Page 2 of Her Duke at Midnight
Adam scrubbed a palm along his jaw and fought the urge to snipe back with some cynical quip. But Bennett, the happy-go-lucky romantic that he was, wouldn’t hear him. The man was still determined to find The One—some extraordinary woman he was fated to meet and adore.
But Adam had found that love was always a problem. When it came to matters of the heart, logic fled and passions caused people to make the very worst choices. In his life, he’d either experienced a suffocating excess of love, a twisting and corrupting of affection, or the lack of genuine feelings entirely.
“The problem with Mrs. Caldwell is that you did not love her,” Bennett offered a bit more loudly. He had a habit of stating the obvious if he had any doubt Adam took his meaning.
“I do not love any of them, and I told her as much.”
His friend winced. “Well, I suspect that is what wounded her pride.”
“No, no.” Adam strode to the washbasin, took up a cloth, and began swiping at his face and neck, savoring the coolness against his skin. “I told her that at the start. As I do with every lady with whom I form an understanding.”
“Anunderstanding.” Bennett let out a low chuckle. “The Duke of Everton’s Rules Regarding Understandings. You’ve never shared them with me,” he added in a peevish tone. “And I’ve asked repeatedly.”
“I should think they’d be obvious.” Adam decided a chat with Bennett did not require a tie, but he found himself putting one on, nonetheless. He liked habit, routines. Rules.
“I should think brevity is somewhere on this list. You’re never with a lady long.” His friend stretched out his legs, settling his boots near the fireplace grate, and crossed his hands over his belly.
“I make no rules about the length of an affair. Only that there is no expectation of a commitment beyond the physical.” The notion of vows and promises felt like a trap, and it was one that he’d worked very hard to avoid.
“Heavens, man.” Bennett sat up a bit straighter and stared at Adam. “You’re that blunt at the start?”
“Of course. A man should be. There must be no pretense. I know myself and what I’m capable of, and any lady who tangles with me needs to know what she’s getting.” He’d never led any woman to believe his heart was on offer. His determination to tell the truth was the only honorable thing about him.
“I suppose that’s fair play,” Bennett mused, though his tone indicated he doubted the fairness of it entirely.
But Adam didn’t. He’d been raised in a family of deceivers—a father with mistresses in two counties, a mother who cuckolded her husband in return, and an older brother who’d been so afraid of their father’s wrath that he’d never admitted his work for the Foreign Office.
“Yes, well, unfortunately, honesty did me no good with Mariah Caldwell.”
“What did she lack, Everton? Why did you break things off so quickly?”
“She lacked nothing.” Adam approached the pair of chairs where his friend had settled, rang the bellpull to signal his staff that he was finally awake and coffee should follow as soon as possible, and took the chair on the other side of the fireplace grate. “Don’t you see, my friend? The lack is in me. I know I have a heart because blood pumps in my veins, but it’s a wholly practical organ. I’ve never longed for marriage or love.”
Bennett turned toward him, one tawny brow crooked in confusion. “You’re serious?”
“Lots of noblemen avoid the marital noose as long as they can,” Adam told him defensively. “And what I shared with Mariahwasa kind of affection.”
Romancing women was an art, and he’d mastered many of the techniques. He simply didn’t wish for the rest.
And that had been the trouble with Mariah Caldwell. She’d sought a lover in every sense of the word. Though he’d set out the rules as he always did at the start of an affair, she hadn’t listened. Or perhaps she’d heard him and believed she would be the one to make him bend his rules. Ladies seemed to see his iced-over heart as a challenge that the heat of their ardor could melt.
As lovely as Mariah was, Adam’s feelings for her had been exactly what he’d expected—he’d enjoyed their trysts and wanted nothing more.
But according to the excerpts of her journal that were somehow obtained by and printed in one of London’s gossip rags, she’d fallen in love with him. In truth, she’d become obsessed with him. For a time, everywhere Adam had gone in the city, she’d been there too—the opera, the bookshop, his favorite coffeehouse. Which merely served to deepen interest in their very public end to a very private arrangement.
The scandal sheets had taken glee in dubbing him theHeartbreak Duke.
Then, on an evening in July, he’d decided to call on Mariah to try to finally put an end to all of it. Everyone had urged him not to go, but the letter he’d asked his solicitor to prepare hadn’t seemed sufficient. The coldness of words scribbled on a piece of paper had been too extreme, even for his icy heart.
He’d suspected her antics were part of some ploy and had been prepared to offer her money, jewels, whatever she required to allow her to move beyond her fixation.
What he’d found on that hot summer day was a broken woman. Mariah’s pain was not feigned. Her tears and anguish were real. The poor woman had loved him—though they’d been acquainted little more than two months—and he could not return the feeling.
“Do you regret it?” Bennett had lowered his normally boisterous voice to a whisper, sensing as he often did, that Adam’s mood had darkened.
“Ending things? No, not at all. I regret the pain I caused.” Her heartbreak weighed on him still.
“But you never intended to hurt her.” Bennett sat forward in his chair and gestured animatedly toward Adam. “You said so yourself. You were clear, honest. I say you are not to blame.”
