The Day of the Duchess (Scandal & Scoundrel, #3)

by Sarah MacLean

So Seraphina did what she could, reaching for her dress, scooting back across the floor with it clutched to her. “We cannot go further.” He did not move from where he sat, bare from the waist up, one arm resting on a bent leg, clad in dark, soft buckskin. “I did not ask to go further.” “But you wish to.” “I’m a grown man, Sera, and I have waited for this—for you—for years. Of course I wish to.” His gaze was hot and honest. “But I shall wait for you. Until you are ready.” She hated the words. Hated the way they tempted her. The way they whispered a promise that he understood. Of course, he couldn’t. “I shall never be ready.” “Perhaps not. But perhaps you will. And when you are, I shall be here.” He said it as though he had nothing to do but languish here, in his underwater lair, waiting for her to wander in and ask him to make love to her. And something about that, about the certainty in his words, as though he would wait for her forever, unsettled her more than anything else could. “That particular act has never served us well,” she said quietly. “Or do you not remember?” She hated the words, loathed that she gave voice—even in a vague, small way—to their past. To the child they had not planned. That he had not wanted. And to all the others they would never have.

“I remember, Sera,” he said, and the words seemed wrenched from him, as well, impossibly so. She could still hear his vow never to have a child. She could still feel the sting of it now, years later, and the ache of it after she discovered he would have one, nonetheless. Just as she could still feel the quiet happiness that had consumed her when she’d known she would never be alone, even if she never had him. And then, the devastation when she realized that alone was all she’d ever be. “Let me go,” she whispered, the words ragged, shot through with fear that he might resist them. That he might try to keep her there. That she might choose to stay. He took another step back. And another, until the path to the exit was clear for her. “You are free,” he said. “We’re neither of us free,” she said. “But we can be.” Lie. He watched her, unmoving, his beautiful broad chest gold in the firelight, his face all light and shadows. And then he threw his weapon. “I never asked to be.”

“What a lie that is.” She narrowed her gaze on him, and let her anger fly. “It was you who ended us, Duke. Not I.” Before he could reply, she escaped.

He raked his gaze over her, breathing her in, a cool breeze on the summer day. And that was when the blow came, wicked and unexpected. She was with child. She was with child, and she hadn’t told him.

He steeled his countenance, refusing to show her how the truth consumed him. How it struck like a blow. A devastating punishment. And then he turned on his heel and went to find a way to punish her, as well.

“I mean, not as soon as he discovers how much he loves her.” He could have been ashamed. He could have been defensive. But instead, Felicity’s words, filled with truth, made him relieved. Finally, he thought. Finally someone saw it. Someone who believed it. Two someones. Two someones, who listened when he said, “I know how much I love her. I’ve known it for years.” They looked at each other, then to him, their judgment plain. They thought him an imbecile. “You should tell her, then.”

He might not have looked her in the eyes and said, with no thought of what might come of it, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, “Tell you that I love you.”

“No, I’m loyal. Which is a thing you have never been.” An instinctual denial caught in his throat as the Countess Clare called from her place, “And amen to that! Hit him in the head this time!”

Because when he reached her, his fingers reaching for her, curling around the back of her head, she tilted her face up to his, her own hand reaching. Her own fingers curling. And, God in heaven, his lips were on hers and she was his—all breath and touch and long, glorious kiss.

“You refused to free me, even when I came to you, offering you freedom, as well. Offering you a future. Even when I offered to get down on my knees and beg you for it.”

“And all that before you meted out the worst of your punishments.” He would never forgive himself for that moment—for taking another woman to exact revenge upon his wife. “I cannot take it back. I can only tell you that I—” “I know.” She cut him off. “You were angry.”

He let her go, watching as she moved to the monument at the center of the clearing. To the stone angel there, seated on a platform etched with two simple words. Beloved Daughter. Silence stretched forever, until he could no longer bear it. She crouched, placing her fingers to the letters. “You did this.”

“I came to you after it was done,” he said. “My hands still frozen from the cold. My boots covered in snow and dirt. I came to tell you that I wished to start anew. You were asleep, but no longer at risk. I told myself there would be time to win you. To love you.”

His tears came as hers did, from a deep, silent place, filled with regret and frustration and an understanding that there was no way to erase the past. That the only possibility for their future lay in forgiveness. If she could ever forgive him. If he could ever forgive himself.

“I was late, Angel,” he said, the words coming on a near beg, unashamed. “I’ve always been too late. I’ve always missed you. I had no plans to come to Highley for the summer. I was headed to search for you again. I will never stop missing you.” He took her lips, the kiss soft and lingering, a salve. She had always been his salve.

And there, on his knees, he pressed kisses to their entwined fingers, and whispered her name until she could no longer bear it, and she took his face in her hands, tilting him up to face her, staring deep into his eyes before joining him, kneeling before him.

