Page 105 of My One and Only Duke
He permitted himself a tactical retreat until the coach had pulled into the mews and he’d handed Althea and Constance down. By rights, Jane should have been first out of the carriage, but she was making a point.
She looked at Quinn’s proffered hand, picked up her skirts, and stepped to the ground without touching him. She’d taken two steps in the direction of the garden gate when Quinn spoke.
“I am in more peril now than when the noose was placed about my neck.”
She turned slowly. “Explain yourself.”
Had he ever faced a greater danger than the hurt in Jane’s eyes? “I keep my family safe.”
Jane was mentally counting to three again, and that made him wild.
“Quinn, you keep your family out. They think you want to be left alone, so they return the favor. The lot of you rattle around in this gorgeous house, captives to a past that matters less by the year. What am I to do with you?”
A chance comment Stephen had made outside the walls of Newgate came back to Quinn. “What would you like to do with me?”
He was encouraged by her brooding regard. She was thinking, and thinking was better than walking away.
“I would like to be your wife, your friend, your duchess, your lover, but handing my heart to somebody who marches into harm’s way without me won’t serve.”
Without me. “You’re not upset that I confronted the countess. You’re upset that I went alone.”
“And that you purposely loved me witless first, thus assuring I’d be sound asleep while you took on a jealous earl, his half-daft countess, stray butlers…Quinn, a duke is a leader. He leads armies, he helps lead the nation. He does not charge off all on his own without a friend or ally to be had. I would like to be the wife of a duke, rather than the domestic convenience of some self-appointed warrior who might never come home to me.”
They should not be having this discussion in the benighted alley, where Quinn didn’t dare take Jane’s hand.…
Ask her. “Could we continue this conversation in the stable?”
She shot a glower toward the house. “Excellent suggestion.”
Quinn offered her his arm. “Ned!” he shouted. “Wherever you are, get into the house and stay there, or your name will be Ned Can’t Sit Down for a Week.”
The bushes on the far side of the garden wall rustled as Quinn led his wife to the cool, quiet surrounds of the stable. Horses were dozing in their stalls, an all-black cat rose from a pile of straw and stropped itself against his boots.
“Is that the fellow from Newgate?” Jane asked.
The fellow who’d nose-kissed Jane while Quinn had tried not to envy a cat. “The warden kindly surrendered him when I sent a note requesting the favor. I can offer you a choice of trunks to sit on, or we can repair to the harness room.”
Jane preceded him down the barn aisle, the cat at her heels. The harness room was humble, redolent of horse and leather. Jane perched on a trunk, Quinn turned a wooden bucket upside down and planted his arse upon it.
Jane spoke first. “Ned said you gave him the Wentworth family name.”
“He hadn’t one of his own, and Wentworth is an honorable name, lately.”
“You gave me that name as well, Quinn. I gather you will give it to my firstborn too.”
“The child may use whatever name you please,” Quinn said. “MacGowan was your husband, and a child should be encouraged to honor his father. I would certainly be honored if your baby had the same last name as our other children.”
Jane wrinkled her nose. “I want to be furious with you, but I’m far more wroth with that blasted earl. He could not bear for his wife’s former paramour to obtain a higher status than he had.”
“Her former footman, Jane. When status is all a man has, he guards it jealously. Then too, Tipton has no heir of his body, and to an aristocrat, that’s a bitter pill. I can make no excuses for his thieving from the late Duke of Walden, but that wrong was committed against a party now deceased.”
She stared at her boots. “You are forgiving and forgetting, and all I want is to see that man in Newgate, counting the hours that remain to him, hanging his food from the rafters so the rodents don’t steal it. Not very charitable of me.”
Sitting on a dusty trunk, Jane yet exuded all the dignity of a duchess. She’d stood before a loaded gun for Quinn, and the weight of that…he leaned forward to press his forehead to her knees.
“I went there to give Bea her damned letters, to tell her she needn’t worry that I’d ever betray her confidences. I have much more enjoyable tasks to occupy me than brooding over the past. You were right, Jane. The time has come to put youthful stupidity behind me.”
To put all of the past aside, including Jack Wentworth’s insults, York’s endless bitter winters, and too many missed meals to count.
