“Tricks,” she repeated faintly.
“Our lessons will begin on the morrow.” Above the affable twist of his lips, his gaze hardened. “This is the bargain I am willing to strike with you, Mara. Accept it or not. The choice is yours.”
“And if Idon’taccept?”
“Then you’ll accompany me to London, as we discussed, and play the part of doting wife to perfection before returning to Southwick Castlesansyour precious lover.”
“That isn’t a choice!” she burst out, half-rising from her chair. “That’s—that’s a decree!”
Ambrose shrugged. “I’ll give you the night to think it over.”
How gracious of you, she thought bitterly as he quit the room... locking the door behind him on his way out.
Chapter Seven
The Next Morning
Southwick Castle, Derbyshire, England
What had hedone?
Worse yet, what had heoffered?
As it was too early for brandy, even by his standards, Ambrose requested coffee, the color of it as black as his soul, and took it in the study that had once belonged to his father.
Since the late duke’s death, he’d ordered all material possessions—from the wall hangings to the furniture to the bookshelves—ripped out and replaced until nary a physical trace remained of the man that had incited pure terror and shame in a scared boy of eight. But even though the mahogany panels were gone and the rich stench of his father’s favorite cigar along with them, the memories of what had occurred here remained.
Memories of a childhood that Ambrose had spent his entire adulthood trying to suppress. Memories that came upon him in a spool of unwanted images and the scathing hiss of his father’s voice while he sipped his coffee and sat behind his desk as if nothing was wrong. As if when he’d crossed over the threshold from the hallway to here, he hadn’t still had a momentary clench of panic in his gut. As if he hadn’t temporarily stood frozen with his feet planted on the same floorboards that had once been his prison while he was yelled at and berated until tears rolled silently down his cheeks. Only then to be yelled at again, for what sort of a duke-to-becried?
A weak one, or so his father had said.
A cowardly one.
A duke who was never going to amount to anything, who was never going to impressanyone, and why had he been cursed with this embarrassing, sniveling worm of a child when he deserved a strong, capable son?
Well, he’d shown his sire differently, Ambrose mused with deliberate indifference as old emotions threatened to boil up and over. Not only had he amassed the largest fortune in coin and land that the Buxton family had ever known, but he’d also earned the unwavering respect—and fear—of his peers. It was a wise individual who realized the Duke of Southwick was not to be trifled with, and to risk invoking his wrath was to risk their own neck.
Ambrose did not crush his enemies.
That would be a mercy.
Instead, he ruined them. In every way that they could be ruined. And then, when they wished for the equivalent of death, when they pleaded for it, he merely smiled as his father had smiled at him when Ambrose stood in this very same study and wished for the earth to swallow him whole.
He had become everything that the late duke claimed he would never be, but his success was a bitter tonic when his sire wasn’t alive to see it. When he couldn’t shove it down the old man’s throat and watch as he choked on it.
It nagged at Ambrose that his father had died before he’d come into his own. But what nagged at him even more, what truly dug under his skin, was the fact that of every living being in England and her neighboring countries, the only person—just one—who did not respect and fear him in equal measure was his own wife.
Oh, she jumped at the sight of him. And in his arms, she trembled. But out of them... out of them she still planned to cuckold him in front of King and country! At least she’d said nothing to the contrary. And if he weren’t so infuriated by it, byher, he would have been in reluctant awe of her incredible brazenness. Instead, he found himself suffering from an emotion that he hadn’t experienced in years.
Uncertainty.
And in his uncertainty, he’d done the unthinkable: bargain with his own duchess. And it was a bargain she’d not yet accepted, because in a stroke of regrettable lunacy (surely there was no other explanation for it) he had given her the upper hand... leaving him to await her decision as if he were some sort of errant schoolboy rather than one of the most powerful dukes in a generation.
Lifting a quill pen, Ambrose spun it absently between his fingers as he contemplated his next move. Like in a game of chess, he preferred to be three or four steps ahead at all times. And that was where he’d thought he was with Mara. Yes, she’d thrown him off guard in the very beginning with her guileless brown eyes and gentle naivety, but he’d found his balance quickly enough and had enactedhisplan of a marriage lived apart. Aside from the matter of an heir, things had been going along swimmingly. Or so he’d assumed. Little had he known that while he was advancing his knight, Mara was playing a different game entirely.
The little minx had outfoxed him, and he wasn’t going to have it.
Rising from his chair, Ambrose rang for Humphrey and the loyal butler responded promptly.
