Her Reformed Rake (Wicked Husbands #3)(27)

The heaviness of the moment settled into his bones. He searched for something flippant to say, some manner of distraction for them both. “Hell has some damn good whisky.”

Griffin grinned and downed the rest of his glass. “That is does. Care for a game of billiards?”

Sebastian finished his whisky as well. Had it been his second or his third? The fourth? Who gave a damn. He was getting soused tonight. It was the only panacea he had left. “Prepare to lose, my friend.”





ell. This gave new meaning to the tired old phrase drunk as a lord. Though perhaps in this instance, it would be more apt to say drunk as a duke.

Daisy stared at her bleary-eyed husband, who had just appeared as she was en route to her lonely breakfast. He wore the same trousers, coat, and waistcoat he’d left in the day before. He was rumpled, his hair disheveled, dark half-moons marring the flesh beneath his eyes. The undeniable scent of spirits perfumed the air.

“It seems I’ve arrived just in time,” he announced as though he hadn’t a care in the world. “Giles tells me you’re about to break your fast.”

She’d far prefer to break a vase. Over his arrogant noggin.

Her mouth tightened as she surveyed him further. How dare he, the cad? Where had he been? What had he been doing aside from plundering London’s whisky cache? Yesterday, she’d thought he resented having to marry her with such haste. She’d felt guilty at her part in the entire affair. Had known a keening despair at his taciturn demeanor. When he had left her alone, she had wanted very much for him to stay.

But he had attempted to brush her off with some feigned sense of honor and disappeared. What had he said? We need time to get to know each other. Ah yes, and her favorite: the unusual haste with which our nuptials took place has robbed from us the chance to court.

What nonsense. The only thing he’d been courting was a thorough sousing. How foolish of her to have known a moment of remorse for using him to escape her father’s clutches. The man before her—somehow still handsome even in his disgraceful state—didn’t deserve a drop of pity. Was he a drunkard, or had he found the prospect of wedding her so loathsome that he’d needed to find solace in a bottle? She had asked if he had ever hit a woman, but perhaps there was a more salient question she ought to have posed.

He stalked toward her when she maintained a frigid silence. “Haven’t you anything to say to me, wife?”

There, before the footmen waiting to dance attendance on a formal breakfast, she raked the duke’s person with undisguised disdain. “You’re sozzled.”

His brows crashed together. “And you’re impertinent. I assure you, I’m nothing of the sort.”

“You’re wearing yesterday’s attire.” She was so vexed with him that she didn’t care that it wasn’t done to speak her mind, and that it was decidedly de trop to do so in front of servants.

He made a show of inspecting his person before meeting her gaze once more with an indolence she found particularly infuriating. “Since I’m wearing it now, I daresay it’s today’s attire.”

A closer look at his wrinkled coat and trousers suggested that he’d slept in them. She wasn’t sure why such an observation would bring her relief. If he’d spent the evening in the arms of a mistress, it was no concern of hers. Theirs wasn’t a love match. He didn’t even seem to like her. And for her part, she had only chosen him because she was desperate.

And because she enjoyed his kisses.

Daisy struck that aberrant thought from her mind.

The compulsion to remove herself from his presence was strong. How could she be affected by her inconvenient attraction to him when he had spent the entirety of their wedding night drinking himself to oblivion and committing Lord knew what manner of sins?

That was it. She needed to escape. “If you will excuse me, Your Grace, I fear I’ve lost my appetite. I’ll be retiring to my chamber for the remainder of the day.”

“No.” His expression was mulish.

The devil. She skewered him with a glare. “Pardon me, Your Grace?”

“I do believe you heard me, Your Grace,” he drawled.

The obvious sign of the manner in which he’d been frittering away the evening—and perhaps early morning as well—stiffened her spine. For a moment, she thought of the woman she’d been before, in New York, under her father’s watchful eye and stern edicts. That Daisy would never dare to gainsay any man. Not her father. Not her husband.

But her time in England had changed her. The Daisy she had become wouldn’t be insulted by the man she’d married. A man who seemed to delight in leaving her at sixes and sevens, one moment smoldering, the next ice, and the next a reprobate.

She spun on her heel, presenting him with her back and a silent impression of what she thought of his boorish behavior. Daisy Vanreid—strike that—Daisy Trent, as she was to call herself now, would not meekly obey an order. From anyone. Ever again.

At that precise moment, Giles, who had been unflappable from the instant she’d first met him the day before, hurried into their midst at a clipped pace, his expression uncharacteristically pained.

“Your Graces, forgive me, but I’m afraid we’ve a guest who refuses to leave without an audience,” the butler said.

“We aren’t at home,” dismissed the duke without a second thought.