Page 32 of Bride of the Fae Duke

And even then, she’d missed him.

Even then, through the sharpest pangs of her hunger and the hottest flares of her fury, she’d never been able to banish the grief entirely.

Which the man sitting before her shouldn’t know –couldn’tknow. And yet she couldn’t help opening her mouth, a stupid, sentimental attempt to soften the lines of guilt etched into that inhumanly beautiful face …

‘It’s alright.’ It was little more than a whisper. ‘It really is. You must have been very fond of her, before she was banished.’

Like a dam broke, his bitter laugh shattered out of him. ‘I didn’t even believe it at first – can you imagine? Simply refused to accept the bloody facts. Walford argued and argued after Jeanne died, and I kept clinging to coincidences and lack of evidence, told him that surely she’d loved me too much to curse me in such a vicious way …’

He’ll come back, Mother had insisted, gaunt with hunger and red-eyed with grief.Of course he’ll come back. Helovesme. He loves all of you …

‘Yes,’ Nellie mumbled, throat clenching tight.

‘And then Alis died.’ He didn’t seem to have heard her; he certainly hadn’t heard the emotion she was so desperately trying not to feel. His fingers clenched and unclenched erratically beside his plate. ‘Horse kick to the head –Alis, of all people, who could tame a bloody horse bysmilingat it. So then … then …’

Then he’d given up on his arguments.

Losing not just a fourth wife, but also the mother he’d thought he’d known.

‘So why do you think she did it?’ Nellie whispered. ‘Could she have made a mistake? Tried to curse your father and accidentally targeted you?’

‘Walford said the same thing.’ His lips curved into a cramped, joyless smile. ‘But she really wasn’t one to make mistakes. Not even if she was furious. The notion of her wielding magic that carelessly seems even more impossible than the notion of her cursing me deliberately.’

‘But then why—’

‘The best I’ve managed to come up with is that she wanted the family line to die with me,’ he cut in, not waiting for her to finish. The words came out with strange, restrained eagerness – as if he’d waited years to speak them out loud and hated himself for wanting to do so. ‘That she wanted everything my father had worked for to come to naught. She would have known how much that would haunt him – having caused the decline of the Locke estate.’

Oh.

Oh dear.

She shouldn’t ask – she shouldn’t invite him to bare so much of his own heart and soul to her. But thiswasrelevant to her own role in the tragedy, the entire dratted reason why he’d married her … so out it slipped, a question she’d never even thought of before. ‘Is that why you’re going to such lengths to have an heir, then? Your father’s wishes?’

He closed his eyes. ‘Not exactly.’

Not an answer, and shereallyshouldn’t ask.

Then again, asking was only dangerous if it made him feel fonder towards her. And if every line on his angular face, every twitching muscle in his jaw, was telling her that he didn’t wish to dive deeper into his own motivations, wouldn’t asking him be a very decent strategy for survival?

‘So what is the reason, then?’ she blurted, absently spooning up pea soup. Somehow, most of her plate had emptied itself over the course of the conversation. ‘What happens if you die without an heir? Does the duchy cease to exist?’

‘Oh no. Nothing so dramatic.’ He opened his eyes, slumping back with the air of a man about to recount an unpleasant history lesson. ‘It’s rather … When my great-great-grandfather fled the tyrants of Pavella and came to Elidian, he left a significant part of his family behind. So while the Elidian line always remained small, I still have distant cousins living under the iron crown’

Nellie lowered her spoon again. ‘Do you know them at all?’

‘They write me every now and then to ask for money,’ he muttered, sounding bitter. ‘Other than them, my father and uncles are the only family I’ve known. The youngest of them, Percival, drunk himself to death a decade ago and never had any children with either his wife or his impressive string of mistresses. My other uncle, Ambrose, is alive but hasn’t set foot in Elidian for twenty years. He left home to travel as a young man and never returned.’

Matters began to solidify. ‘So if you were to die tomorrow, Ambrose would become the next duke of Locke?’

‘Exactly.’ It came out grim.

‘And you don’t think he’d come back to Elidian and take up life as a nobleman here?’

‘He regularly assures me in his letters that he never wants to see the city again.’ The way his lip curled up lay a hair’s breadth removed from a sneer. ‘Which means the house would be sold. The servants would lose their positions, the family possessions would be traded, any influence we wield in the Senate would be gone. And if Ambrose were to die childless, which seems likely at this point, all of it would go back into the hands of some squandering cousin licking the boots of the Pavellan tyrants.’

Not his father’s wishes, then.

Just principles. She should have known.

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