Page 103 of When a Duke Loves a Woman
“Bugger it, then. I won’t touch you, but I will give you marriage and respectability—”
“I love you, Aiden, but after a time I think we’d each be plotting how to kill the other with the least amount of bother.” She shoved back her chair and stood. “But thank you for thesuggestion. It means the world to me.”
“Will you send a girl over with a couple of more pints? I’m going to need to drown my sorrows at you turning me down.”
“Such rubbish,” she muttered with a smile before heading back to the bar. Still it made her feel special that Aiden and Finn were willing to saddle themselves with her. But if she couldn’t marry for the sort of passionate love that could exist between a man and a woman, she didn’t want to marry at all. She thought about Thorne and the atmosphere in which he’d grown up, with nary a whisper of love. How could one learn to love if one had never been loved?
She got to the bar to find Beast waiting for her. His hands were clasped around a tankard so tightly his knuckles were turning white. “Gillie, I wondered if I might have a word.”
Cradling his jaw with one hand, she smiled tenderly at him. “No, Beast, I won’t marry you.”
Relief washed over his features as he slowly released a breath he might have been holding since he walked in. “I wouldn’t be bad as a husband.”
“You’d be wonderful, but I think we both deserve to marry for love.”
“Not in my future, Gil. Even if I’d been born on the right side of the blanket, I’d have still not been wanted, still would have been brought to Mum’s door. There’s no denying that.”
She shook her head. “People are idiots. No matter what this babe looks like—”
“You’re with child?” Roger asked.
With a low growl, she swung around and glared at him. “Keep the news to yourself.”
“Why didn’t you bloody well say? You shouldn’t be standing.” Reaching over the counter, he grabbed a stool, hefted it up and over, and set it down. “Sit.”
She didn’t usually take orders, but her legs were beginning to ache, so she settled down on the stool. It would be nice to sit in between pouring drinks.
“Was it that toff? If your brothers and I were to have a word with him—”
“No,” she stated sharply. “I’m on my own in this.”
He grinned sadly. “No, you’re not, Gil.”
“He’s right there,” Beast and Aiden said at the same time and she wondered when Aiden had wandered over.
“It’ll all work out,” Aiden told her.
“That’s what Mum said.”
“She usually knows.”
“But you need to tell him, Gil,” Beast said. “It’s not fair to him not to know.”
She nodded. “I know. I will tell him. After the babe is born, after he’s married.” After she’d sold the tavern and moved to a cottage in the country. After she could prove she expected nothing from him.
While the rain pattered the panes, Thorne sat at the desk in his library and looked over the offers he’d received in writing from a dozen fathers. During the six weeks since the ball, viscounts, earls, marquesses, and dukes had met with him or written to him in order to discuss the possibility of his marrying one of their daughters. Every daughter came with a parcel of land—some large, some small—because everyone knew the Dukes of Thornley coveted land. Fathers had even brought their daughters who had yet to have their coming out, so he could get a preview of next year’s offerings, in the hopes he might make a preemptive proposal and save them the bother of a Season.
It was a dismally depressing way to select a wife. He certainly wouldn’t use this method for his daughter, should he ever have one. The gent was going to have to woo her, spoil her, love her, and prove he would treat her with the utmost care. And if his daughter wanted to marry an untitled gent, by God, he’d make that happen as well.
As for himself, he had a duty to honor and a vow to keep.
All the women he was considering were poised, graceful, and beautiful. Each was a lady fit for a duke, and yet each seemed wrong.
He reminded himself that he came from a long line of dukes who did not marry for love. These ladies brought with them property that would expand his holdings, the holdings he would pass down to the next duke, his son. Each brought a pure bloodline their children would inherit. Each brought good breeding that would make him proud as they hosted affairs, visited with royalty, made their mark on Great Britain.
Each was rather dainty. Would any of them have the gumption to haul him upstairs if wounded, to harangue him into fighting to survive? Would any look into the faces of the poor and offer them help? Would any crouch before them and offer them kindness?
His entire life he’d been instructed, tutored, and educated on the sort of woman he would marry, the echelon of Society from which she would be heralded. There were the sort of women men wed and the sort they bedded. Regardless of how a man might feel about them, they were relegated to a certain role in his life.
