Jennifer Ashley - The Duke’s Perfect Wife

Eleanor’s eyes widened. “I’ll thank you to believe I know my own mind. Of course Mrs. Palmer is cool and manipulative—she has had to be, a woman in such a position, alone in the world, with you as her only support. But you did not see her. She knew that by telling me, everything she had with you would be at an end. She was resigned to it. Resigned. You think me an unworldly young woman, brought up by a naive gentleman, but I know much about people. Enough to see that you broke her. She devoted herself to you—she would do anything in the world for you—and you broke her. Why should I not think that you will do the same to me?”

Hart could not breathe. Eleanor stood there like some avenging angel, making Hart face everything he was, everything he’d become. By his own choice.

He ran a shaking hand over his face, finding it wet with sweat. You broke her. Maybe he had. Angelina had soaked up his needs, his terrors, his tempers, and his frustrations like a sponge. She’d taken everything he’d thrown at her. This did not make her a saint—she’d been far from that—but she’d put up with Hart and his life.

But Hart Mackenzie could never bow, apologize, or back away for the sake of another. He’d never learned how to control his anger or his selfish desires—to have any idea that he ought to control them. His father had vented anger by terrorizing, and Hart had never learned there could be any other way.

Whatever Hart wanted, he took. Those who got in his way paid the price.

He looked at Eleanor with her quiet strength. No matter what he’d done or how hard he’d tried, he’d never truly won Eleanor. And that made him so angry.

“I can ruin your father,” he said. “Don’t think I can’t. Ruin him, ruin you… easily.”

Eleanor gave him a grim nod. “I am certain you could. You are wealthy and powerful, and everyone will say what a fool I am for turning you down.”

“I’m not jesting, El. I can destroy him. Is that what you want?”

Hart waited for Eleanor’s fear, for her need to say anything, do anything, to make him withdraw the threat. He waited for her desperation to put Hart back to his laughter and wicked jokes, to smooth him over, to do what he wanted. Everything Angelina had done.

Eleanor looked at him for the longest time, shadows from the overgrown garden playing across her face. She never registered fear. Only sadness.

“Please go, Hart.”

Hart growled. “You agreed to marry me. We have a contract. It’s too late.”

Eleanor shook her head. “No. Please go.”

Hart caught her arm in a hard grip. She stared at him in amazement, and he softened his hold but didn’t let go.

“What will you do without me, Eleanor? You have no one to go to, and you have nothing. I can give you everything in the world. I told you that, remember?”

“Yes, but what price will I pay for it?”

Hart lost his temper. He knew, even then and all through the long years, that it was that temper that had lost him everything. He’d been too young and too sure of himself to understand that not everyone in the world could be bullied, especially not Eleanor Ramsay.

“You are nothing.” The words came out a snarl. “You are the daughter of an impoverished earl who is too feckless to understand where his own dinner comes from. Is that what you want for the rest of your life? Poverty and idiocy? If I walk away from you, you are finished. Ruined. No one will want Hart Mackenzie’s leavings.”

Eleanor slapped him. He barely felt the sting, but he grabbed Eleanor’s wrist again, and she glared at him, eyes blazing.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She wrenched herself from his grasp, glared at him another moment, then turned and walked away. Head high, her shawl and light gown billowing in the wind, Eleanor Ramsay walked out of Hart’s life.

Hart felt himself falling down, down, down, into an abyss of his own making. “El!” he’d called, his voice cracking, pathetic.

Eleanor did not stop and did not turn back. She walked on, never looking at him, until she was lost in the shadows of the overgrown garden. Hart had put his hands on top of his head and watched her go, his heart aching until he thought it would burst.

He hadn’t let it go at that, of course. Hart tried over the next weeks to make Eleanor change her mind. He’d attempted to recruit Lord Ramsay, only to find that Eleanor had told him everything… every embarrassing detail.

“I’m sorry, Mackenzie,” Lord Ramsay had said sorrowfully when Hart approached him. “I’m afraid I must stand behind my daughter. You did play a rather bad game.”

Even Hart’s argument that he’d taken Eleanor’s virginity brought him nothing.

“I’ve not started a child,” Eleanor had said when he’d argued this. She’d not even blushed when Hart had laid out the fact that he’d ruined her to her father. “I know the signs. I’ll likely not marry anyone else anyway, so it does not matter, does it?”

Eleanor and her father, the pair of them with their stubborn, steadfast, unyielding Scots stolidity, had defeated him.

End of Act III, Hart, the villain, exits. Never to return.

Act IV had to be Hart’s life since Eleanor—his father’s death, marrying Sarah, losing her on one day and his son the next. Hart, who never cried, had stretched across the floor of his bedroom and wept brokenly after he’d laid Sarah and Hart Graham Mackenzie to rest in the overdone Mackenzie mausoleum.

This then, was Act V. The heroine returns to drive the villain insane.

“Hart?”

Eleanor saw Hart blinking at the light as he jerked around to face her and the lantern she carried. His hand was on the chiseled letters of his son’s name, and he was holding on to them for dear life.

Hart’s gaze was unfocused, his golden eyes glittering and moist. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “It’s too damp. You’ll take sick again.”

Eleanor walked to him. Hart kept his hands on the plaque, as though loathe to take his fingers from the letters.

“What are you doing here?” Eleanor asked. “You have a perfectly good fire in your bedchamber. I saw it.”

Hart turned his face back to the tomb. “I was afraid.”

“Of what?” It was cold, which made her hurt arm ache, but Eleanor did not want to leave him here. “Tell me.”

