The Inconvenient Duchess

way or the other. I imagine the family that can hold you can stand one more scandal. And it is a very old scandal, is it not? And now that her father’s debts are paid…’
    ‘Paid?’ Her legs buckled under her and she collapsed into the chair by the desk.
    ‘I was saving it for a Christmas present.’ Marcus’s smile was sincere as he looked at her. ‘My idiot brother has spoiled my surprise.’
    Her father was free. She could rest easy, knowing that he was safe. If she survived the night, of course. She smiled weakly back at her husband.
    St John growled low in his throat, frustrated that his threat was not being received in the intended light. Then he grinned. ‘Very well. So it doesn’t matter to you if you drag your own name through the mud marrying the student of a whore. How well does she know our old family scandals, Marcus?’
    ‘She knows enough, St John. The rest is better left dead and buried with the people concerned, where it’s been for ten years.’
    St John raised the pistol again and pointed it towards his brother. ‘Dead for you, Marcus. You never suffered for it.’
    ‘Oh, I suffered, St John. Much as you wish to believe otherwise.’
    ‘Suffered tragically, I’m sure.’ St John turned to her and gestured with the pistol in his hand. ‘Your precious husband, your duke, who had had everything his way since the moment of birth. The title, the land, the woman, the heir. All falling into his lap, and still he wasn’t happy. Not even when he had taken what little belonged to me. Did he tell you, then, how he came to marry Bethany? Despite the fact that she was engaged to me?’
    ‘Engaged?’ She looked to Marcus.
    ‘Abandoned, more likely,’ Marcus countered. ‘And already with child. And I knew nothing of it until too late.’
    ‘You lie. You wanted her because she was beautiful. And because she was mine. You always were a greedy bastard,Marcus. Never satisfied with the best and the biggest share. You had to have it all, didn’t you? I went to London. I was coming back with a ring. You waited until my back was turned and took her from me.’
    Marcus held out a hand in supplication. ‘As I told you at the time, God help me, if Mother had told me the whole truth before the wedding, I’d never have married the girl. She couldn’t find you, for you’d run off yet again. Bethany’s family wanted justice to be done and honour restored. They came to Mother with the story and not to me.
    ‘And she made her plans as she always did, not caring a whit for what it would do to the family. Mother threw us together. Bethany was beautiful. She was talented. I was besotted. How could I not be? I knew there had been something between you, but she gave no sign that it was serious.’
    ‘You could have looked for me. You could have asked me for the truth.’
    ‘I didn’t want the truth. I wanted the woman. And she didn’t want you, St John, if there was a duke to be had. An eighteen-year-old, younger son is no prize when the peer is handy and gullible. And our dear mother cared not that I was not to father my own heir. If you, her favourite, could not have the title, then your son could be duke after me. It was a tidy plan. But then, our mother always was good at those things.’
    ‘History repeats itself,’ St John spat back. ‘Our mother has chosen you another bride who arrives on the doorstep without her honour but eager for a title. And you are just as gullible as you ever were.’
    ‘And you think that you can steal my wife away from me, as easily as you did ten years ago?’
    ‘If your first wife had lived, she would still be mine.’
    ‘And your child my heir.’ It was Marcus’s turn to spit. ‘If she had lived, she would have led us both a merry dance, and my heir could have been a coachman’s son. Mother was as big a fool as either of us to believe the girl’s story. Even on our wedding night, Bethany knew more tricks in the bedroom than she could have learned from you.’
    ‘Liar.’ The word exploded out of St John like a pistol shot.
    ‘Swear to me that she was innocent when you first came to her, and that you were not a boy, green with love and as gullible as I was.’
    ‘Damn you, and your title and your land. You married the woman I loved and you let her die.’
    ‘And she loved neither of us. Let her stay dead.’ Marcus held out a hand to his brother, all the time watching the pistol.
    ‘No.’ It came out as a howl. Then St John threw the gun aside and