Page 21 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
The look of anguish and guilt on his features, the way he stared after their departing carriage, stuck with Josephine long after he had passed out of sight.
Forget a man haunted. He had looked like a spectre himself at that moment, his pain on full display for her to see.
“Oh, he was so much lovelier in person than I even remembered,” Lady St Vincent exclaimed as they turned downthe road towards home. “Did you see how impeccable his manners were?”
“And his humour,” Josephine’s father agreed with a chuckle. “I quite enjoyed his company. And his friends speak well of his character as well. Lord and Lady Fethmire were wonderful dinner companions.”
“I agree. I see no reason why we should delay the marriage at all. Do you, Josie dear?”
Josephine shook her head, her voice still stuck somewhere down in her ribcage.
“Good, good. That’s settled then,” Lord St Vincent declared with a clap of his hands. “We shall have to place an official engagement announcement in the papers of course. And give a little time for planning, shall we not?”
“A little,” Lady St Vincent snorted.
Neither seemed to notice their daughter’s preoccupation or the way she still stared out the window. The duke’s green gaze was burned in her mind almost as inescapably as those feelings he had stirred within her.
“We will have to write to the girls to tell them,” Lord St Vincent added, his grin growing. “A duke! In our family. Priscilla will be green with envy. But they’ll all want to attend, of course.”
“All things to include in your arrangements with the duke, dear,” Lady St Vincent reminded him softly.
Josephine felt as if her head was spinning.
She knew that she ought to be commenting on such things or, at the very least, providing some opinion, but she couldn’t force herself to pay attention to the actual goings-on inside the carriage.
She was too busy replaying the conversation before dinner and after. Too busy focusing on those intricacies in the duke’s gaze and how his green eyes had skewered her to the spot.
It would be easy to dismiss such feelings as unease or fear, but neither was true. Not in the strictest sense. It was only now, remembering that agonized look on his face, that she felt uneasy.
At the time … both times … she had felt …
God, she had been aroused. That was the word for it. He had barely touched her, his voice like silk over gravel, and she had swooned in place, her heart beating and her whole body becoming uncomfortably hot.
Had he known?
Had he seen?
Was that why he had looked so aggrieved?
Surely not. He was asking after her hand, after all. She didn’t know much in the way of romance, but she knew that a man asking one to be his wife should be pleased by such a thought, not haunted.
So, then, it only stood to reason that he had been so removed on account of his own ghosts.
Lord, his late wife.
She knew so very little about that situation. Even less than she knew about him, she realized. She didn’t pay enough attention to the gossips around town.
But she knew one person who delighted in such things.
And she knew, now, that she would have to talk to Caroline and find out all she could about her future husband and his late wife. And anything between.
Which, of course, meant telling Caroline the news in the first place.
Oh, she was going to think it was terribly romantic. And Josephine was going to be hard-pressed not to confess all those inelegant emotions that the older duke had inspired in her. Because they still rang about her head like rocks being tossed by the carriage wheels.
Oh, this was so much more terribly messy than she had accounted for it to be.
Chapter 7
