“Why don’t you come clean and marry her, Jack?”
“I’ve told you before. I’m never getting married.”
“That’s sounding a little thin. You went to balls. You were making the motions of looking for a duchess.”
“I was trying to forget Helen at the time.”
“Elizabeth is the one you should forget.”
Jack bit down on his tongue before answering. “I’ve forgotten her. Elizabeth isnotthe reason I’m never getting married.”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s not just Elizabeth. It’s my mother. It’s the women I’ve been with since Elizabeth.”
“You don’t want to get married because you don’t want to be cuckolded.”
Jack shrugged. Yes, he didn’t want to be cuckolded, but it was more than that. Marriage was a whole host of things he had shied away from for years. Obligation. Responsibility. Although he had both of those things now with his title, whether he wanted them or not. And, truth to tell, of all the women he had ever bedded, Helen was the least likely ever to constitute a burden. He was far more likely to be a burden to her.
So it wasn’t duty he feared. He didn’t want . . . oh, fuck it. He didn’t want to care. He didn’t want to care enough to feel betrayal. Agony. Loss. Grief. But he could barely say that to himself. He could never say it to Phineas.
“You do know, don’t you, that most men are never cuckolded?” Phineas asked.
“That’s not been my experience.”
“With the exception of your mother, Jack, you’ve chosen all these women. All these unfaithful women. It sounds like this woman, this countess, has chosen you. It’s a good start.”
“She didn’t choose me. I practically forced myself on her.”
“She came to your bedchamber in Scotland and asked you to bed her, you old salt. Sounds like she did the choosing, all right. You probably wouldn’t have given her a second thought if she hadn’t come to you when you were so deprived of a warm place to put your cock. If she hadn’t come to you in Scotland for what, you said? Her training. I must remember that.” Phineas chuckled. “Her training in how to bed you even though she didn’t know it was you. You were vulnerable to her wiles.”
“She doesn’t have wiles, Phin.”
“What does she have?”
“She has will. Tenacity. A strength, a—”
“It sounds like you’re buying horseflesh, not thinking of a wife.”
Jack bristled. “That’s the whole point. I’m not thinking of a wife.”
There was more he had been going to say about Helen to Phineas. How she could be both so unyielding and so soft, and he felt it was a privilege to be the one to see that softness. How she expected more of him, just as his best commanding officers had, and how she made him yearn to meet those expectations, be that better man. How she challenged him and forced him to see that his money and his power didn’t have to weigh him down, but could free him.
And how she made him feel.
Not alone.
“You don’t think it’s a bad sign she asked me to bed her so she could seduce another man?”
“The other man, being you? But as the Duke of Dunmore.”
“Right.”
“She doesn’t care about the other man.”
“Exactly. She cares about his title, what he’ll do for her—”
“Wait, wait, wait. I thought you said she wanted to marry Dunmore for Kinmarloch. That she would do anything for her people. That she gave away a ham, rescued a child,et cetera. She wants to marry Dunmore for them.”
