Never Desire a Duke (One Scandalous Season) (2 page)

Sophia turned, but a sudden hand to her arm stayed her.

“What of Claxton?” the countess blurted.

The punch sloshed. Instinctively Sophia extended the glass far from her body, to prevent the liquid from spilling down her skirts, but inside her head, the intimate familiarity with which Lady Annabelle spoke her husband’s name tolled like an inharmonious bell.

“Pardon me?” She glanced sharply at the hand on her arm. “What did you say?”

Annabelle, wide-eyed and smiling, snatched her hand away, clasping it against the pale globe of her breast. “Will his Grace make an appearance here tonight?”

Sophia had suffered much during her marriage, but this affront—at her grandfather’s party—was too much.

Good breeding tempered her response. She’d been raised a lady. As a girl, she’d learned her lessons and conducted herself with perfect grace and honor. As a young woman, she’d maneuvered the dangerous waters of her first season, where a single misstep could ruin her prospects of a respectable future. She had made her family and herself proud.

Sophia refused to succumb to the impulse of rage. Instead she summoned every bit of her self-control, and with the greatest of efforts, forbade herself from flinging the glass and its scarlet contents against the front of the woman’s gown.

With her gaze fixed directly on Lady Meltenbourne, she answered calmly. “I would assume not.”

The countess’s smile transformed into what was most certainly a false moue of sympathy. “Oh, dear. You
do
know he’s in town, don’t you, your Grace?”

Sophia’s vision went black. Claxton in London? Could that be true? If he had returned without even the courtesy of sending word—

A tremor of anger shot down her spine, but with great effort she maintained her outward calm. However, that calm withered in the face of Lady Meltenbourne’s blatant satisfaction. Her bright eyes and parted, half-smiling lips proclaimed the malicious intent behind her words, negating any obligation by Sophia for a decorous response. Yet before she could present the countess with a dismissive view of her train, the woman, in a hiss of silk, flounced into the crowd.

Only to be replaced by Sophia’s sisters, who fell upon her like street thieves, spiriting her into the deeper shadows of a nearby corner. Unlike Sophia, who could wear the more dramatically hued Geneva velvet as a married woman, Daphne and Clarissa wore diaphanous, long-sleeved white muslin trimmed with lace and ribbon.

“Who invited that woman?” Daphne, the eldest of the two, demanded.

Sophia answered, “She wasn’t invited.”

“Did you see her
bosoms
?” Clarissa marveled.

“How could you not?” Daphne said. “They are enormous, like cannonballs. It’s indecent. Everyone is staring, even Clarissa and I. We simply couldn’t help ourselves.”

“That dress! It’s beyond fashion,” Clarissa gritted. “It’s the dead of winter. Isn’t she cold? She might as well have worn nothing at all.”

“
Daphne
,” Sophia warned. “
Clarissa.
”

Daphne’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly did she say to you?”

Sophia banished all emotion from her voice. “Nothing of import.”

“That’s not true,” Clarissa retorted. She leaned close and hissed, “She asked you if Claxton would be in attendance tonight.”

Stung at hearing her latest shame spoken aloud, Sophia responded more sharply than intended. “If you heard her ask me about Claxton, then why did you ask me what she said?”

Her hands trembled so greatly that she could no longer hold the punch glass without fear of spilling its contents. She deposited the glass on the nearby butler’s tray. Within seconds, a servant appeared and whisked it away.

Clarissa’s nostrils flared. “I didn’t hear her. Not exactly. It’s just that she’s—”

“Clarissa!” Daphne interjected sharply, silencing whatever revelation her sister had intended to share.

“No, you must tell me,” Sophia demanded. “Lady Meltenbourne has what?”

Clarissa glared at Daphne. “She deserves to know.”

Daphne, clearly miserable, nodded in assent. “Very well.”

Clarissa uttered, “She’s already asked the question of nearly everyone else in the room.”

Despite the chill in the air, heat rose into Sophia’s cheeks, along with a dizzying pressure inside her head. The conversation between herself and Lady Meltenbourne had been shocking enough. With Clarissa’s revelation, Sophia was left nothing short of humiliated. She’d tried so desperately to keep rumors of Claxton’s indiscretions from her family so as not to complicate any possible future reconciliation, but now her secrets were spilling out on the ballroom floor for anyone’s ears to hear.

