Page 5 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“How delicate your conscience becomes when it is asked to serve her.”

The rebuke struck him. Henry’s mouth compressed, and for a moment some feeling rose in him that might have been anger or shame, though neither did him much credit now.

“There was no betrothal,” he said. “There was no offer. There was no formal attachment of any kind. A gentleman admired her for a time, and the matter ended before it could become anything of consequence.”

“To whom?”

Henry’s head lifted. “Your Grace?”

“To whom did it become nothing? To him, to you, or to your sister?”

Henry did not answer.

Theodore leaned back, his gaze coldly steady. “I see.”

“It was a Season’s attachment,” Henry said, hurriedly now, as though speed might make the statement less ugly. “A very ordinary thing. Young ladies have admirers. Gentlemen are attentive. Nothing need come of it.”

“That is often said by the people who are least injured when nothing comes of it.”

Henry swallowed. “If Your Grace means to suggest that I have concealed some binding claim upon her, I have not. She is free to enter into a matrimony.”

“Free,” Theodore repeated, with enough quiet distaste to make Henry color.

“Legally free, Your Grace.”

“Ah. A comforting standard.”

Henry’s hand bent the brim of the hat. “There is no other standard the law recognises.”

“The law recognises many things that should shame the men who profit by them.”

The boy looked as if he had been struck, and Theodore found no satisfaction in it. The shape of the matter was clear enough. A girl of twenty had cared for someone, or had been made to care, or had allowed herself the private folly of hope. Her brother had chosen silence because the truth was inconvenient to the buyer. Across the desk sat the buyer.

Theodore let himself look at it plainly because he had made a rule of plainness, and the rule did not soften merely because it had turned inward. Henry was selling a sister who may have been waiting for another man. He was doing it from fear, from selfishness, and from that particular weakness of a young gentleman who had never in his life been required to do a hard thing well. That part was simple. Theodore could despise him and find the clean edge of contempt almost restful.

His own part refused to stay clean.

He was five-and-thirty. Twice this year, once by his solicitor and once by his aunt, he had been advised that he must take a wife and produce an heir before the matter ceased to be private and became a subject family lawyers discussed when he was absent. A wife had become a thing he delayed the way a man delayed a tooth being drawn, privately, repeatedly, and with increasing irritation.

Now one had been delivered to his study on terms he would set himself. There would be no courtship to endure, no mother to flatter, no Season to attend, no smiling in overheated rooms while ambitious families presented their daughters like fine china and expected him to admire the pattern.

The convenience of it disgusted him. Worse was that he went on seeing it clearly, item by item, the way a man reads a bill he has no intention of querying.

“And if I decline,” Theodore said, “what then?”

Henry looked down. “Then I am ruined within the month.”

“Men survive ruin.”

“I do not expect to.”

Theodore’s gaze sharpened. “Explain yourself.”

Henry spoke to the hat. “I expect I shall shoot myself.”

Theodore did not move.

After a moment, Henry looked up, perhaps expecting horror, pity, alarm or something softer than the expression he received.