Loved by a Duke (The Heart of a Duke #4)(65)

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

Daisy’s head pitched back, a whimpering moan slipped past her lips as he moved his lips to the corner of her mouth and lower to the place where her pulse throbbed wildly in her neck. The scent of lavender clung to her skin and he drew an intoxicating breath that sucked him into the past—visiting her family, a family he’d forever destroyed.

He wrenched away, his chest heaved in agonized, shuddering breaths.

Her lashes fluttered wildly and she blinked several times as though she sought to clear the haze of passion that had enveloped her. “What—?”

“Forgive me,” he said gruffly, guilt ravaging his conscience.

“There is nothing to forgive.”

Only, there was everything to forgive. Guilt churned in his belly.

She held her palms up misinterpreting the reason for his regret. “We are to be married.” Emotion filled her eyes. “And I love you.”

A dull buzzing filled his ears with her words coming as though down a long corridor. He gave a brusque shake of his head. The implications of this admission so much greater than the amorphous wish she’d spoken of earlier to love and be loved. Now, she spoke of him and yearnings for his heart, when she didn’t know the dark lie he’d kept from her. Once because the words of his shameful past would never be fit for a respectable lady’s ears, now because he was a coward. She was deserving of the truth even as it would kill all the warmth in her eyes, leaving him dark and empty. But he could not enter into a union with this between them. He swiped a hand over his eyes and turned on wooden legs, needing to put distance between them, too much of a coward to witness the moment all her love for him was replaced with that deserved loathing.

Daisy rushed around him in a flurry of blue skirts and planted herself in front of him. “Do you intend to leave?” Incredulity underscored her question. She settled her hands upon her hips, her eyebrows dipped.

But for the details of one night he kept to himself, he had always chosen forthrightness. He lowered his voice, speaking in hushed tones. “Surely, you know I care about you?” He’d have lobbed off his left arm if it would bring her happiness. “There is something I would have you—”

The lines of her face gentled. “Oh, Auric,” she whispered, caressing his cheek.

He flinched. He’d never been worthy of her affections. She’d made him, with his visits through the years, into someone honorable and good, when in truth there was none more complicit than he. “Daisy,” he began once more, his voice gruff. He captured her wrist in his hand, intending to remove it from his person so he could at last give her the truth.

Footsteps sounded in the hall. Their gazes swung as one to the doorway where the Marchioness of Roxbury stood framed in the entrance, a wider smile than he remembered of the lady these years wreathed her aged face. She clapped her hands together. “Oh, Auric, I have heard the splendid news.”

He dropped a bow. The woman’s enthusiasm stabbed him with more of the agonized guilt. He’d bungled this all up. Daisy should have been given the truth before he’d rushed over with an offer for her hand. “Lady Roxbury, it is a pleasure.” Only, deep inside where truths dwelled, he’d recognized this was the only way he might have her. Panic climbed up his throat, threatening to choke him. “If you’ll excuse me? As much as I’d enjoy visiting, there are matters to see to.”

“Of course, of course there are,” she exclaimed. She captured Daisy’s hand and locked their fingers together. “I do not remember when I last knew this happiness,” she said softly.

Would the woman feel that way if she were to know that he was not the honorable, devoted man she’d taken him as through the years? He spun on his heel and fled as though the hounds of hell nipped at his heels.

And if there had ever been a doubt these years, his hasty retreat only proved something he’d long known—he was a bloody coward.





Chapter 16

When she’d been a girl, Lionel had teased Daisy about her remarkable ability to slumber through anything and everything, from the volatile summer storms to their mother’s loud rapping on Daisy’s chamber doors. The only time in Daisy’s life she’d struggled to sleep had been the evening of Lionel’s death. She’d lain abed and stared up at the ceiling. She’d flipped onto her side, back and forth, all night, until ultimately flopping onto her back again to stare at the canopy over her head. Anxiety had turned in her belly and ran down her back, and she’d not known how to make sense of the inexplicable misgivings.

Much the same way she’d had an innate sense of hovering darkness, so did she after Auric had beat his swift retreat three days earlier. She’d not seen him since that hasty flight. His are not the actions of a gentleman in love. Then, he’d never spoken of love, or even affection. Yet no one could or would ever make Auric do something he’d not want to. His life stood as testament to that. Surely, he’d not wed her if he didn’t love her with at least some sliver of his heart. No, a man who remembered such details as her favorite color and her least favorite colors and the foods she enjoyed proved that he felt at least something where she was concerned.

A shadow fell over her and she started. “You are quiet, Daisy.”

She cast an upward glance. “Mother,” she answered. “I did not hear you enter.” For somehow, with an offer of marriage from Auric, Mother had become the invisible one and Daisy the one lost in her own world—a world that made so very little sense.