Page 22 of A Duke, a Virgin and a Baby
Do not be tempted, you damned idiot.He cursed himself silently. It was a woman’s nature, he reminded himself, to be seductive, to draw a man in. It was a trick, a lure. He had seen it in his father’s mistresses, the way they twisted men around their fingers, how they reveled in the chaos they created.
He would not be like his father. He would not succumb. He would not hurt her as his father had hurt his mother. His primary objective was to find the parents of the child, the true parents, and then he could return to his solitary life, away from this unsettling woman who threatened to unravel his carefully constructed world.
He forced himself to think of Ernest, the butler, and the search for the nursemaid. He needed to set clear boundaries, implement protocols, and regain control of his household, and his own increasingly erratic thoughts.
Come morning, however, the resolve he had clung to through the sleepless hours began to fray. He found himself looking for her in the halls, his eyes scanning for the flash of her dark hair, the swish of her skirts, and the faint, lingering scent that seemed to permeate his very home now.
It was as ridiculous as it was tiresome. He was a Duke, with responsibilities and pressing matters, not an infatuated schoolboy.
He was surprised, pleasantly so, when she appeared to join him for breakfast. She walked into the dining hall with quiet dignity, her hair neatly pinned, a sensible gown replacing the scandalous nightwear he had found himself wishing multiple times that she had been wearing when he had his hands on her last night.
It would have been so easy then, to feel more of her smooth skin, to taste her scent until it was all he knew. To mark her up as –
Oh, God. It was getting worse.
Julian cleared his throat and raised his cup of tea to take a sip, his eyes following her as she settled in the seat facing him. She looked… composed. Too composed, perhaps, for a woman who had been thoroughly kissed by her the husband she wished to wage war against just hours before. A flicker of annoyance mixed with a strange disappointment flashed through him.
Was she truly so unaffected?
“Good morning, Duchess,” he managed, his voice a little rougher than he intended.
“Your Grace.” Her response was equally formal, her green eyes fixed on the spread before her, without sparing him a single glance.
The dining table they sat at was quite large, but the silence that hung over them made the expanse feel vast. And Julian hated it completely.
“How are – the child? How is he?”
There was a slight quirk to her eyebrow as she reached for a piece of toast.
“He has a name. Choosing not to use it will not make him disappear.” Anna responded lowly, focused on slathering jam over her toast.
Irritation flared within the duke and he sighed.
“Nicholas. How is he?”
“He is well. Has been fed and cleaned for the morning and last I saw, he was being showered with attention and affection by the maids. He is in good hands.”
“That is… that is good. I have already asked Ernest to look into finding him a nursemaid. We should begin to receive applications soon. And I am also searching for his parents. I intend to find them as soon as possible.”
Anna nodded, lifting her cup of tea. “All right.”
The small talk was stilted, void of emotion and inflection. It seemed neither of them could meet the other’s gaze for long, their eyes darting away whenever they inadvertently locked. The memory of the kiss hung in the air, a thick, unspoken tension that made the simplest exchange feel fraught.
Then, suddenly, she broke the silence that followed the clinking of cutlery. Her voice was a little higher than when she had blandly answered his questions, as though she could not hide the emotions behind them.
“Why did you marry me, Your Grace?”
The bluntness of it caught him off guard. He froze his fork midway to his mouth. He set it down slowly, carefully. He hadn’t expected her to raise it, not like this, not now. Or rather… he had hoped he would never have to hear it at all.
“It was… necessary,” he finally managed, his voice strained.
He remembered the fury he had felt when they had been found in the conservatory, the whispers that had begun before he even left the ball, the unavoidable scandal that would have found them both if he had not done the right thing. His oath to never marry, to never subject a woman to the pain of a faithless husband, had been shattered in that instant, pushing him down a disconcerting and uncomfortable path.
“Necessary?” she repeated a hint of hardness in her tone. “For whom, exactly? You clearly didn’t want a wife. You couldn’t stand the idea of living in the same house with me, so you left, barely a day after we were wed. For nine months, you were absent and you would have never returned, had I not summoned you. So why did you marry me? You could have simply let me face my fate. Ruined, perhaps, but free.”
His jaw clenched.
She had raised good points that had aligned with his intention never to marry to avoid subjecting a woman to the agony his mother had endured. He had planned a solitary life, dedicated to restoring his family name, to ensuring the Harrow legacy was spotless.
