Page 7 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
A silence fell between them. Tension reigned along with it, though not with any anger or anything stronger than a mild frustration. It was an old argument. One that Henry had expertly shot down time and time again since the first it had been broached.
“You wanted a large family at one point, Henry,” Simon reminded him gently. No urgency marked his words, just a quiet concern that almost made them harder to hear.
Henry grimaced.
After growing up an only child, he had always dreamed of populating this house with a multitude of children.But even that thought was tinged with the horror of what had happened here. With the brown-eyed children he had come to expect, that would now never be.
“Simon,” he warned, taking a large draught of his drink as he stared into the fire.
“Unless you mean to let your name fully die out and your title pass to some far-distant relative that has never so much as stepped foot in these halls,” Simon spoke blithely, but there was a passion to his words that spoke volumes about his relationship with Henry. “We know how you feel about finding another wife, Henry. No one is expecting you to replace Martha. God, I couldn’t imagine how you even could. But to remain here? On your own? It has already been three years, and every passing year you become more and more of a recluse. Where does that lead?”
Henry’s fingers tightened around his glass, his stare hardening as he refused to look at Simon.
They were good points.
They were points he had no interest in hearing.
But still … That niggling in the back of his mind that had persisted ever since he had greeted Simon’s children in the hall earlier whispered, stretching and growing until he could no longer fully ignore it.
“I am not saying yes,” Henry bit out finally, slumping in his chair as he finished the rest of his port in one large drink. “I am only saying that I will, maybe, consider it. Perhaps an arranged marriage …”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Simon agreed readily, skipping right past the first half of Henry’s statement and catching onto the only part he cared for. “There are a good many eligible ladies–”
“In London.” Henry chuckled dryly. “Yes. You’ve said. But I have no interest in leaving here to go and court any of them. I have no interest in a member of the ton expecting romance and excitement.”
Simon paused, his brows furrowing as he considered Henry’s words.
“Then maybe one of the lords here?” Simon suggested, his tone cautious. “I know there are none so great of title to match your own–”
“That matters little.” Henry shrugged as he stood, crossing the room to refill his already empty glass. “A woman of lower title will expect less. Especially if she is inheriting all this …” Henry gestured emptily to the house around him. It meant little to him. A woman who wasn’t expecting love, one who didn’t want it, sounded like a much easier prospect to swallow.
“I could have Lisbet ask around,” Simon broached, clearly unwilling to let the topic die out or to allow Henry to find a way to talk himself out of it before it could even begin.
He’d consider it, Henry had said. But, standing there, pouring his glass, he knew that to admit that much must mean that he had every intention of doing so. The laughter from earlier that evening … the breath of life that Simon’s children brought with them every time they came … He couldn’t be happy, not really and truly, he knew that.
But to have some vestige of it?
“I will write to the lords of the area,” Henry muttered, “enquiring after their eligible daughters.”
He pretended not to notice Simon’s victorious smirk almost as strongly as he pretended not to feel that tug in his chest, his grief pulling on his guilt as he added more port than necessary to his glass.
He knew what Simon thought he was accomplishing. And he didn’t have the heart to tell him that no woman, no matter how well-suited she might be, stood a chance of coaxing Henry from his confirmed bachelorhood. He would marry her, certainly. She would provide him with heirs … and in return, he would provide her with more than she could have ever asked for. Comfort, wealth, station …
And that would just have to be enough.
Chapter 2
There wasn’t enough ‘creative’ accounting in the world to fix the red numbers quickly growing in the ledger before Josephine.
The longer Josephine sat, the more numbers she added and tried to move around, the worse the situation became. Her stomach twisted in knots, the beginning vestiges of a megrim building in her temples as the incessant scratching of her pen against the ledger finally ceased.
The budget wasn’t enough to cover the payments they needed to make and the amount to cover the necessities for the month. If she completely negated their grocery budget, perhaps they could cover the majority of their bills, but that was a very large perhaps. The rising price of poultry over the last few months, while noticeably marked, wasn’t quite enough even to account for taxes.
She tapped the pen against the edge of her father’s desk, her brows forming a deep ‘v’ on her forehead as she struggled to see if there weren’t some ‘patches’ that she had used before that might work. She’d spent years robbing Peter to pay Paul when it came to the family’s accounts. Her father’s estate, though comfortable, was modest at best. And the income that came from it was even more so.
Maybe if their crops had yielded more in the last quarter …
Oh, it was a silly thing even to consider. The past couldn’t be changed. She needed to find something tangible to latch onto for her to –
