Page 9 of Her Cursed Duke
Aiden stared at the woman standing before him, noting that she could not meet his eyes. Stifling the urge to say something of consequence, he chose a safer response.
He bowed politely and curtly said, “How do you do, Miss Carlton.”
Miss Carlton was strong enough to let her fears keep her from returning his polite greeting, but soon, she and her mother were walking away from the Duke and his godmother.
Aiden waited until he was sure no one was within earshot before speaking. “You said I would not have to do anything other than meeting and speaking to a few young women.”
“Is that not what you are doing?”
“No, Godmother. It seems we are engaging in this activity together, with you orchestrating the introductions and trying to spin conversations that inevitably lead to nowhere.”
The Dowager Marchioness sighed and folded her arms. “What would you have me do, then? Just stand back and watch? I only mean to help you.”
Aiden took his godmother’s hands in his own and said in a softer tone, thinking nothing of it as he opened his statement with a lie,“And I appreciate that, I really do. But I thought it was implied that I would attempt to face this issue on my own first.”
“Were you going to? You were sulking in a corner when I found you.”
Aiden’s mind wandered back to the woman he had been speaking with, and he wagered that it was likely his godmother had not seen them at the start of their conversation and was unaware that it had been Prudence who approached him first.
“But I was not alone. I was talking with someone, and then you came and pulled me away,” he pointed out.
Beatrice attempted to speak but faltered before the words could escape her lips, pausing slightly before asking, “But… was that to lead anywhere?”
She simply refused to give up. She had been dropping hints of her wishes and intentions to see Aiden married. He had hoped that she had understood the hints he had dropped in response, alluding to the impossibility of that happening and his desire to live out the rest of his days without any sort of weight bearing down on his shoulders.
He had already spent most of his life under scrutiny and condemnation, and there was no way any woman who chose to be with him for the rest of their life would not bear that same mindset.
Aiden’s only desire was for peace of mind—something his godmother had made it her own personal business to rob him of. He knew he could not give her what she wanted, but perhaps he could provide her with some sort of offering, to convince her to relent on the matter—even just a little bit.
“You did not give me a chance to find out. I understand that you are worried about me, but your interference has the potential to help or harm whatever situation I am able to make the most of, whether or not you mean well. At the end of the day, I am the one who will end up marrying.” Saying that last word took a lot of courage from him, considering it was something he had never envisioned himself doing. “Just… let me try it my way. At least for a bit.”
His godmother appeared to relent, her shoulders dropping as she agreed. “All right. But you will make an effort, yes?”
She was thorough, he had to admit. Bloody hell, this had better not come back to bite him in the rear later.
“You have my word.”
Those were bold words from someone who had picked a single stray thread and ran with it. Aiden was lucky to have recalled the brief, amusing conversation with Prudence earlier, but now, he seemed to have implied that what had simply been idle chatter held the potential for more.
And sooner or later, he might have to prove that theory.
“Oh my. The Duke seems to have risen in popularity all of a sudden,” Agnes casually noted, watching a few ladies approach Aiden and strike up a conversation.
Prudence tried not to snort at the display, knowing what their true intentions were. A few minutes ago, word got around that the Dowager Marchioness was searching for a wife for her godson, and at first, many of the eligible ladies present had scoffed at the idea, still terrified of a man who had never been proven to be what others had accused him of being.
Things took a slightly worse turn when a footman tripped and dropped an entire tray of punch on a lady in a bright yellow dress. The Duke had been a couple of feet behind the footman, and word quickly got around that he had not liked the way the servant had looked at him and opted to punish him for his insolence.
It was utterly ridiculous, and Prudence was quite disappointed by the disrespectful attitude of the majority of the guests.
But at some point, the single women present seemed to remember that he was a duke and, therefore, a man of great wealth and fortune. Soon, it became a competition of who could claim and hold onto his attention the longest.
Prudence felt sick, watching the women fling themselves at him, not interested in him but his money, their greed evident in how quickly they had gone from condemning him and calling him cursed to fluttering their eyelashes at him.
“It is quite odd. I did hear a few… cruel words about his past earlier. Rumors, if you will. So, this display of attention toward him is interesting,” Silas told them.
“What sort of rumors?” Agnes asked.
“It’s nothing of substance.” Prudence felt the need to explain the root of this tragic behavior. “His family fell ill from a fever when he was a child, and they passed. He was the sole survivor, and thus, people deduced that he had cursed them. Others have claimed to have been ‘cursed’ by him—like Grandmother told us earlier—but those are just baseless accusations.”