“Trollop,” whispered Daphne. “It’s none of her concern where Claxton is. It is only your concern, Sophia. And
our
concern as well, of course, because we are your sisters. Someone should tell her so.” Though her sister had been blessed with the face of an angel, a distinctly devilish glint gleamed in her blue eyes. “Do you wish for me to be the one to say it? Please say yes, because I’m aching to—”

“Erase that smug look from her face,” interjected Clarissa, fists clenched at her sides, looking very much the female pugilist.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Sophia answered vehemently. “You’ll conduct yourselves as ladies, not as ruffians off the street. This is my private affair. Mine and Claxton’s. Do you understand? Do not mention any of what has occurred to Mother, and especially not to our grandfather. I won’t have you ruining his birthday or Christmas.”

“Understood,” they answered in unison. Her sisters’ dual gazes offered sympathy, and worse—pity.

Though Sophia would readily offer the same to any woman in her circumstances, she had no wish to be the recipient of such unfortunate sentiments. The whole ugly incident further proved the insupportability of her marriage and her husband’s tendency to stray. Though Lady Meltenbourne’s presence stung, it made Sophia only more certain that Claxton would agree to her terms. Certainly he would prefer to have his freedom—and he would have it, just as soon as he gave her a child. Seventeen months ago when she spoke her vows, she’d been naïve. She’d had such big dreams of a life with Claxton and had given her heart completely, only to have it thrown back in her face when she needed him the most. Claxton would never be a husband in the loyal, devoted sense of the word. He would never love her completely, the way she needed to be loved.

Admittedly, in the beginning, that aloofness—his very mysteriousness—had captivated her. The year of her debut, the duke had appeared in London out of nowhere, newly possessed of an ancient title. His rare appearances at balls were cause for delirium among the ranks of the hopeful young misses and their mammas.

Then—oh, then—she’d craved his brooding silences, believing with a certainty that once they married, Claxton would give her his trust. He would give her his heart.

For a time, she’d believed that he had. She closed her eyes against a dizzying rush of memories.
His smile. His laughter. Skin. Mouths. Heat. Completion.

It had been enough. At least she thought it had been.

“Well?” said Daphne.

“Well, what?”

“Will Claxton make an appearance tonight?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Sophia.

Clarissa sighed. “Lord Tunsley told me he saw Claxton at White’s this afternoon, with Lord Haden and Mr. Grisham.”

Sophia nodded mutely. So it was confirmed. After seven months abroad, her husband had returned to London, and everyone seemed to know but her. The revelation left her numb and sadder than she expected. She ought to be angry—
no!
—furious at being treated with such disregard. Either that or she ought to do like so many other wives of the
ton
and forget the injustice of it all in the arms of a lover. She’d certainly had the opportunity.

Just then her gaze met that of a tall gentleman who stood near the fireplace, staring at her intently over the heads of the three animatedly gesturing Aimsley sisters. Lord Havering, or “Fox” as he had been known in the informal environs of their country childhood, always teased that she ought to have waited for him—and more than once had implied that he still waited for her.

With a tilt of his blond head, he mouthed:
Are you well?

Of course, Lady Meltenbourne’s indiscreet inquiries about Claxton would not have escaped Fox’s hearing. No doubt the gossipy Aimsley sisters were dissecting the particulars at this very moment. Sophia flushed in mortification, but at the same time was exceedingly grateful Fox cared for her feelings at all. It was more than she could say for her own husband.

Yet she had no heart for adultery. To Fox she responded with a nod and a polite smile, and returned her attention to her sisters. While she held no illusions about the pleasure-seeking society in which she lived, she’d grown up in the household of happily married parents who loved each other deeply. Magnificently. Had she been wrong to believe she deserved nothing short of the same?

Clarissa touched her arm and inquired softly, “Is it true, Sophia, what everyone is saying, that you and Claxton are officially estranged?”

In that moment, the candlelight flickered. A rush of frigid air pushed through the room, as if the front doors of the house had been thrown open. The chill assaulted her bare skin, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. All conversation in the ballroom grew hushed, but a silent, indefinable energy exploded exponentially.

