“I believe so.”
“Then allow me to be explicit.” He kept his voice level. “A son conceived within a lawful marriage carries the full rights of a legitimate heir whether he is born before or after his father’s death.En ventre sa mère.English courts have acknowledged the doctrine for centuries. If you carry a boy, he is the tenth Duke of Oxley the instant he is born alive. Not a claimant, not a candidate, but an heir at law. My tenure here would be rendered entirely null.”
He paused.
“Your proposal, as you have framed it, is not entirely accurate. If we marry before the birth, the child does not merely come under my guardianship. Jerome’s claim would be extinguished altogether. The child would be accounted my lawful issue. There would be no posthumous heir. Only my heir, succeeding me in the ordinary course as the eleventh duke.”
Josephine absorbed this without flinching. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That is what I intended to say.”
“Furthermore.” He held her gaze. “As the heir presumptive to this title, I had a legal right to be informed of this pregnancy from the moment you knew of it. That is not merely custom. It is obligation, and it exists for precisely this reason, to prevent the circumstances you are now in. I did not grow up in a ducal household, but I know as much about the law.” He let the silence sit for a moment. “I should have been told at once.”
She did not look away. “I know,” she said. “I was not certain you could be trusted.”
It was, he reflected, a more honest answer than he had expected, and it disarmed him more effectively than any apology could have done.
He stepped back. Three feet. Four. Not enough. The taste of her lingered, warm and herbal and faintly salt, and his hands hung at his sides like tools he no longer knew how to use. The air between them, which moments ago had been charged with the electricity of two bodies pressed together, now felt cold and foreign, as though someone had opened a window onto a January night.
He wanted anger. Anger was clean, decisive. But what he felt instead was the sick, hollow sensation of allowing himself, for exactly two minutes, to believe that something exceptional had happened to him, and then discovering it was a transaction. A business proposition dressed up in trembling lips and gray eyes and a scent like chamomile and mint, and he, who had negotiated contracts with men twice his age since before his majority, had not seen it coming. Had not wanted to see it coming, which was worse.
She was not his enemy. He knew that. He could see the sorrow in her face, the sorrow of gambling the only card she held and losing. That did not make the sting of it any less sharp.
“I think,” he said, and his voice was very controlled, the words measured out with no margin for waste, “that you should go.”
Her chin came up. Even now, tears tracking down her cheeks, hands trembling, there was a dignity to her that he found both admirable and infuriating, because it made anger very difficult to sustain, and anger was the only emotion that did not lead somewhere dangerous. She stood there in her black bombazine, with her hair coming loose from its pins and her lips still faintly swollen from his kiss, and she looked at him with an expression that was not defiance but anguish.
“Your Grace?—”
“Go,” he repeated, gently. “Please. I have work to do, and I need to think.”
She gathered herself, a visible act of will, the poise reassembling like armor refastened after a blow, and walked to the door with the refined glide with which she had entered the room. At the threshold, she paused. He thought she might turn. She did not. The door closed with a soft click, and the room was suddenly, oppressively, empty.
Alistair stood motionless for a long time. The fire had burned down to embers while they talked, while they kissed, while the world rearranged itself into a shape he did not recognize, and now the library was growing cold. The scent of chamomile lingered like an accusation.
Not wholly.
Two words. Two miserable, devastating words that told him everything he needed to know and nothing he wanted to hear. The attraction was real. She had admitted that much. But it was tangled in desperation and strategy and the survival instincts of a woman with no other cards to play. He could not build anything on a foundation of need. He knew how it ended, knew the shape of the yoke before it settled across the shoulders, knewthe way a man’s own desires went quiet, then silent, then extinct, smothered beneath the relentless weight of being indispensable.
Being needed was not the same as being wanted. Need was a transaction. Need was “you can loosen the dowager’s grip” and “we need you” and the desperate arithmetic of a woman calculating her survival. Want was something else entirely, and Alistair had lived long enough without it that he had almost convinced himself he did not require it.
Almost.
He sat down at the desk and picked up his quill. The contract needed attention. The tenancy records needed sorting. The steward needed sacking. London needed him. The mill needed him. Everyone needed him, and not one soul in thirty-five years had ever simply wanted him.
The numbers swam before his eyes, meaningless as ancient runes. He set the quill down.
Not wholly.
He shoved the ledger aside, leaned back, and stared at the vaulted ceiling, where carved owls regarded him with their eternal unblinking indifference. Outside, the rain continued its patient assault on the windows. The fire died to ash. And Alistair Fraser-Oxley, tenth Duke of Oxley, industrialist, mill owner, guardian of four imprisoned cousins and reluctant heir to a collapsing estate, sat alone in his library and thought about the taste of mint tea on a woman’s lips.
Damnation.
CHAPTER 6
The sound of laughter reached him first.
It was a thin, tentative thing, more breath than mirth, but it stopped Alistair in the corridor outside the family drawing room as surely as if someone had placed a hand on his chest. He had been at Fortunestone Hall for two days now and had not yet heard any of his cousins laugh. The sound was so unexpected that he paused with his hand on the doorframe, listening. Someone was speaking in a low, animated murmur, and another voice answered with a bright, rising note that dissolved into that fragile laughter again, and then a third voice shushed them both with an urgency that suggested the hilarity was forbidden and therefore all the more valuable.
He pushed the door open, and the room fell silent.