“I want my wedding night.” The words were out before she could imagine their impact, on them both. He froze above her, the truth of the statement, the promise of the moment, the memory of the past, all of it was there, between them, hovering. She couldn’t stop herself from continuing. “We married, but I was never your bride, Mal.”

“I think you could tell me it did not matter. I think you could tell me it meant nothing at all, and I would do it anyway. I’ve never been able to resist you.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to.” She left the rest unsaid. You matter. This matters.

So much so that she whispered there, “Mine.” “Always,” he replied without hesitation. “Forever.”

She smiled against him. “Show me what you like, husband.” And the word undid him, as it did her, sending a pleasure pooling hot and heavy to her core as she parted her lips and took him long and slow and deep, hard and hot as he lost control of his words, cursing and praying in equal measure as she licked and sucked and drew him deep, wanting nothing more than to give him pleasure and to take her own.

She tore her lips from his. “All the time we were apart—” He nodded. “I know.” He didn’t, though. “Everything I ever imagined this could be . . .” “I know.” He kissed her again, reaching between them, finding the spot just above the place where they were joined.

And then she looked into his eyes, desperate for release, and recognized the edge in him, saw the way they catapulted toward it. “Mal,” she whispered. “I love you.”

Find yourself a red frock and do your best to get him alone once you’re wearing it. If you can do that in his private study, all the better.”

“It seems your wife remains uninterested in being your wife, Your Grace.”

“Wot, that the Sparrow seems a good plow?”

“What are you smiling at, Red?” Mal smirked. “Only that it’s nice to see you laid low by one of them, as well.” “Leave,” Caleb said, jabbing one finger in Mal’s direction before waving it in front of Sesily’s nose. “And take this one with you.”

“Gone is the flower and gone is the crow; gone is the future that promised to grow. Farewell the past, the present, the now; farewell the ship, the anchor, the bow.”

“So we lie down and pillow our heads; so we lie down in the cool of our beds. We put aside dreaming, and we put aside toys; and remember our days in the heart of a boy.”

“For all the grabbing Grab-hands does, you’d think he’d be a bit more in favor of a divorce,” Seleste said, a touch too loudly, drawing a collection of harrumphs from below for her inappropriate and exceedingly apt assessment of Lord Grabeham. She also drew a wink and a smirk from her handsome husband. “Oh, yes, I do like that wig.” “Seleste!” Seleste lowered her voice to a whisper. “Well, it’s true.”

“Well, you’ve done a poor job at it, as the count is a tie.” Was that a smile on his lips? She could not look away from that expression—not happy and not sad. What was happening? “Ah. Well. Perhaps, as I am here, now, I might be able to cast a verbal vote?”

“I have known I wanted to marry you since the moment I met you, when you gave me a dressing down for insulting women’s motives in marriage. You were magnificent.” He pointed. “Mayweather was there. He would have thought so, too, except he was in love with Helen already.”

“But as the years passed, I realized it was a fool’s thought. Because what of him? What of the boy, born that same day, in the heart of a girl?” The words were thick with emotion, and Sera’s knuckles turned white with the force she used to clutch the railing. “What of the boy who hadn’t seen the sun until he’d seen her? The moon? The stars?” He stilled, staring up at her, his gaze tracking every inch of her face as she did the same, wishing he were closer.

“What of the boy who couldn’t let her go?” Tears came, hot and unexpected. “That was always the problem,” she said to him.

“I know you think we failed, my love, but we did not. I failed. I failed you.” She shook her head, tears coming hard and fast. “No.”

“Yes, love. I’m through chasing you. I shall have to be happy with finding you in the stars, at night.” He paused, and she gasped, realizing what he was about to do. “There will never be another for me. But it is not my choice that matters; it is yours. And if you do not want this, then I would rather you be free of it, as you’ve wished since the start. To begin anew. To choose your happiness somewhere else. With . . .” He paused, began again. “. . . with someone else. Someone you can trust. Someone you believe.”

“My Lord Chancellor, I vote Content.” And, like that, they were divorced.

“The Dove.” The name the sailors bestowed. “They said it was because I only ever sang like mourning.” He closed his eyes, hating the words and the knowledge that came with them. Knowledge and memory and regret. He should have been there to hold her while she mourned. To love her through it. They should have loved each other through it.

“Would you like to know why I kept the name?” “Yes.” More than anything. “Because doves mate for life, and I knew there would never be another for me.”

“And now, I want to get down on my knees and beg you to choose me.”

For a rich, riveting history of divorce in England, I recommend Lawrence Stone’s Road to Divorce, which was a constant companion while I wrote—much to my own husband’s trepidation. The extensive Parliamentary collections at the British Library were also essential to this part of the story.

The ballroom is real! There is a nearly identical underwater ballroom at Witley Park in Surrey, a massive estate built in the late nineteenth century by Whitaker Wright,