Page 6 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“You do not believe me,” Henry said.

“I believe you are frightened. That is not the same thing.”

“I am past frightened, Your Grace.”

“Men who are past frightened do not usually announce their demises as if declining soup.”

Henry’s lips parted, then closed again. “You think me a coward.”

“I think you have discovered a threat that costs nothing to make and may purchase sympathy.”

Henry rose halfway from the chair, then seemed to recall himself and sat back down with visible effort. “I came to you because I had nowhere else to go.”

“No. You came to me because you believed I would be cold enough to consider the bargain.”

That silenced him.

Theodore stood and walked to the window. The square below was grey with October damp. A maidservant knelt on the steps of the house opposite, sleeves pushed up as she scrubbed at stone already darkened by soot and weather. A coal cart had stopped at the corner. Men moved, servants worked, horses shifted in harness, and the common commerce of the afternoon went on below as though no one upstairs had been asked to decide the course of a stranger’s life.

Behind him, Henry drew breath.

“Do not speak,” Theodore said.

The breath was released without words.

That restraint surprised him, and raised the boy a little in his estimation.

He did the arithmetic. The notes and the private debts together would come to something under nine thousand pounds. He could find nine thousand pounds without selling anything or troubling anyone, which made the sum almost insulting in its smallness against the thing it would buy.

He did the other arithmetic too, the one he liked less.

A wife was an opening.

A man with no wife, no children, and no domestic affections presented an enemy with very little to take hold of. Theodore had spent nine years presenting precisely that to the one enemy who mattered.

The Earl of Greaves had watched him for those nine years, patient as a tick, ever since Theodore had stood in the Lords in his second session and defeated the sugar bill that would have made the Greaves fortune whole. Forty thousand pounds, Greaves had lost, or had expected to make, which to a certain kind of man amounted to the same grievance. The earl had never moved against him. He had never needed to, and more importantly, he had never been able to. Theodore had given him no flank to come at.

A wife was a flank.

A wife could be frightened, flattered, followed, or worse still, compromised. Greaves was exactly the sort of man who studied the soft places of others while keeping his own coat buttoned to the throat.

Theodore set that beside the nine thousand pounds, the convenience, Henry’s omissions, and the girl who may have been waiting for someone.

Then he proceeded, because the alternative to Theodore taking her was some other man taking her, and that man might not weigh the thing at all. Some other man would simply take. At least under Theodore’s roof the rain stayed out, and no one raised a hand to a wife, and the worst she would suffer was the cold of a husband who did not pretend to warmth he did not possess.

It was not reasoning of a high order. He had heard better arguments made for worse things.

He turned from the window. “You spoke of my requirements.”

Henry stood at once, as if summoned to judgment. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“You have heard, I suppose, what is remarked upon in certain quarters concerning my character.”

“I have heard Your Grace called severe.”

“Pray, try again.”

Henry’s eyes betrayed a momentary agitation.