Confessions of a Royal Bridegroom(93)

Drat the man.

Finally admitting defeat—for now—Justine hurried from the room.





Griffin stretched out his legs, trying to make himself comfortable in the intimate confines of his luxurious town coach. He’d told his coachman to take the long way around to Jermyn Street. Even so, he doubted it would be long enough to manage Justine’s fit of temper. But if he waited until they got home she’d just disappear into her bedroom again like she did every time he came near her.


He couldn’t truly blame her, given how he’d bitten her head off on their wedding night. But she’d surprised him, not only by her questions about his parentage but by her kind response that resembled nothing so much as pity. That had made his skin crawl. He wanted many things from Justine—first and foremost, getting her into his bed where she belonged—but pity wasn’t one of them.

“You looked very pretty tonight, my sweet, and you didn’t even need your silly little cap,” he said in a teasing voice.

In the dim light of the carriage lamps, he saw her eyes narrow to irate slits. Griffin suspected that she had a lively sense of humor when she relaxed enough to let it surface, but not about her caps.

He cast about in his head for something innocuous to say, something to remind her that he wasn’t some evil brute intent on ruining her because that was how she seemed to be regarding him these days. Again, his fault, he supposed, since his dramatic announcement that he was as vile as his father and uncles. Griffin would never pretend to be something other than what he was, but his royal relations—at least the men—were a truly repellent, amoral breed.

Griffin might fall into the amoral category on occasion, but repellent? He hoped not. Not only were those sorts of aristocratic excesses of behavior bad for business, they made him recoil on an instinctive level. On most days, he could convince himself that he’d left every remnant of his boyhood behind, but he knew that to be a lie. Those years spent in an isolated parsonage in North Yorkshire, under the thumb of his rigorously moral uncle, had left their mark no matter how much he denied it. Griffin might be capable of many things, but certainly not harming women and children.

Unfortunately, his mind was still drawing a blank when it came to conversation starters with his own wife, perhaps because he wasn’t used to the alteration in their relationship. Justine was probably feeling the same way, so it might work to remind her of that.

“You must have found it strange to be introduced to your relatives as my wife,” he said. “It had to be somewhat unnerving.”

She grabbed onto the strap as they rounded the corner. Not that she seemed to need it since her posture resembled that of a lamppost.

“You have no idea,” she replied in blighting voice.

Griffin’s temper began to stir. He’d put up with her cool behavior in Lady Thornbury’s drawing room after the men had joined the ladies, assuming it was caused by irritation with her cousin. Lady Serena might be rich, beautiful, and a popular hostess of the ton, but she was also a vulgar flirt. Griffin didn’t generally mind a flirtation of that sort now and then, and at least Serena had spoken with him. Most of the other guests had avoided him, either from nervousness—as if they expected him to pull out a deck of cards and begin fleecing them—or from disdain, which had surely been the case with Justine’s uncle. The evening had been as bad as he’d imagined it would be, compounded by the fact that his sweet, gentle wife had spent a good part of the night throwing daggers at him with her eyes. The married state, it would appear, was having a less than beneficial effect on Justine’s temperament.