The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides #1)(2)

His grandfather looked up. He may as well have been evaluating his ledgers for the precise, methodical glint in his steel-grey eyes. “Am I better than my grandson?” he demanded, breathless from his exertions.

Lucy moaned in reply. “Oh, yes,” she panted.

“And you’ll leave him as you said and be my duchess.”

“Anything,” she cried out, arching her back.

Robert’s stomach lurched, and he pressed his eyes closed. I am going to be ill.

With an abrupt movement, his grandfather straightened. “That will be all,” he said with a thread of ice coating his tone. At the jarring cessation, Lucy lay prone on the desk. She creased her sweaty brow. “Your Grace?”

The lyrical quality of her voice that had once captivated him jerked Robert back from the edge of madness.

“You are late,” the duke snapped, and Lucy swiveled her head sideways.

A gasp spilled from her lips, and the color leached from her cheeks. “Robert.”

As his grandfather adjusted his garments, he stepped around Lucy. Lucy, the one woman who hadn’t given a jot whether Robert would one day be a duke. Lucy, who’d so wholly captured his heart. He fisted his hands at his sides so hard, his nails ripped the flesh jagged, and blood coated his palms. “You summoned me, Your Grace?” he said with an ice to rival a winter freeze, one that even his grandfather would be hard-pressed to not admire. All the while he deliberately kept his gaze averted from the crying, pleading lady who hurried to right her garments.

“Robert,” she cried out.

“Silence.” The duke’s quiet directive had the power to command with a greater strength than any thunderous shout. “I warned you about her.” He waved a hand at Lucy. “This one would have made you a terrible bride.”

A cynical laugh rumbled up from Robert’s throat. Those were perhaps the only true words this man had ever spoken. “Indeed,” he drawled, proud of that smooth deliverance, when inside his heart iced over, freezing him from the inside out.

“Robert,” Lucy pleaded once more, making to rush past the duke, but the powerful lord easily stepped between her and the path to Robert, cutting off her forward movement.

“There is something wrong with the blood in this line that you are all drawn to the inferior blood of your lessers.” His mouth tightened. “First, my daughter and the damned footman.” He inclined his head. “It was easy enough to sever her from the family. There is little need for a daughter beyond the connections she might make. But you,” he continued over Lucy’s copious weeping.

His heart hardened all the more. Those false tears of a lying whore.

“But you, Robert, will one day be duke, and I will be damned if I see a whore perpetuate the bloodlines.” Not pausing to take his gaze from Robert, the duke stuck his finger at the door. “You’re through here, Miss Waltman.” The old bastard had bedded her like a common whore on his desk, in midday, and didn’t even know her name. Then, isn’t that what she is? A shiver of disgust coursed along Robert’s spine. For the duke, for Lucy, and for himself in seeing a maid and believing in her station. She’d been different than all the ladies of the peerage, this woman he’d given his heart to and would have given his name, in a few short hours. His Grace spoke, cutting into Robert’s musings. “My man-of-affairs will see to your payment.”

Her payment. Again, Robert’s stomach pitched and he fixed on the hatred building inside like a slow-growing cancer, anything but the gradual, endless cracking of his heart.

Cheeks damp and red from the force of her tears, Lucy rushed around the duke, and came to a quick stop before Robert. “Robert,” she begged. “He promised me I would be his duchess.”

I would have made you my wife and you would have been my duchess . . . Except, her greed too great, her grasping even greater, she’d been unable to wait for this man to kick up his heels. Robert sneered. Then, there was still his father, who in robust health would have never seen this woman a duchess . . . not anytime soon.

“Surely you understand, Robert. I-I am no governess. I am not of noble birth, I’ve always—”

“I have nothing to say to you,” he cut in. Incapable of looking into those treacherous brown eyes, he looked beyond her shoulder and held his grandfather’s stare.

“I’ll not ask you again, Miss Waltman,” his grandfather said in bored tones the way he might ask a parlor maid to apply an extra coat of wax to his treasured desk. “If you don’t leave this instant, I’ll advise my man-of-affairs to see you have nothing.”

That sprung her into movement. Without another look, or so much as a backward glance, Lucy Whitman stepped out of the room, and out of his life.

His grandfather moved to his sideboard and poured himself a glass of brandy. “You hate me, and that is fine, but I saved you from yourself,” he said as he carried his drink to his desk.

Robert stood, hands tightly clenched still at his side. “I am touched by your devotion.” Hatred laced his tone, and the duke pursed his lips.

“As a duke, and in your case a future duke, you’d do well to remember, the only risks worth taking are in matters that can grow your wealth.” His lip peeled derisively. “We do not make decisions with or for our hearts. So you may have your tantrum and hate me for now, but someday you will thank me for this.”