Page 51 of Tamed By her Duke

Even so, and even with her ears craned for any sound of movement, she did not hear her husband come back to bed before she dropped off into an exhausted slumber.

CHAPTER 14

Caleb rubbed at his brow, which did absolutely nothing to dispel the wretched headache brewing behind his eyes. This whole thing was a mess.

He wondered where he’d gone wrong. Obviously, preventing his wife from tumbling to her death had been the right choice. He disliked the idea of Grace with a broken neck more than he cared to admit.

What he should have done, most likely, was taken his lying little wife and put her over his knee until she told whatever truth she was locking up inside. That or pleasure her until she was too limp to do anything but give in to his demands.

Yes, that could have worked. Then he would have his answers and perhaps even have gotten an heir on her in the bargain. Maybe he’d send her back to London for her confinement. She couldn’t drive him mad all the way from London, could she?

To his great irritation, he suspected she could.

“Will ye be taking yer tea up here, Your Grace, or do ye plan to leave it to go cold as well? If so, I’ll save myself the trip.”

Despite her acerbic words, when he glanced up at Mrs. O’Mailey, he found her looking at his—nearly untouched—breakfast and lunch trays with a faint air of concern. Caleb would never call his housekeepermaternal—and he suspected she’d be horrified to hear it, if he did—but she was loyal, and her steadfastness was something he’d come to rely upon, particularly as his family had grown increasingly fractured over the years.

Caleb sighed. He’d spent the morning—and now the early afternoon, it seemed—in his study, accomplishing nothing. His wife likely would have accused him ofbrooding,if not for the fact that she was avoiding him. This morning, she was the one to have been absent from the breakfast table, prompting Caleb to order a tray up to be eaten at his desk.

Or not eaten, as it happened.

“Save yourself the trouble,” he said, reaching for a cold chicken sandwich. They were finally having some suitably springlike weather, and Mrs. Bradley had prepared a cold luncheon to celebrate. Nothing on the tray would be harmed for having sat out for a few hours.

“Very good, Your Grace.” Mrs. O’Mailey turned to leave, then paused.

This was the kind of thing that never boded well for Caleb.

“Aye?” he demanded, a bit more snappishly than he perhaps ought to have done.

His housekeeper indulged in an arched eyebrow at his tone, then said, with excessive deference (in order to really make her point about having known him since he was a squalling infant), “Might I speak freely, Your Grace?”

He waved her on.

“Yesterday, ye asked me what was wrong with Her Grace. Today, whatever is amiss with her has gotye, too. This thing is catching, it seems, so I hazard that ye best sort it out before it afflicts the entire estate.”

Metaphor aside, Caleb thought, this was not an unfair point. Perhaps whatever was bothering Grace was no real illness to spread by touch or breath, but the lord and lady did set the tone of a place. If they were at odds, it would set the servants on edge. The servants had families, friends, and sweethearts in the village. The poison would spread.

Caleb knew that. What he didn’t know was how to fix it.

“She willnae say what’s amiss,” he complained, feeling like a gossiping fishwife for confiding in his housekeeper, of all people. He decided to blame Grace for this. “Nae—she willnae even say that aughtisamiss, never ye mind what’s actually botherin’ her.”

The middle-aged Scotswoman pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Well,” she said, “I’m nae a fancy London lady, ye ken, but as a woman who has been married these many years, I wonder… Do ye need to know what’s troublin’ the lass?”

Yes. Caleb bit the instinctive response.

“I daenae take yer meaning,” he said instead.

“Well.” Her fingers tapped thoughtfully on the back of a chair. “Think like this, mayhap. Did ye know Mr. O’Mailey was married once before?”

Caleb hadn’t ever thought about it—the couple was an institution in his childhood and remained seemingly as reliable as the sun—but no, he hadn’t.

“Was he?”

“Oh, aye.” She waved a hand. “As a young man, some years before I met him. Poor thing got herself a nasty bout of influenza and died. He evidently loved her quite a bit, though I did not learn this until we’d been wed, oh, five or six years.”

“He lied about her?” Caleb asked, not sure he liked where this bit of advice was going. Grace was no young widower; if she was pining after a lost love, that meant the lout hadn’t had ruined her without marrying her, which meant hewouldbe a dead man, just as soon as Caleb got his hands on him. Then he would revertto his original plan of pleasuring her until she forgot any other man’s name.

Mrs. O’Mailey was too polite to call him a dolt, but her exasperated expression suggested that she was not too polite tothinkhim a dolt.

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