, Helen looked up in the direction of the voice. Margaret was standing at the landing of the staircase.

“Goodness, Maggie, you startled me,” Helen whisper-screamed. Then, slowly making her way towards Margaret at the top of the stairs, she asked, “What are you still doing awake? I had assumed you had retired earlier in the evening.”

“Yes, I did, but I was awoken by the sound of a carriage outside my window. I am guessing that was the carriage bringing you back home. Well, I could not go back to sleep, so I decided to come below stairs for some milk in the hope that it would help me go back to sleep faster.” Then pausing dramatically, Margaret continued, “Imagine my surprise to see my sister sneaking into the house with the biggest smile in the whole of Mayfair on her face. Well, I think I am up for some late-night story time, so start spilling.”

Drat, Helen had forgotten that her sister was a very light sleeper who woke up at the slightest provocation. Of course, if there was anyone in their household that would have caught her, it was her sister.

Helen hung her head in defeat and led the way to her bedroom. When they were inside, Margaret made a beeline for the bed, jumping up to sit on it while bouncing on it like an excited schoolgirl. Apparently, she was slowly returning to her normal self, and Helen admitted she was cute when she showed such excitement.

“So, how was your clandestine meeting with the Duke?”

---