Page 2 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
He’d had no reason.
He and Martha had never even traded a cross word. Not even in the most stressful of times. He didn’t think that Martha was capable of such a thing. She was – She’d been such an accommodating person. If ever she’d had a temper, he hadn’t seen it.
“I heard there was another woman.”
“No!”
“Well, I heard that she caught him in some more unsavoury dealings.”
“More unsavoury than an affair?”
“More illegal than an affair, that’s for sure.”
Henry could have laughed. The bitter irony of it all was that the more they speculated, the further from the truth they all got.
Slowly, one by one, bodies were filing out of the cemetery, many stopping by to offer words of condolence and emptyplatitudes that Henry ignored as staunchly as he was the whispers from further back in the crowd.
He was involved in no illegal dealings. He’d had nothing to do with Martha’s death.
Even the thought made his stomach turn.
And made him remember all over again coming home from parliament to find her body stretched across the entryway floor at the base of the stairs, blood pooling around her pale, lifeless form.
Oh, God. Why her?
Why had he taken her? Of all people.
Henry had never sought romance. He’d never thought to find love or marry for anything besides the very basic requirements of his station and title.
And then she had shown up, flowery and kind, unlike any woman he had ever met before her.
And now she was dead.
The words sat like acid inside of him as the crowd thinned out more and more.
Death was an inevitable. Everyone died.
His father and mother had died. All of his various aunts and uncles. Martha’s father had died only two years after agreeing to allow Henry to court her. Death happened. It was.
But it wasn’t supposed to happen to people as young as them.
It wasn’t supposed to happen to her first.
Henry had no idea what he was supposed to do now. How he was supposed to make his feet move from her gravesite or where he was supposed to go afterward. Back home? Back where the memories of her filled every room and every detail?
What was he supposed to do?
Carry on with his life as if he hadn’t just lost the single most important person in it?
Return to his duties as a duke?
His duties could wither and burn for all he cared. His inheritance could be given away. His lands, his money, his titles, all of them meant nothing if he didn’t have Martha to share them with.
Everything was grey and bleak despite the warm evening.
Everything was… dead.
The murmurs died out with each new party’s departure, soon only the sound of the birds and nature itself filling his ears as he remained rooted in place.
