The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)(50)

Of course, he’d never met Oliver’s eldest sister. For that matter, he’d not met Mr. and Mrs. Marshall. But reality had no bearing on the substance of his dreams. Every time Oliver got a letter from home—or sent back another carving for a younger sister—Robert fell a little more in love with all of them. It didn’t matter who they were, what they were like. If they would only love him back, then he would finally belong.

“Huh,” Oliver said, and punched him on the shoulder. A veritable love tap, that. “Well, I believe that you have nothing of your father in you.”

Robert shrugged. “If you say.”

But he’d had it proven otherwise—and by nobody so much as Oliver’s own family.

It had gone like this. On the day that Oliver’s parents were finally to visit, Robert had dressed with painstaking care. He’d brushed his hair and his teeth twice over and had tied his cravat three times in an attempt to make himself look earnest and respectable. He found himself pacing the room with a restless, desperate energy while Oliver gave him odd glances.

He knew that his daydreams were just daydreams. They were so idiotic, he had never mentioned them to his brother. But even if it was all bosh, even if they never loved him…they might still like him a little. Mightn’t they?

The door opened. Robert turned.

Mr. and Mrs. Marshall had to have been the most beautiful sight that he had seen. So utterly normal. They’d rushed forward, arms outstretched, and grabbed up Oliver. Who had scowled and made noises of complaint, the ungrateful wretch—noises like “Stop, Ma, not my hair,” and, “Don’t kiss me in front of the fellows!” All that fuss, just because they hadn’t seen him in a handful of months. Robert had watched from the other side of the room, a lump in his throat.

And then the moment had come. After the affectionate greetings had been given, Oliver had turned. “Mother,” he’d said, “Father, this is—”

But Mrs. Marshall had looked over just as her son did. Her gaze landed on Robert. And as it did, she went very still—so still that it felt as if the whole room came to a stop alongside her. Her eyes grew wide, and all the color washed from her face. She stared at him.

And then, without saying a word, without even lifting a hand in a pretense of a greeting, she straightened to her feet, turned, and left the room.

Robert’s lungs seemed to fill with shards of glass. Every breath he took hurt. He took one halting step after her—only to have Mr. Marshall intervene.

“You must be the Duke of Clermont,” Mr. Marshall said, putting himself in Robert’s way.

He’d been going to say Call me Robert after the introductions. But those words—that request for intimacy—would have only made him look all the more desperate. He managed a firm jerk of his head.

Mr. Marshall’s voice was quiet, but it couldn’t soften the harshness of the blow. “You look like your father. Very like.” He paused. “So much like, I think, that when my wife saw you just now, she saw him.”

He had nodded in a haze of pain.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Marshall said gently, “this is not the best moment to perform introductions.”

“Yes,” he’d said. “Sir.”

And he’d understood that there would never be a moment for introductions. There would be no lazy family summers, no man-to-man talks, no gingerbread on plates for him.

It didn’t matter what he did. He looked like his father; his father had forced himself on Mrs. Marshall.

In a way, everything he’d made of himself stemmed from that moment—that desperation to prove himself to be more than his face.

It was stupid to say that his heart had been broken by a pair of people he’d never met. It was even more idiotic that it was true. But for months after, every time he thought of that moment, he felt a sharp sense of loss. As if they really had been his family, and he’d lost them all at once under tragic circumstances.

He’d mourned the loss of those dreams more than he had the death of his childhood nurse.

“I don’t have to be your conscience,” Oliver said, breaking him out of his memories. His brother leaned into him ever so slightly as they walked, enough to convey a wealth of affection. “You have one of your own. And I trust you, even if you can’t trust yourself.”

He didn’t have much, but what he had, that he would hold on to. And never let go.

He gave his brother a playful nudge, but his throat was tight. “I always knew you were the gullible sort,” he said. “Lucky me.”

Chapter Fourteen

MINNIE DIDN’T SEE THE DUKE AT ALL in the days that followed.

But it was impossible not to think of him. She examined his paper under a borrowed jeweler’s lens, poked at the ink used in his handbills, cataloged the vagaries of the type used to create it. There was a lowercase e that had a hairline crack in the lower stem; she’d seen it on four separate handbills, now. A b that was a bit misshapen.

All of the proof that she’d found added up.

Details, all of that. Now that she had his letter, it was all rendered superfluous.

More importantly, when she imagined herself on the streets of Leicester, she no longer saw herself industriously collecting paper samples, but striding arm in arm with the Duke of Clermont.

Stupid. She was so stupid.

She told herself that all too often, and yet found that she could not make herself stop thinking of him. She remembered the feel of his lips, the look in his eyes. She remembered his hands, warm on her body. She remembered everything he’d told her, and she didn’t feel stupid.