Page 85 of My One and Only Duke
How on earth was any daughter to honor such a father? To forgive and forget this degree of hypocrisy?
“Papa, I am ashamed”—bile rose in Jane’s throat—“of…” You. You and your pious cowardice, your righteous arrogance. Your failure to live up to Mama’s image of you.
“Well you should be ashamed, Jane Hester. Your mother, God rest her, encouraged a certain independence in you that I have come to regret, meaning no disrespect to the dead.”
Jane pushed to her feet when she longed to defend her mother’s memory. “You will excuse me, Papa. I’m about to be unwell. Ivor will show you out.” She snatched the bowl of dried rose petals and managed a dignified exit—only just. Then she was on her knees in the linen closet, retching into the antique French porcelain.
* * *
Stephen had learned years ago how to take apart and reassemble his Bath chair. He regularly oiled the metal surfaces, because any fellow with three older siblings needed to move quietly about his own home.
He was thus proceeding silently down the corridor when an odd noise from the linen closet caught his ear. Either one of Constance’s cats had eaten a mouse that disagreed with it or somebody was in distress.
He opened the door and the scent that assailed him ruled out the mouse theory. “Jane? Are you well?” Inane question. Quinn’s wife was on her knees, a porcelain bowl before her.
“Go away.”
Not dying, then. “Shall I fetch Quinn?”
“I will kill you if you don’t close that door immediate—” She fell silent and put a hand over her mouth.
Stephen rose from his Bath chair and knelt by her side. “The sachets and soaps probably aren’t helping. Ruddy stench permeates everything. Let’s get you to bed and find you some ginger tea, and—” And what? Quinn would know what to do—Quinn knew what to do with aggravating reliability—but where was Quinn when Jane needed him?
“Stephen, every moment you remain in this linen closet you risk your continued existence.”
He got a hand under her arm and lifted her to her feet. “I’m a doomed man, then, but hold off annihilating me until we get you down the corridor, hmm?”
She leaned on him, which felt awkward and good. Good because he had the height and strength to support her. Awkward because Jane was soft, feminine, and not at her best. If Stephen had it to do over again, he’d probably not have shot the honeysuckle from above her head, but he didn’t have it to do over again, and he and Jane hadn’t spoken much since.
“Are you able to walk, Jane?”
“Of course.”
He waited, and she remained for a moment right where she was, against his side. Of all people, Stephen did not associate “of course” with the ability to walk.
“I hate this,” Jane muttered.
Tarrying in an odoriferous linen closet with a dyspeptic sister-in-law wasn’t high on Stephen’s list of ways to spend a day.
“I got drunk once,” he said. “Felt like the devil the whole next day. If it’s anything like that…”
She left the linen closet, still leaning on him, and shuffled with him past Satan’s chariot.
“It’s exactly like that, while you have no energy and your figure comes to resemble that of a…a heifer on summer grass. I’m whining.”
“You’re also making progress toward your bed, so don’t stop on my account. I really ought to fetch Quinn.”
“He’s napping in the library. I’ll nap in my bed.”
Quinn never napped. He didn’t laugh, he didn’t chase women, he didn’t waste a day reading the paper or playing cards. He was a bloody paragon, as long as lack of imagination was a virtue and loneliness a high calling.
He also avoided the library. “You left him asleep in the library?”
They paused outside the door to Quinn’s suite of rooms. Jane shook herself free and peered up at Stephen. Lovely that, to have a woman looking up at him.
“You don’t have your canes.”
Shite. Shite, bollocks, and bother. “I have good days and bad days. Damsels in distress inspire me to heroic feats.” He was blushing, damn it all to hell, and Jane wasn’t buying his load of goods. Quinn never blushed, may he be condemned to a purgatory full of other humorless paragons.
