Page 79 of My One and Only Duke
She never made it to the fourth. Quinn had crossed the library and snatched the packet from her hand.
“This is personal correspondence, Jane. Shall I start reading your letters?”
She could not discern his mood, but her own was very clear to her—she was angry, and beneath that, unsure of her husband.
“You told me you haven’t kept mistresses. You told me we shared newfound pleasures. You told me you were too busy to bother with affairs of the heart, and I believed you.”
“I spoke the truth.”
His calm mendacity only enflamed Jane’s temper. “My darling, dear, desirable Wentworth? Does your solicitor exercise his alliterative talents thus? Perhaps the fine fellows at the College of Arms open their correspondence to you with such effusions.” She marched up to him and jabbed his chest with a finger. “New. Found. Pleasures.”
He stared down at her, a single furrow appearing between his brows. “Are you jealous?”
That hypothesis clearly pleased him. Jane whirled away lest she start shouting.
“I am not jealous, you mutton-headed gudgeon. I am angry. You lied to me, and about an intimate matter. Perhaps you sought to spare my feelings, but we agreed that we’d have honesty between us, Quinn, and then I come across passionate letters. How am I to trust you?”
He set the packet on the mantel. “You married me, I spoke vows. You either trust me or you don’t. I’ve fed you, clothed you, housed you, made love with you—”
“And lied to me.”
Quinn stared off across the library, as if doing sums in his head. “I take it the late, lamented Captain McGowan had an unreliable grasp of the truth.”
“We are not discussing him.” And yet, they were. Quinn’s instincts were, as usual, deadly accurate. “We are discussing a man who assures me his affections have not been elsewhere engaged, the same man who keeps these letters affixed to the topmost drawer of his desk.”
“Have you read them?” Such a casual question.
“One can’t help but glance at what’s in plain view, which was sufficient to establish the nature of the correspondence. I did not read them.” Hadn’t been able to read them.
“You sound like you’re giving a sermon, Jane. If you take to task every man who has a few old letters in his possession, then I daresay—”
“Quinn, you lied to me. We don’t tiptoe around one another’s feelings like the shepherd boy and the goose girl. Why not simply admit that once, long ago, you lost your heart and never entirely regained it? Why not sigh and smile, and allude to a lady you loved dearly in your youth? My expectations of this marriage were honesty, civility, and a certain mutual accommodation. Of the three, you seemed to value the honesty most highly.”
Though those expectations had become augmented by hope on Jane’s part, and where hope flew, fears followed.
“How did you find the letters?”
“The drawer jammed—the lace of the garter was caught in the mechanism. They spilled onto the floor at my feet.”
“Why were you rummaging in my desk?”
Jane took a seat at the end of the sofa and tapped her fingers on the armrest in a slow triple meter.
“In point of fact, Your Grace, that is our desk, I being your wife and having no desk of my own. I was neither rummaging nor pillaging. I must sit somewhere when I draw up the menus and schedules for the maids and footmen. Am I now to ask you where I might sit?”
He scrubbed a hand over his face, his granite inscrutability slipping to reveal wariness.
Why was he home several hours early, today of all days?
Jane’s ire ebbed, as if somebody had turned down the wick on a lantern. “What’s wrong, Quinn? Something is amiss or you’d be at the bank.”
He took the place beside her, and more of Jane’s indignation slipped away. She could not cling to her anger when Quinn was troubled, though neither could she allow the situation with the letters to remain unresolved.
“I paid a call on the College of Arms.”
“Mr. Dodson was doubtless pleased to receive you. Constance and Althea mentioned him.”
“I wanted to discuss a banking matter with him, the dukedom being in some disarray, but he attempted pleasantries with me.”
