Page 6 of An Accidental Bride for the Duke
“What was that?” The duke had been looking out the window, but he turned to find her glaring at him.
“How long is the journey,” she repeated. “You have not told me.”
“Did I not?”
“No,” she said, anger sitting on the edge of her tone. “You have not told me anything. Other than we did not have time to attend the breakfast, just as I hardly had time to say goodbye to my family.” She raised both eyebrows at him.
And the duke, in the face of her anger, frowned with apparent amusement. Not concerned. Not put out. Perhaps curious that she would dare speak to him as she was.
It had all happened so quickly.
Once the decision was made, Iris was led back into the church where she was promptly married to His Grace in place of his younger brother. He did not look at her during the ceremony and when they were announced man and wife, he did little more than offer a curt smile of acceptance.
After that it was a matter of Iris being told by her sisters that this would not be nearly as bad as she imagined and that she needed to make the most of it before the duke was interrupting them, telling her family that they needed to get going because the journey home was a long one.
There would be no romance found in this marriage. No companionship. Certainly no love. The duke seemed determined to make it clear to Iris that this was a circumstance that was forced on them both and that he would not be going out of his way to change that perception.
Not that I want him to do so. Not that I want to be here! But what can I do? Complaining feels childish and pointless. But I can’t just bow down and accept it either. I can’t let it be that easy.
“My estate is to the north,” the duke answered finally. “It will take us until tomorrow to reach it.”
“And then what?” she asked hotly.
“I do not understand your meaning.”
She exhaled sharply, keeping him in her glare. “You have made it perfectly clear how you feel about me. As if I am the imposition here. Is that how it is to be from now on? Little more than an inconvenience that you will do everything you can to avoid?”
The duke continued to study her, his brow furrowing. “You are unhappy.”
“Well observed.”
“And you blame me for this.”
“I don’t blame you,” she snapped, unable to stop herself. “I blame… everyone. I did not want to marry your brother, but I accepted it because I had no choice. Because my family needed it of me. More importantly, I had time to reckon with it. To come to terms with it. But this…” Her glare hardened and she felt her chin shaking. “This is nothing like what I imagined. Nor what I wanted.”
“And you think I do?”
She scoffed. “I don’t think you care. Just as you don’t care how this will affect me – I doubt you’ve even thought about it!” She widened her eyes at him. “Your brother might not have been the man of my dreams but at least he might have been kind to me. He might have accepted his own fault in what had happened. He might have…”
Iris felt her words catch in her throat then, the anger getting the better of her so she almost said some things that she should not have. Things that probably weren’t even true.
All Iris had ever wanted was to fall in love. With five older sisters, she had been forced to watch as each of them managed to find such a state of being, not always easy for them, quite often starting at a point of disaster, but they were each now happy and besotted with the man who they called their husband.
Why could she not have the same as they did? And where Lord Robert was not perfect, he wasn’t evil. He wasn’t wicked. Such that perhaps there was a chance for them, if fate allowed it. Truly, it was all she’d been able to grasp hold of to keep her from losing herself in the weeks leading up to the marriage.
Now, Iris knew this dream, however slight, was dashed. She forced herself to look at the duke once more, seeing in him a dispassionate, uncaring partner who she doubted cared for her at all. Just as he never would.
“It doesn’t matter,” she scoffed and looked away. “As I said, you don’t care.”
“Is that what you think?”
She laughed bitterly. “I doubt you have it in you. That you could even comprehend what it is like to care about anyone other than yourself and?—”
“Enough,” the duke growled suddenly, cutting through her rancor as if he had slapped the words from her mouth. Her words caught in her throat and her stomach dropped when she looked at him again, finding that he was now glowering at her with a fury of his own. “The first thing is this: I will not be spoken to that way. Is that understood?”
Iris found her bravery fading in the light of the duke’s cold gaze. “I… I am sorry.”
“Secondly, you have clearly gone ahead and formed your own opinion of me. Opinions which are based on nothing save for the little you think you know—and it is very little,” he emphasized. “Tell me, as you seem to know so much, what do you really know about me?”
