Page 14 of Her Duke Next Door
The housekeeper nodded. He shuffled some papers on his desk in his study.
“Was there anything else?” he asked, raising a brow.
“Only that I wish to see Lady Katie happy, Your Grace. She yearns for you when you are gone. The months you are home she is happiest and she gets accustomed to you being around.”
He sighed, rubbing his brow. “I know, I know. And yet those are the worst, are they not?”
The housekeeper nodded sympathetically. “The poor thing gets used to you being here. It takes her a lot to trust you again, Your Grace. She can never be sure if you will be at breakfast each morning.”
“This time, I am determined to be there for every breakfast and dinner, for as long as…” He trailed off. “Well, for as long as it takes for my ghosts to catch up with me again.”
“Not every ghost needs to chase you out of the front gate, Your Grace.” She smiled, almost sadly. “Only the ones that look like the late Duchess of Livingston, Lord rest her soul.”
He nodded, staring off past her, toward the window. “Yes. Those ghosts especially.”
And it was true: the memory of his late wife was too much to handle at times. Katie was beautiful, a mirror of his wife, Marguerite, and it was hard to be around that reminder. That Marguerite had not loved him the way he loved her and their future together had been shattered by her own acts.
“Do not punish yourself forever, Your Grace,” the housekeeper told him. “Because in doing so you are punishing that beautiful daughter of yours.”
“I fear it is still my wife punishing me from the grave rather than myself,” he muttered. “She always was good at pulling the control from beneath my feet.”
Dutifully, the housekeeper remained silent at that comment.
“She loved you, Your Grace,” the housekeeper said but he did not need to be told that, or given false memories.
“She loved being loved, Geraldine,” he answered with a sigh. He stood up from his desk and walked to the window overlooking the vast gardens. “Her wandering eye ruined this family, the future we could have had together.” He half turned to give her a sad, almost helpless smile. “So you see why I must run when this castle reminds me of all I have lost?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” she said, bowing her head. “But you have not lost your daughter and yet it is a risk the more you leave her as she grows up. She will remember empty hallways and her father not being there out of choice.”
“I amtrying,” he argued quietly. “I am trying my best to remain here.”
Even if the walls press around me at night, and I swear I hear my wife’s taunting in my bed chamber, I will remain here,he thought to himself.
“Leave me be now,” he said quietly. Geraldine nodded.
“Yes, Your Grace.” She ducked out of his study. Dominique braced his hands on the windowsill, closing his eyes, and breathing deeply. As soon as he breathed easier again, his mind returned to the one thing that had been on his mind for the days he had remained at home: the spitfire next door. From his study, he could see the roof of her home. He smiled, wondering when he might see her again.
* * *
Over the days, Katie had begun to talk to him a little more. She ate breakfast in silence but by dinner time, he at least got a response to asking how she was.
“It is only her and Eloise, Papa,” Katie had told him the evening before, over dinner. She had worn the pretty pale pink dress he had brought back with him for her birthday. “It is a large house for only the two of them.”
“Eloise has no father?” he asked. He had assumed perhaps Mary was like most women he met: flirtatious when they were alone, responding to his advances, but were actually married. He should not pursue those women and tried not to, mostly, but sometimes he could not help himself when they were beautiful and wanting.
“I do not know what happened to him but he is no longer in her life,” Katie answered with all the childish innocence of not realizing that some private life matters were best left unspoken about. Dominique was not a gossiping man and had always despised his wife’s penchant for it, but it had made his mind whirring with possibilities.
However, he rejected any hope of pursuing Mary with serious intention. He would be noble and spare her the mess of his life. Becoming serious with another woman meant staying, and if he could not even stay for his daughter, then a wife would have no hope of pinning him down, either. No, he would have to keep his distance.
He refused to subject a woman to waiting for him the way Katie did. It was bad enough he put her through it. Dominique did not know how much more guilt he could carry for the things he found a vice in.
“Papa,” Katie called.
He sat out on the terrace in the back garden. His mind was lost in Mary, and how delectable she had looked with her dress hugging her curvy figure in every best way.
He blinked, bringing himself into the present. He set down the book he had not actually been paying attention to.
“Yes, darling?”