Both pairs of her sisters’ eyes fixed at the same point over her shoulders.

“Oh, my,” whispered Daphne.

Clarissa’s face lost its color. “Sophia—”

She looked over her shoulder. In that moment, her gaze locked with the bold, blue-eyed stare of a darkly handsome stranger.

Only, of course, he wasn’t a stranger, not in the truest sense of the world. But he might as well have been. It was Claxton.

Her heart swelled with a thousand memories of him, only to subside, just as quickly, into frigid calm. Without hesitation, she responded as her good breeding required. She crossed the marble floor, aware that all eyes in the room were trained on her, and with a kiss welcomed her faithless husband home.

W
elcome home, Claxton,” she murmured after placing a chaste kiss upon his cheek. And then, under the pretense of fetching her grandfather a previously promised glass of punch, she vanished into the crowd of guests.

“Welcome home, Claxton,” Lord Haden, Vane’s younger brother by two years, mimicked in an affected, high-pitched voice.

His cousin Rabe Grisham drolly announced what he had already surmised. “Her Grace is certainly thrilled to see you.”

Vane ignored them both and set off to follow her. He was tall, and though she was not, he easily tracked the path she made as she traversed the room, because…well, she sparkled. The diamond-encrusted hair combs she wore so artfully nestled in her stylishly coiffed mink-brown hair had been a betrothal gift from him, commissioned from the jeweler Garrard.

Her hair had always fascinated him. Though current fashion inspired many young ladies to cut theirs, hers, when set free from its pins, fell in luxurious waves to her waist. Not so long ago, he’d owned the privilege of seeing it unbound. He had touched it with all the awe and reverence of a smitten lover, and even now when he closed his eyes, he could recall its scent and the feel of it against his skin.

Upon first seeing her, his every muscle had drawn painfully tight and even now refused to relax. He had hoped time and distance would mellow his desire for her, but clearly he was a fool. He had always been a fool for Sophia.

From the brief glimpse he was granted before she fled his company, he could see his wife had only grown more beautiful in their months spent apart. But then, what had he expected? From the first moment Vane had seen her in the formal drawing room of his uncle’s home, for the purpose of an arranged meeting in advance of their arranged betrothal, she took his breath away. With her green eyes and mischievous-angel smile, he even fancied that in that very moment he’d fallen in love.

He never told her, of course, even in their early days of bliss. He kept such dangerous details to himself. To do otherwise would have been to expose himself to unbelievable torment and pain.

He was twenty-eight years old, and she twenty-one, her first season delayed by her father’s untimely death. He never expected to be presented with such a rare and precious gift. He didn’t deserve her, but apparently his newly bestowed title, fortune, and estates did. To his shock, she seemed just as enchanted with him as he was with her. For a time.

He gave up too easily then—but not this time. He wouldn’t allow Sophia to just run away and build up more walls against him. After seeing her, he felt even more resolved than before to end the estrangement between them. As if sensing his determination, the crowd of guests parted, giving him a clear path across the floor. Just then he lost sight of Sophia and her sparkling hair, when she disappeared beneath the archway that led to Lord Wolverton’s book room.

“Your Grace.” A small hand gripped his arm.

Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the shimmer of blonde hair and bright blue silk. With his gaze fixed on the doorway, he murmured something cordial and continued on his way. He did not miss, however, the subsequent burst of tittering and whispers he left in his wake. As heir to the Claxton title, he’d long ago grown accustomed to whispers and learned to ignore them.

He paused at the door and peered inside. Here, the air smelled of legacy and comfort, of wood, tobacco, and books. Dim light from a garden lantern streamed through the window, revealing Sophia’s silhouette. She stood at Lord Wolverton’s cabinet, her head tilted back on her slender neck, lowering a now-empty rummer from her lips.

He cleared his throat.

She whirled. Her skirts rustled with the sudden movement. In the darkness, her emerald velvet bodice appeared black. Its high collar served as a dramatic foil to the pale skin of her throat and décolletage.

“Claxton,” she exclaimed softly. Eyes wide, she raised her fingertips to brush the moisture from her lips, no doubt oblivious to the sensual appeal of the gesture. “You startled me.”

