Page 46 of Duke of Iron
Calenham looked as though he might argue, but then only tipped his hat. “Suit yourself. See you at the club tomorrow?”
Logan nodded, and they parted ways, Calenham disappearing into the swirl of London traffic.
Logan slowed his horse as he neared the square, savoring the way the air cooled and the sounds of the city became more human—vendors, the snap of canvas awnings, a distant street musician, even the occasional bark of a dog.
He felt almost at peace until he reached his own street, and saw the tall windows of Irondale House gleaming in the late sun.
He remembered the night before. The way May had held the child, rocking him in the old chair, her hair falling loose in the firelight. The song she’d sung—soft, uncertain, so full of hope it made his chest ache.
He had wanted, in that moment, to do something entirely out of character. He had wanted to kiss her.
Not because he should. Not because she was beautiful, or because the world expected it. But because he needed to. The feeling had come on him like a fever—hot, irrational, and impossible to ignore.
He had never needed anything in his life.
Desire was familiar, but this was something else. He would not put a name to it.
He rode the last block slowly, determined not to let the servants see him in a state of agitation. When he handed the horse off to the groom, he paused, drew in a breath, and reset his face into the careful lines of the Iron Duke.
Inside, he strode through the marble halls, past Bexley, and up the main stairs. He did not go to the study, nor to his private apartments, but straight to the library.
May was there, exactly as he knew she would be, her back to the door as she perused the shelves. She wore blue today, but he thought of the pink dress she had worn when he first kissed her hand, and for an instant, he wanted to see her in it again.
He cursed himself for the thought, and for the dozen that followed.
He did not speak. He only watched her, watched the way she reached for the highest shelves, the way her lips moved as she read titles aloud. She did not know he was there, and he liked it that way.
He stood in the shadow of the door, telling himself he would say nothing, do nothing, just observe for a moment, until the feeling passed.
It didn’t.
He stayed there, silent and unseen, until the urge to cross the room and touch her became almost unbearable.
Then, and only then, did he force himself away, striding down the hallway with a kind of violence that made the portraits tremble in their frames.
He would notneedanyone. Least of all, a girl who hummed lullabies to another man’s child.
He would not.
Fourteen
Logan sealed the letter with a precise stamp of wax and set it aside, careful not to disturb the neatly squared piles of paper that bricked his desk.
He had kept himself occupied with correspondence and ledgers for several days, a feat matched only by his record at Oxford, and he would have congratulated himself for it if he weren’t so aware of the reason for his newfound diligence—he had become an expert in the art of avoiding his own wife.
It had been four days since the wedding. Four days since the world began referring to him as a married man. Four days of Irondale House running like clockwork, precisely because its mistress and master occupied opposite ends of it.
He reached for the volume he had been reading the night before—The Logic of Virtue, an obtuse treatise that he’d always found useful for clearing the mind—and frowned to see it missing from its customary position atop the inbox. His hand swept the desk,checked the writing shelf, even the battered armchair by the fire, but found nothing.
Odd. He remembered placing it on the desk. He never forgot such details.
He slid open the leftmost drawer. The book wasn’t there either, and the contents didn’t look as he had left them. The tray of pen nibs had been shifted to the back, and someone had tidied away the loose sheaf of parliamentary minutes he’d left for reference.
Logan opened the right drawer. The box of quills had been rotated, the bottle of ink capped more tightly than his own fussy wrists allowed. Even his magnifying glass had been re-polished and returned to its velvet case.
Shutting the drawer with a little more force than necessary, he sat back, surveying the room. At first glance, nothing else seemed amiss. The heavy curtains were still precisely draped. The paperweight, a brass rendering of a crouched lion, sat where he’d left it.
He stood abruptly and called, “Bexley!”
