“Where is he?” The question was fairly thundered, the frustration and anger in the words rocketing through him on a flood of similar emotions. And anticipation. And desire.
Shame flooded him with the last. He shouldn’t want her. He should want to be rid of her. He should want never to see her again. He should want her punished for what she’d done—trapping him into this farce of a marriage, which was no farce at all because the entire aristocracy and every gossip rag in Britain seemed to know the truth of it.
“I shall stay here all day until he is receiving, so you’d might as well bring me to him.” Haven stood at that, telling himself he was heading for the door to his study because he wanted to protect his servant from her wrath and not because he was tied to her like a dog on a lead.
“M-my lady,” the footman stammered beyond. “I sh-shall see if the duke is at home.”
“No need,” she said.
“My lady! You cannot simply . . .”
But no one had ever successfully told Seraphina Talbot what she could and could not do, and she certainly wasn’t going to begin taking instruction from a footman when she did not take it from the footman’s master. “Oh, but I can! Don’t you read the papers? We are to be married!”
Anger flared at her words and Mal set his hand to the door handle of his office, preparing to summarily exit her from his property.
He opened the door as she arrived. “We’re not married yet, Lady Seraphina. I’ve still a week before I put my special license to use.”
One mahogany brow rose in a perfect arch. “I assure you, I am well aware of my ever-tightening yoke, Your Grace.”
It was his turn to look surprised. “It is I who limits your freedom, then?”
“That is the way of men and women, is it not?” She smacked him in the chest with a newspaper. “You punish me all you like. That is the bed in which I lay. But you leave my sisters out of it, you bastard.”
He took the paper. “I’m sure we are both a bit saddened by the fact that I am not, in fact, a bastard. If only I were, we wouldn’t be in such a situation.” When she did not reply, he looked to the paper, instantly knowing to what she was referring. Still, he could not resist irritating her. “The king is vacationing in Bath.”
“I should like to dunk you in a bath,” she said, setting a finger to the paper. “There.”
He’d read the story earlier in the day. Haven Hooked by Huntress! Irritation flared as he was returned to it. Irritation and hot embarrassment.
She did not wait for him to recover. “Shall I recite it from memory? Men!, warn the clearly deeply concerned editors of the News. Mind yourselves! Lowborn ladies lurk London-wide, longing for largesse!” Mal grimaced at the alliteration. She noticed. “Oh, you do not care for the overwrought language? Let me move on, for it gets significantly worse! Heed the harrowing tale of the Duke of Haven! Do not fall victim to wicked, wanton Wisteria . . . no matter how willing! These are Dangerous Daughters, all!”
He looked to Sera. “Do you wish me to disagree?”
She looked as though she wished him dead. “You don’t even know my sisters.” She raised her voice. “You never even came to my home to attempt to know them.”
“I do not know them,” he said. “But as it is my name being dragged through the mud and you who is doing the dragging, I am not predisposed to trust them with unmarried men.”
“Oh, yes. Poor unmarried men, weak-willed, doughy boys with neither control nor intelligence. So easily marked and ruined by women—ever more powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were all descended of witches.”
He raised a brow.
She continued, “Poor, sad men, so kind and blameless, fairly wandering the streets in their impotent impressionability. How well they must be protected from the wiles of women, who want nothing but their destruction.” She paused. “That is our tale, is it not? You, the tragically heroic Samson, and me, the temptress Delilah, thieving your power?”
Malcolm’s gaze narrowed. “You tell me. Delilah took money and land.”
“I took nothing from you.”
“No,” he said. “You did worse. There was no honorable thievery in your actions. You made a trade for your spoils.”
She gasped. “Are you calling me a whore?”
“Your words, Sera. Not mine.”
He should never have said it. For a moment he thought she might strike him. He would have taken it. Would have deserved it, even. But she didn’t. She straightened, her shoulders going stiff and square, and her fingers curling into fists. He stood, prepared for the blow. Knowing he deserved it and somehow unable to apologize for his behavior. He was too proud and too angry.
As was she. “Someday, you shall have to listen when I speak, Malcolm.”
“But not today.”
“I apologized.”
“Forgive me if three days is not enough for me to come to my senses about my soon-to-be wife trapping me into marriage.”
She did not look away. “You were there as well, Your Grace.”
“Yes. But with different intentions.” He turned away, not wanting to have the conversation again. Not wanting to remember. He waved at the door. “You are welcome to leave.”
“We do not have to marry.” She’d said it a dozen times in the hours following their discovery. Another dozen the day after. Of course they had to marry. “I made a mistake,” she added, softly. “I should never have agreed—”
“Stop.” He didn’t wish to hear it, the confirmation that she’d trapped him. He did not wish to relive the moment of realization.
She did not stop. “And if I told you it wasn’t a trap? Not at the start? Not in any of the days leading up to the end? Because it wasn’t a trap, Malcolm.” Christ, he wanted to believe her. “It was all real. I was me and you were you and everyone said it couldn’t be—”
“Stop.” He could barely contain his rage. “Still, you weave your pretty tale. I don’t care.” He took a breath, forcing himself calm. “You landed your duke, as my mother landed my father before me. I thought you were in it for me, and you were in it for a title and I should have seen it coming and that is that.”
Silence fell, thick and unpleasant as she considered her next words and he willed them to be anything but another lie. He did not think he could stomach another lie. Not from this woman who had seemed so much the truth for so long.
Finally, she spoke, something like panic in her words. “I’ve thought about this; if I leave—if I disappear, I give my sisters a chance at futures unencumbered by my scandal.”
“You can’t cleanse the scandal from them,” he said. “They own it as they own your name. They are—forever—Dangerous Daughters. Just as I am always Hoodwinked Haven.”
She swallowed and looked away. “I never intended for this. I simply thought they would find us and we would marry. And we would be happy.”
He could not contain the humorless laugh at that. “That’s the irony, is it not? That we would have been happy.”