He startled a lot of people. The same had been true about his father. Whether it was his height or his dark looks or demeanor or a combination of all those things, he did not know. He knew only he did not like the way his wife flinched upon hearing his voice.

What event would drive her to seek out a bracing gulp of her grandfather’s brandy, something he knew for a fact she never touched?

The unexpected return of a despised husband, of course.

He couldn’t fault her for that. Looking back at himself as he existed seven months before, he despised that man as well. God, he’d behaved like an ass—but worse, a coward. He ought never to have left her. He ought to have fought harder for them.

Before his betrothal and marriage to Sophia, he’d been…desperately lost. Only he knew how completely her love had transformed him. She’d given it so freely, touching him to his very soul and blotting out the stain of his former life. He’d never burdened her with those best-buried and forgotten details of his past. Even now, in the aftermath of their tragedy, she could never understand the magnitude of the gift she’d given him when they’d learned they were expecting a child.

Yet that dreadful February afternoon, she had turned her back on him.

Now, almost a year later, she turned her back to him again. Lifting the crystal decanter, she poured a splash into a half-filled punch glass. “For my grandfather.”

Capping the bottle, she lifted the glass and maneuvered toward him through the darkness. She would have walked past him if he hadn’t stepped into her path. Her skirts brushed his breeches, but she stopped herself before allowing their bodies to touch. It required every ounce of his restraint not to touch her face, to kiss, inhale, and taste her. To push her back inside the room and lock the door behind them.

“Come home with me tonight,” he said, his voice thick with desire.

Did she realize how difficult the words were for him to speak? That he had just given her a dagger and invited her to stab him in what was already a grievously wounded heart, one that he had made every effort to shore up in hopes that he might be worthy of her forgiveness? Of her acceptance?

She avoided his gaze. “I’ve already made arrangements to stay the night here.”

And so stab him she did, carefully sidestepping him and going a short distance beyond before turning back.

This time her eyes met his unwaveringly. “But you could certainly extend the invitation to Lady Meltenbourne. She’s here—I’m sure you know—and has already been making inquiries about you.”

Sophia wended through the crowd, avoiding the myriad curious gazes fixed upon her. Her hands shook. She quaked inside to her very bones. Had she truly just encouraged her husband to spend his night in the arms of another woman? Perhaps she ought to indulge in maraschino more often.

Cheeks aflame, she slipped behind the shelter of a Corinthian column, one of six twin pairs that lined the north and south sides of the ballroom. Backed against the cool plaster, she gasped in a fortifying breath. Except for the occasional servant rushing between the teaboard and the kitchen, and two blank-eyed marble busts of famed political statesmen and adversaries, Fox and Pitt, she was alone here.

While she could not exactly claim to have shocked Claxton, his eyes
had
noticeably widened and his lips
had
parted ever so slightly. For her cool, always-controlled husband, those reactions were quite nearly the equivalent. While the gravity of their exchange did not escape her, she could not deny the satisfaction that rushed through her at having astonished him.

Come home with me tonight.

Did he truly believe it would be that simple? That after months of frigid separation she would forgive and forget? With one of his paramours presently circling the waters of her grandfather’s birthday party like a hungry shark, she was in no mood to do either, nor would she ever be. What sort of husband would subject his wife to such public degradation? If she was honest with herself, she could admit she shared some of the blame.

How differently would things have turned out if she’d waited to confront him about that awful letter at home, rather than reacting like a child and running out of the house in a hysterical rush onto steps slickened with ice? Certainly there would still have been tears and angry words and hurt feelings, but maybe they would still have their child. Perhaps, even, they would still have each other.

Days later, when at last he had come to her, smelling of drink and looking like a man destroyed, he openly confessed an affair with the actress who wrote the letter, but assured her, in a most earnest and forceful manner, that the relationship ended months before their betrothal, before he and Sophia ever met. He swore that despite the unfortunate phrasing of the letter couching the affair in present terms, there had been no further dalliance, not even a spoken word.