“Losing you.” Hart looked at her again, his eyes anguished. “I was remembering you throwing the ring at me and telling me to go away, how arrogant I was.”

Eleanor shivered, thinking of that terrible day and how enraged and how proud they both had been. “That was a long time ago.”

“No, I’m still fucking arrogant. I should have sent you home when you came bleating to me about a job. But, no, I coerced you into staying with me, and you almost died for it.”

“Not everything in the world is your fault, Hart,” Eleanor said.

“Yes, it is. I manipulate the world, and then I suffer the consequences. Others more so than me.”

Eleanor’s gaze went to the tomb, where lovely, shy Sarah lay, along with her tiny son, Lord Hart Graham Mackenzie, one day old.

“You blame yourself for their deaths too,” she said softly.

“Of course I do.”

“Sarah would have died carrying someone else’s son,” Eleanor said. “It sounds cruel to say it, but she wasn’t strong enough to have a baby. Some women are not.”

“She didn’t want to have a baby at all. She hated being with child. She did it because that was what she’d been raised to do.”

True enough. Perhaps if Sarah and her son had lived, Sarah would have changed her mind about wanting a baby. Perhaps she would have realized how much she could love her son, and thereby brought Hart some measure of happiness.

Hart caressed the letters of baby Graham’s name. “Mac likes to say, We’re Mackenzies. We break what we touch. But this little Mackenzie… he broke me.”

Eleanor’s heart squeezed. When she’d received the black-edged card from Hart with the formal words, His Grace, the Duke of Kilmorgan, regrets to announce… she’d cried. Cried for Hart and for Sarah, and for the child who’d never grow up. She’d cried for herself, for what hadn’t been, and what could never be.

Hart finally let go of the letters. “I held him in my hands,” he said, showing her his broad palms. “Graham was so tiny, and he just fit into them. I held him, and I loved him.”

“I know you did.”

Hart looked at her, his eyes still dark in the lantern’s glare. “I never knew I could love like that. I don’t know to this day where the feelings came from. But looking at him—so small, so perfect… I realized, that moment, that I’d never entirely be like my father. I’d feared and fought being like him all my life, but when I looked at Graham, I knew I was safe from that. Because I could never hurt this little boy.”

Eleanor touched his arm, which was steely hard beneath his coat. “No.”

“He was so frail. I would have done anything in the world to keep him safe. Anything. But I couldn’t.” The pain in his eyes cut her. “I couldn’t save him, El. I should have been able to. I’m a strong man, the strongest I know. And I couldn’t save him.”

Eleanor pressed her forehead to his shoulder. “I know, Hart. I’m so, so sorry.”

He laughed a little, the sound bitter. “Do you know, people tried to tell me that Graham’s death was part of God’s plan and that he’d gone to a better place? I nearly punched someone for telling me that. A better place. Rot that. I needed him here.”

“Yes.”

“When I looked at Graham, I saw what I’d become. You showed me part of the truth when you threw me over, but this tiny boy made me face myself. The blackest, deadliest part of me.”

His words ran out, but Hart remained still, staring at his hands, head bowed.

Eleanor stepped in front of him and put her unhurt hand across his palms. “Come to the house,” she said. “You’re too cold out here. It’s time to get warm.”

Eleanor might wear the bandages, but he was the wounded one, Hart thought as he stripped back the covers on Eleanor’s newly made bed.

Under Eleanor’s heavy coat, she wore one of the old serge gowns she’d brought with her from Glenarden. She saw his frown as she slid off the coat and shook her head. “Did you think I’d go traipsing across your lawn in satin finery? That is the trouble with ladies’ gowns, terribly impractical for a good tramp.”

“Why the devil were you having a good tramp in the middle of the night?” Hart helped her extricate her arm from the sleeve. “Did you want to make yourself ill again?”

“I am perfectly fine, thank you very much, and I was looking for you.”

“You found me.” Sick at heart, floundering. He’d turned, and there she’d been.

Tell her everything, Ian had advised.

Sorry, Ian. I’ve had enough heartache for one night.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Hart said.

Eleanor rose on tiptoe and kissed his lips. “You won’t.”

Did she say that because she trusted him, or because she was that sure of herself?

“I’ll leave you to sleep.”

Eleanor pressed another kiss to his lips. “No, indeed. Sleep with me.”

She left him to walk to the bed. In the circle of the fire’s warmth, she unbuttoned her gown and let it fall, then stripped off what little she wore under it. She hadn’t bothered with a corset or layers of petticoats for her stroll. Her round backside rose as she leaned down to pick up the dress from the floor. She smiled over her shoulder at him as she straightened up.

God help me.

Hart stripped off his coat and muddy shoes at the same time, nearly tearing the coat in his hurry. He shed waistcoat and shirt, undershirt and socks as Eleanor lifted her coverlet and got into the bed. She lay back against the pillows, her bandaged arm across the quilts, and watched Hart pull off his kilt and let it drop.

Her smile widened as her gaze went unashamedly to his naked arousal. She lifted the covers. “Come in and get warm.”

Hart slid in beside her, on her right side so he wouldn’t touch her bandages. He drew his fingers across her sleek shoulder, and kissed her skin.

Making love to her the conventional way might hurt her injury, but Hart didn’t mind being unconventional. He slid his leg across both of hers, putting them inside his bent knee. He kissed Eleanor’s lips, slow, light kisses, enjoying her softness.

She tasted delightful. Firelight brushed her skin, and her warmth beneath the covers was chasing away his bone-deep chill.