Page 60 of An Inconvenient Duke

“And now?”

“Former soldiers don’t have that.” He slowly wrapped the linen strip around her hand to protect the cut and let it heal. If she were lucky, the scar would be small and would fade with time. But it would never completely go away. “They’ve returned to a country they barely recognize, where they can’t find work or support their families. The crown would rather renovate a palace or throw a party than give out the back pay that the men are owed or fund hospitals to care for them, and Parliament makes it even harder by putting into place laws to protect its own interests by driving up the price of corn until the same men who fought so hard to defend English liberty now have to beg for food in the streets in order to survive.”

He tied off the end of the bandage. Then he lifted her hand to his mouth to place a kiss against the wound, his eyes fixed on hers.

“So when they see how their brothers in arms have been treated,” he finished with somber sarcasm, “men who were just as heroic on the battlefield as those given peerages, why would any former officer not want one?”

She trembled, but he knew it wasn’t because of the cut. Of all the civilians he knew, she would be the only one who understood what he was telling her, who would be just as outraged about the plight of former soldiers as he was.

“But you, even now as a duke, you’re still fighting.” She touched her hand to his face, and the bandage scratched softly against his cheek. Her voice grew somber. “Are you ever going to stop waging war and find peace, Marcus?”

Nineteen

For a long moment, their gazes locked, and Dani held her breath, waiting for him to answer.

But the only reply she received was silence as he took the glass of brandy from her and tossed down what was left in a single swallow, then walked away to refill it.

Her chest tightened as the limits of their newfound trust were so clearly exposed. They’d shared their bodies intimately tonight, but there were still some places that were off-limits. Unfortunately, that included his heart.

She’d promised Claudia that she’d help Marcus to find a sense of purpose. But how on earth was she supposed to do that when he refused to talk about himself?

Wrapping the coat around herself, she slid off the settee to gather up her clothes. She hesitated when she reached for her stockings, and an unbidden heat stung at her eyes.

With a curse at herself for being so sentimental—and now emotional, as her sight blurred from the unshed tears—she snatched them up and tossed the lot of her clothes onto the settee. Her hands shook as she reached for her chemise, the neckline of which had been stretched out of shape from Marcus’s hands in his eagerness to touch. She’d have to throw it away. There would be no explaining this to Alice when her maid—

“How do you stop waging war when it’s all you’ve ever known?”

His deep voice twined around her spine. She paused as she slipped the cotton material over her head, her heart skittering at his sobering question that revealed a vulnerability and doubt she never would have suspected lurked within him. Needing a moment to absorb that, she let the material caress down her body and fall into place around her legs.

“You start by laying down your arms.” The irony of that! Even as she said it, she let her gaze drift around her at the weapons affixed to the walls. “All of them.”And then you open your heart to me.

“Not when you’re in the middle of a fight.” This time, his voice was much closer, but she ignored both it and the sharp pang of longing in her belly.

She slipped on her corset, only to curse herself when she realized that she’d need his help to lace it up. And again with the buttons of her dress. Undressing had been so much more fun. Then, he couldn’t seem to come close enough to her, not even with bare skin against bare skin, not even when he’d been inside her…

But now, even as he stood just behind her and reached out to tie up her corset without being asked, he felt half a world away.

“This isn’t that kind of a fight,” she whispered. But she knew what he meant, and when he finished with her laces, she surrendered the argument—for now—and changed battle tactics by changing topics. “Lady Hartsham didn’t seem to know about how Elise died. When I told her that she had been murdered, Beatrice was shocked by it.”

“Are you certain?”

She nodded, having no doubts at all about that. “But not by the fact that Elise was running her own network and rescuing women by herself.” Passing over the stockings, she reached for her dress. She couldn’t have borne to have Marcus watch her as she put those on. “Beatrice said that she’d told Elise about the girls in the brothels, but she never expected your sister to try to rescue them on her own.”

“You think she told you the truth?”

“About that? Yes.” She pulled the dress on over her head and carefully twisted the satin into place. “Beatrice has never been able to hide her emotions. That was one of the reasons why I never gave her more responsibility inside Nightingale.”

Not turning to face him, she waited with her back toward him for him to button her up, just as he’d done with her corset. He did, and she reflexively shivered at the inadvertent scrape of his knuckles against her back. She closed her eyes to keep herself collected. How would she ever be able to look at him again without thinking of the intimacies they’d shared tonight?

“But Elise gave her responsibility,” he drawled, his mouth so close to her shoulder that his warm breath tickled at her ear.

“I don’t think so, not based upon what Beatrice said.”

He took her hips in his hands and turned her to face him. “What did she say, exactly?”

“She and Elise had been having discussions about the prostitutes, the women that Nightingale couldn’t help because vanishing them would have been too dangerous. Beatrice knew that some of the women had been kidnapped from the mills in the north, brought to London, and sent into the brothels. She told Elise about them.” She dropped her gaze to the floor, the stab of betrayal still fresh. “Apparently to complain about me and how overly cautious I was being, how there were women whom we’d turned our backs on.”

His hands tightened on her waist. “So Elise set about attempting to save them by herself.”