She believed him, but still, the ugliness of the incident remained, along with a new air of mistrust between them. Seeking comfort, she withdrew to the warm embrace of her mother and sisters to grieve and to heal, never sharing with them the existence of the letter or the trouble it had caused. Claxton vacated London with Lord Haden and his gentlemen friends for his hunting lodge near Inverness. Weeks passed and he returned, but only out of obligation to his seat in the House. At her mother’s insistence, she too had returned home, yet she found herself very much alone. When not in sessions, Claxton adjourned to his club, or so she thought, but Lord Havering confided to having seen him in numerous St. James’s gambling hells at all hours of the night. On the rare occasions when he came home, his eyes and his manner showed the signs of increased drink and dissolution.

All that she could have forgiven. Time passed, and the heartache of losing the child was not gone, but it had eased in the same way her pain over Vinson’s and her father’s deaths had. She just needed him to talk to her, to say he was sorry, so that she could tell him she was sorry too. Then maybe she could have let him hold her. It was what she wanted more than anything. But then she started to hear rumors, gravely repeated to her by her closest friends at tea and cards, who thought she would want to know. He’d been seen in the company of one unsuitable woman, perhaps two.

Just the normal
ton
scandal broth, which Sophia did her best to brush off, but then early one morning when he returned home sotted after another night out, Sophia crossed paths with the maid who had retrieved his clothing. A different sort of “letter” had fallen from the pocket of his coat onto the floor between them, carefully folded inside a paper envelope. A French letter, which Sophia had only heard about, but never actually seen. The poor maid, only under duress, identified the awful thing and confirmed its purpose—to prevent a man from getting a woman with child.

Consumed by pain and rage, she hadn’t been able to help herself. As he slept the sleep of the dead, she crept into his room. There, with the mother-of-pearl-handled letter opener he’d given her their first Christmas together, she stabbed the vulgar thing through and wedged the blade into his headboard so that he would awake to it dangling over his head. Relations between them only grew chillier after that.

She’d almost been relieved when in May he’d left her with barely a good-bye, sent abroad by a diplomatic appointment to Reichenbach, without so much as a suggestion that she join him later. Soon, the first letter arrived, then another. Written in his distinctive script—dark, elegant slashes and flamboyant whorls of ink—they informed her of his relocation to Töplitz and eventually Leipzig, including only the sparest descriptions of lodgings and environs, and negotiations, treaties, and battles. There had been no mention by her diplomat husband of the balls and dinners and routs he attended. Those letters came instead from a lively Hanoverian baroness, who in the manner of any social hostess worth her snuff, assured Sophia that her husband was being well entertained.

His mistress? She did not know. She did not know anything anymore.

What she did know was that in London she had awakened each day alone to the silence of Claxton’s magnificent Park Lane house, to the equally magnificent attendance of his servants. His carriage had delivered her about town, wherever she wished to go. There were endless invitations. Constant callers. Every drawing room and shop welcomed her enthusiastically as his duchess. His accountants paid her bills without question.

Yet every night she went to bed feeling like a fraud, her only company the whispers that followed her everywhere, celebrating her husband of little more than a year as a connoisseur of beautiful women, a libertine, and a rogue. She’d been left to suffer it alone, managing, she believed, to keep the worst of it from her family’s collective ear.

Come home with me tonight.

No, their reunion would not be as simple as that. Her breathing slowed.

Exactly how long had she stood here, behind this column? Not that she wished for Claxton to pursue her, but—

He
would
come after her, would he not?

With all discretion, she peeked through the heads and shoulders of party guests, in the direction from whence she had come. Her mouth grew dry. Claxton was gone.

Shock rippled through her, leaving her lips and
finge
rtips numb. Did she, as his wife, matter so little to him that he would
not
pursue her? Worse yet, would he do as she had challenged him to do and spend his night with another? A sudden vision of Claxton tangled in silken sheets with the buxom, vacant-eyed Lady Meltenbourne—

“Sophia.”

“No!” she exclaimed, her head turning so abruptly her curls bounced off her nose.

The devil himself stared down at her, his face mere inches from hers. Cool liquid permeated her glove, dampening her palm. His hand came beneath hers to steady the glass, a gesture so unexpected and intimate that she gasped.

“No?” he repeated, one dark eyebrow elevated in question.

“
Oh
,” she insisted. “I meant, ‘Oh.’”