The Day of the Duchess (Scandal & Scoundrel #3)(8)

How backward the world was.

“My destiny, then, a Dangerous Daughter.”

Sera held back the cringe at the moniker—the one she’d inherited for them all.

You trapped me.

I did.

Get out.

“Not just any,” she said, refusing to bend. “The most dangerous.”

He watched her for a moment, as though he could see her thoughts. She resisted the urge to fidget. “If you won’t tell me where you went, perhaps you will tell me why you have returned?”

She drank, considering the lie she would have to tell. “Did I not make myself clear?”

“You think divorce so easily obtained?”

“I know it is not, but you would prefer . . . this?”

He did not look away, his gaze so unsettling, seeming to see so much even as it hid everything. “We would not be the first to suffer a loveless marriage.”

They had not always been so loveless.

“I’ve suffered enough.” She spread her hands wide. “And, unlike the rest of the aristocracy, I have no reason not to end our unhappy union. I have nothing to lose.”

He leveled her with a look. “Everyone has something to lose.”

She matched it with one of her own. “You forget, husband. I have already lost everything.”

He looked away. “I don’t forget.” He drank, and she watched the muscles in his hand tighten and strain against the glass, a small, secret, locked-away part of her wondering at it.

That part could remain locked away. She did not care what he remembered.

She cared only that he was a powerful man, with remarkable resources, and that the dissolution of their marriage was essential to the life she had chosen for herself. The one she had built from the ashes of the life she had left. “Let me be entirely clear, Haven,” she said, forcing the formality. “This is our only chance to be rid of each other. To be rid of our past.” She paused. “Or did you have another plan to exorcise the demons of our marriage?”

He exhaled, heading around the desk, as though he were through with the conversation. She watched him, considering the action. Imagining what he was thinking. “Did you?”

“I did, as a matter of fact.”

Surprise flared. There were only three ways to dissolve a marriage. Hers was one. The others—“Annulment is not possible,” she said, hating the thread of sadness that threatened at the words. At the idea that he might have pushed for it. There had been a—

There had been a child.

He met her gaze then. “Not annulment.”

“Then you were intending to have me declared dead.” It had occurred to her, of course. At night, when she thought about the possibility that he might desire an heir. That he might have changed his mind. That he might have decided another woman and another family were desirable.

There was only one way to clear the path to a new heir. With the exception of the fact that she was not dead. And one other minor issue.

“Four years hence?” The law required seven to have passed before a person could be declared dead. He looked away. “Ah. But you’ve the funds and the power to circumvent a little thing like the passage of time, don’t you, Duke?”

His gaze narrowed. “You say that as though you do not plan to use those same funds to convince Parliament to grant us a divorce—something so exorbitantly costly that there have been, what, two hundred and fifty authorized? Ever? In history?”

“Three hundred and fourteen,” Sera answered. “And at least at the end of my plan we are both alive. Was I to die soon? Am I lucky I arrived before the summer recess and not after it? When Parliament returns from summer idyll, rested and ready to disappear one duchess and make room for another?”

“It no longer matters, does it?” he said, the words calm enough to tempt her to rage.

It shouldn’t have. She had one goal. The Singing Sparrow, her tavern. And with it funds, freedom, and future. None of which was hers until he cut her reins.

“So get to it, Sera. What is the reason for the dissolution of our once legendary union? There are limited arguments for divorce. What, then? Shall you tell my colleagues that I was intolerably cruel? Declare to all London that I am a lunatic? Perhaps you were forced to marry me? No,” he scoffed. “Everyone knows you came quite willingly. Fairly tripping down the aisle to shackle yourself to me.”

“What a silly girl I was,” she snapped. “That was before I knew the truth.”

His gaze narrowed. “And what truth is that?”

That you never wanted me. That you cared more for your title than for your future. That we would never be more than a passing, fleeting moment. That you wouldn’t care when our family became an impossibility.

“It is no matter.”

“I never lied,” he said.

It was an echo of years earlier. You lied. She could still hear the words, as though he’d said them yesterday instead of three years ago, when he’d refused to listen. When he refused to believe.

Because she hadn’t lied. Not when it was important. She raised her chin, defiant and defensive. “In this, husband, you do forget.”

He set the weighted tumbler to his desk with an ominous thud, punctuating his movement as he came to her, a muscle twitching in his cheek the only indication of his irritation.