Page 48 of Dare to Love a Duke
She held up the paper like a warrior brandishing a sword. “I read about it,” she spat, “the Duke of Brookhurst’s bill for prosecuting transients, mostly veterans—and your vote in favor of it. The paper praised you specifically for continuing your father’s voting legacy.”
Briefly, he squeezed his eyes shut. “Ah, damn.”
“After the other day,” she said, taking a step toward him, “after you met the girls, I thought you understood. Foolishly, I believed you saw what I worked to do and that you supported it.” Anger and sadness clogged her throat, and she forced her words out. “I was mistaken.”
“Brookhurst’s son is all but engaged to my sister,” he said in a strained voice. “Opposing the duke means destroying Maeve’s possibility to marry the lad. I have it in plain English from Brookhurst’s own pen. He’ll forbid the marriage if I don’t do as he says, and vote as he desires.”
The flame of Lucia’s righteous fury guttered, but didn’t extinguish. “A choice must be made. Do you continue on, acting like your father and maintaining old alliances, or do you do the much harder work of razing the castle to the foundations and building a new, modern structure?”
“It’s not that simple,” he said, his jaw firm.
“I never said it was simple.” She held his gaze with her own. “There comes a time in everyone’s life where we must look into the mirror and trulyseeourselves. It’s... a difficult task, and one I’m not above. But the work has to be done, or else”—she spread her hands—“nothing changes. Everything stays as it was, and rots.”
“Goddamn it, you don’t get to judge me.” Agony was plain on his face.
She inclined her head as the last embers of her rage went cold. “You’re right. That’s God’s work, and of a certain, I am not God.”
He stalked past her to glare out the small, high-set window. “No one condemns me more harshly than I condemn myself.”
Her heart contracted sharply at the self-recrimination in his voice and the tension of his posture. She moved to him and gently laid her hand on his shoulder. He went taut beneath her palm, but did not move away.
“I never had siblings,” she said gently. “There was only Mamma and myself. But I used to wish for a little sister. Someone I could tell secrets to, and get into adventures with. Someone to love and protect.” Bittersweet longing strummed through her in an old, familiar tune. “What you feel for yoursorella,it’s a beautiful thing—a rare thing.”
“She was born a year after I came back to England from Ireland.” His tone was softer now, and warm. “A tiny thing with reddish-brown fuzz on her head and eyes so big you thought you’d fall into them. When she’d grip my finger with her hand, she’d hold me so tightly, I felt that grip all the way down to my heart.” He exhaled. “I can’t deny Maeve her chance to marry Hugh. One of us has to know love.”
Lucia went still. “And you cannot?”
He gave a soft snort. “Duty is my obligation. My marriage—when it happens—must be shaped by political strategy, that’s the way of being a duke. So I’ve been told since birth.”
He turned to face her, yet she did not remove her hand from him, so that her palm rested against his chest.
Oh, but it felt good to touch him, and absorb the solid warmth of him beneath her. They had shared pleasure together a week ago, yet still her body hummed with it, with the sensations that he created.
But her need for him was only physical desire. Nothing more.
“Love is a weapon we use against ourselves,” she said resolutely. “Better never to put the instrument of our destruction into our own hands.”
He raised a brow. “How is it you’ve such a bleak view of love?”
“I watch, I learn.” Mamma had been so alone, so mired in her illusion. It had fallen to her daughter to discover the devastating reality. That truth had been sneered at Lucia by her English grandparents, and revealed in a letter written long ago by her father.
Mamma had been merely a plaything to John Thompson, and her pregnancy was a burden he’d been eager to abandon. So he’d written to his father—the missive itself with its faded ink had been thrust into Lucia’s hands as proof. Her grandparents then pushed her out into the street and locked the door behind her.
At thirteen years old, orphaned and utterly on her own in a foreign land, she’d realized that to believe in love was to invite disaster and pain.
“None of that is of consequence,” she said with a shake of her head. “How will you move forward?”
“I’ve two choices. Follow the path of my conscience or follow the path of my heart.” He exhaled and could not quite disguise the catch in his breath. “Either direction ensures someone suffers.”
Never had she believed that people of wealth and privilege knew anguish, but in the sharp blue of his eyes she saw pain, like a wild creature caught in a snare.
She did not say, because she could not, but she pitied him.
Tom did not want to be here tonight at The Golden Plough, and yet he found himself entering the chophouse, handing his hat, coat, and gloves to a waiting serving lad. All the while, his thoughts were back in the larder at Northfield House, when Lucia had looked at him with the fury of betrayal.
He couldn’t blame her for her anger. It was a fierce thing, as devastating as a hurricane, and yet her wrath was no match for the recrimination he leveled at himself.
“The Duke of Brookhurst and his companions await you in the private dining room at the back, Your Grace,” the serving lad informed him. Given that the young man had used the correct form of address, the Duke of Brookhurst must have informed the chophouse’s staff that a duke would be dining with them this night.
