My Once and Future Duke (The Wagers of Sin #1)(66)
Carefully Jack restored the miniature to the cabinet. He’d long since got over the shock that she wanted another man. She was heartless and calculating to use him as she did, and he’d thought himself brokenhearted, but that faded in time. The scar Portia left on him was not a broken heart, as the ignorant gossips thought; it was the realization that no one would ever want him for himself. Less than a month after Portia’s elopement, the eighth Duke of Ware, Jack’s father, drowned. At the age of twenty--four, wholly unprepared and unready, Jack inherited the sprawling estates, massive wealth, and heavy responsibility of the dukedom.
His more fortunate friends, the ones who either had not yet inherited their titles or who had no titles in the family to inherit, teased him about it. Now there were no tedious limits on his behavior or spending. Now he could have any woman he wanted, they said, with knowing winks and ribald laughter, and carouse as much as he pleased. That was small consolation, when the one woman he’d thought he wanted ran off with another man, and his carefree life as an heir had been crushed beneath the mountain of duty and obligation of a duke. Any woman he approached now saw not him, but a duchess’s coronet.
Sophie Campbell was the first woman since Portia to make him think she didn’t care for his title. For a moment the thought that had tantalized him at Alwyn House—-why couldn’t he call on any woman he chose?—-beat at his brain. He didn’t need to marry for money or consequence, so why couldn’t he break several generations of tradition and marry a woman just because he wanted her? Assuming he wanted to marry her.
Did he? Could one even decide such a thing in the space of a few weeks?
You don’t really know her, hissed his conscience. He’d thought the same about Portia, but she’d been deceiving him. He clearly didn’t know much about women. No matter how deeply Jack felt that Sophie was not like Portia, the fact remained that she had secrets, secrets she seemed determined to keep.
What was Sophie hiding?
Chapter 20
For the next fortnight Jack steadfastly ignored those secrets and what they might mean about Sophie.
He kept to his plan of shadowing Philip. When his brother went to Vega’s, so did he—-until a quarter past one o’clock. At that time he left, occasionally with a mocking salute from Philip, who had grown to accept his presence but not with particularly good grace. Jack no longer cared either way. Mr. Forbes, who was remarkably observant of patrons’ habits, soon had a hackney waiting for him when he walked into the reception hall. Every night Jack took the hack to Tottenham Court Road and walked to Sophie’s neat little house in Alfred Street so as not to disturb—-or alert—-her neighbors.
Those stolen hours in the dark of night fed something deep in Jack’s soul. Every time she opened the door to let him in, his heart leaped at the sight of her face. When they hurried up the stairs, hand in hand, he felt more alive than ever before in his life. And when her bedroom door closed behind them, and he could kiss her and strip her bare and make love to her until they lay twined around each other in bed, hearts pounding and skin damp from exertion, he allowed himself to think again about his position.
He was the ninth Duke of Ware, with relations and connections to every noble house in England and half the royalty of Europe. He hardly needed to instill more respectability or status into the family.
He was one of the richest men in Britain. He did not need to marry an heiress.
He sat in the House of Lords, as his ancestors had all done, but politics was not his passion. He had no urge to make a politically powerful marriage.
In short, there was no reason he couldn’t marry an ordinary woman.
They talked in bed, sometimes silly conversations that left them both shaking with laughter, sometimes more thoughtful conversations that left him quietly impressed. She had seen something of the world—-more than he had—-and she had an appreciation for small things that surprised and humbled him. Her curtsy, for instance; that grand elaborate motion that looked like a ballet in one movement had been taught to her when she was eight by a Russian ballerina. She drolly recounted how she had practiced and practiced in front of a mirror, anticipating her presentation to the czar—-which of course never came. But the curtsy remained because it reminded her of that ballerina, who had refused to wear anything not made of red silk, who kept a pet mongoose, and who had been kind to a little girl.
Jack wondered why she’d been in St. Petersburg in the first place, but she never said. He found he cared less and less what Sophie’s secrets were, but more and more what her feelings for him were.
She wouldn’t be a conventional duchess, but that hardly mattered. The Duke of Exeter had wed a country vicar’s widow and the world had not ended, not even the toplofty little world of the ton. And really, wasn’t his opinion the one that mattered? Wasn’t his preference paramount as to who stood by his side at balls and had her portrait in the gallery at Kirkwood and bore his children? As Sophie lay curled against him one night, relating another silly story from her childhood about some pastries in Vienna and the stray cat she’d tried to hide from her parents, Jack listened with a faint grin and thought to himself: I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. She’s worth it.
His growing feeling that he should follow where his heart and mind were urging him to go lasted until his mother joined him for breakfast one morning, three weeks to the day after Sophie had come to Ware House.