Page 48 of Married to a Frozen Duke
The common room had if anything gotten more crowded. Alexander found a corner near the fire—strategic positioning that would dry his boots while keeping his back to a wall. Years of social warfare had taught him never to leave his back exposed.
The whispers started immediately.
"Is that...?"
"Can't be..."
"Look at him, wrapped in a blanket."
"Where's his wife then?"
Alexander stared at the fire and pretended he was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Perhaps dead. Dead seemed preferable to sitting in a common inn wearing a blanket while strangers gossiped about him.
"It is him!" A woman's excited voice carried over the crowd. "It's the Duke of Montclaire! I saw him this morning at St. George's!"
Alexander's jaw tightened. Of course someone would recognize him. Because this day hadn't been humiliating enough.
"The duke what got sick on?" someone else asked with obvious glee. "At his own wedding?"
"His bride did it! Cast up her accounts all over him, right at the altar!"
"No!"
"True as I'm sitting here! Lady Jersey herself screamed!"
"Poor man."
"Poor man, but he still married her! Stood there covered in sick and finished the ceremony!"
Alexander concentrated on the fire so intently he was surprised it didn't explode. This was what his life had become—entertainment for commoners in random inns.
"He must have really needed that inheritance," someone speculated.
"Or maybe he loves her," a younger female voice suggested.
The laughter that followed that suggestion was particularly galling.
"Love! A duke and a merchant's daughter? More like he was trapped good and proper."
"Coleridge merchant's luck strikes again!"
"Turned it around on the nobility for once!"
Coleridge merchant's luck. There it was again. The family's reputation for stumbling into fortune despite their common origins. And now he was tarred with the same brush, literally married into their curse.
Jeffords appeared, looking harassed and soaking wet, carrying what remained of their luggage. "Your Grace," he said quietly, "I've salvaged what I could, but..." He shook his head.
"How bad?"
"Your valise took the worst of it. Her Grace's trunk..." Jeffords winced. "The clothes are ruined, Your Grace. The water got in through the seams."
Of course it did. Alexander wondered if it was possible to annul a marriage on grounds of supernatural bad luck.
"See what can be dried," he instructed. "And Jeffords? Find yourself some food and a drink. You've earned it."
The man looked grateful as he departed, and Alexander returned to his morose contemplation of the fire. He was calculating how long he could reasonably stay here before having to face the room—and its bed—situation when Ophelia appeared.
He almost didn't recognize her.
