The Inconvenient Duchess

front of him.
    ‘She was very beautiful,’ she supplied.
    ‘Yes.’ His voice was expressionless.
    ‘I should go,’ and leave you alone with your dead wife . She felt a stab of jealousy at the thought.
    ‘No. Stay.’ He looked back to her, then back to the portrait, then back to her.
    She cringed under his gaze.
    Bethany remained in beatific imperturbability, smiling down at them.
    ‘I wish you would not look at me so,’ she muttered. ‘I do not like to be compared to her, for I know I will be found wanting.’
    ‘You are very different,’ he confirmed. ‘But I am not the man I was when I married for the first time. Bethany was a young man’s choice.’
    ‘And I?’
    ‘An acquired taste,’ he said bluntly.
    ‘You acquired me, right enough. And had little choice in the matter.’ But you wooed her, she thought, and the jealousy pricked her again.
    ‘I had even less choice with Bethany. Mother arranged our meeting, and I was besotted from the first. She had the voice of an angel and the painting does not do justice to her beauty. We were married as soon after. And she was dead within the year.’
    She remembered what St John had said. ‘You must have been very sad.’
    ‘Not really.’ His tone was banal.
    ‘If you do not miss her, then why do you come here?’ To expiate an old guilt, as his brother had said.
    ‘It is rather like the desire to pick the scab off an old wound. I can’t seem to leave it alone to heal.’
    ‘A wound?’ To conscience?
    ‘To pride. It did not take me long to realise that she wanted my title, and little more to do with me after she had it. Her mother had bred her and trained her to be an ornament and she did it well. But behind the façade…’ he shook his head ‘…there was such emptiness there that I could never hope to fill it. And a heart of marble.’ He reached out and took her chin in his hands and tilted her face so that he could look in her eyes.
    ‘You are quite different from her. For when I look into your eyes, I suspect that there is more behind them, not less.’
    She looked away. ‘There is nothing. Nothing that I am hiding.’
    His smile was sad when she met his eyes again. ‘Oh, really? I think we all have something to hide. Even in the void that was my first wife, I found secrets. And there is much that you do not know about me.’
    He stared down at her. ‘I was not happy in my first marriage. It was a mistake I recognised soon, but too late to save myself.’
    ‘But was she? Happy, I mean.’ She blurted it out without thinking.
    He smiled. ‘Was she happy? From your perspective, that would be a sensible question. I was not always the man you married. Not so grim. So prone to bark and shout.’ He pondered the question. ‘Was she happy? I think there are some people who are happiest when the people around them are most unhappy. Does this make sense? I know my mother was such a one. Vain and empty headed. She sucked the joy from my father, certain enough. He’d have drunk himself to death to avoid her if the horse hadn’t broken his neck. I never saw him so peaceful as the day he lay in the coffin, waiting for us to nail down the lid.
    ‘And my wife was such a one as my mother. Was she happy? Certainly not with me, and she made no bones about telling me so. The title was enough for a while. She enjoyed the money and the spending of it. I was just the vessel, the vehicle. She needed more. She always needed something. I tried at first to satisfy her whims, but could never be enough. Could never do enough. No man could. It was like throwing pennies down a well, trying to keep her happy.’
    He looked down at her again. ‘I was afraid, when you came here, that my second marriage would be a repeat of my first. That does not seem to be the case.’
    She thought of the quest for land and money that had brought her to this place. If it truly were not a repeat of his first marriage, then he would have to have wed someone free of avarice. ‘I do not know. Were it not for the title before your name, I never would have come here. And I did not stay for love of you. After our first meeting, I would not have sought you out again.’
    ‘Unless I was very rich,’ he prompted.
    ‘Even if you were very rich. If I’d have had a choice, then I’d have run from this house and from you, if I had but known where to go.’
    ‘Then you are very different from my first wife. For she would have married me, no matter what. She filled my head with