By the time Sophie finished speaking, the carriage had stopped no fewer than three times; each time, West had knocked his cane on the roof, signaling to his coachman to ke ep circling, and finally had a quick word with the man. Other than that, however, he did not interrupt as Sophie told him the truth of what had occurred seven years earlier between herself and the duke. At last, she fell silent; at almost the same time, the carriage came to a halt once more. She glanced out the window, then blinked in surprise—she had not been paying the slightest attention to where they were bound, so wrapped up had she been in her own tale, and only now realized that they were outside West’s home, rather than her own. She looked at him inquiringly. “Would you like to come inside?” “I’m surprised your notions of propriety would allow such a thing.” She meant her tone to sound light, but it came out more charged than she had intended. “You’ve already called on me at home once. My virtue is now hopelessly compromised.” He handed her down from the carriage and ushered her into the house, hesitating for only the briefest second, apparently to consider the best room. Study? Drawing room? Sophie amused herself by imagining his mental calculations—the drawing room was more spacious, with more comfortable seating, but did the number of upholstered surfaces offering the opportunity to recline horizontally lend a certain illicit tawdriness to the proceedings? The study was more proper, more staid, but a desk chair was certainly not as comfortable as a settee, particularly after a long day of travel by carriage and boat; his leg must be paining him by now. This being West, however, she knew without a doubt which consideration would win out. “Briar, we’ll be in the study,” he told the butler, ushering her down the hallway with the faintest press of his hand at the small of her back. “Ha,” she muttered. “I owe myself a shilling.” “I beg your pardon?” He closed the door behind them. “I knew you would choose the study, rather than the drawing room.” He leaned back against the door, watching her as she made a slow circuit of the room. It was neat as a pin; his desk was clear of mess, featuring nothing more than a tidy stack of papers, a pen and inkwell, and a few books set to one side, their spines perfectly aligned. His gaze on her felt heavy, and her neck prickled under his regard. She resolutely ignored this—she knew all too well that he was not interested in a liaison with her. And he likely understood better now why she considered marriage to be out of the question. “How, precisely, did you know that?” She drew a book off the shelf, squinting down at it; it was one of the account books for Rosemere from two years prior. The spine was cracked, the leather rubbed buttery soft, not a speck of dust visible on the pages;
clearly, this was a volume he consulted often. She swallowed against a sudden lump in her throat, and carefully r eplaced it on the shelf before turning to him. “Because a study is more proper, obviously. Less conducive to amorous activity.” “Any room can be conducive to amorous activity, Sophie.” His voice was low, like a caress. Her eyes shot to his, and, for the second time in the past five minutes, she felt a blush rising in her cheeks; he met her gaze evenly, unblinking. “I shall ke ep that in mind, thank you,” she managed, feeling oddly disconcerted. She knew—thanks to a conversation, some years earlier, that she still remembered with unfortunate clarity—that he was not interested in an affair. How dare he now make her blush? But then, he’d always been able to do so, seemingly without even trying. She’d proved oddly resistant to blushing in the face of other men’s flirtations—she’d spent two months in Jeremy’s bed without a single rosy cheek, to the best of her recollection—but West was the exc eption, as he was to so many things. She’d spent the better part of the past seven years attempting to train her body out of this reaction to his presence. She took a seat in one of the chairs before the desk, in hope that he might sit as well, but he did not move for a long moment, merely continued to lean against the door, surveying her. He’d loosened his cravat; she caught sight of the tiniest hint of skin at his throat. At last, he pushed off from the door and made his way toward her; instead of settling behind his desk, however, he took a seat in the chair next to hers. Without the barrier of the desk between them, the room felt considerably more intimate. Any room can be conducive to amorous activity, Sophie. West’s thoughts clearly lay along different lines, however, because after a moment he said, “My father and I quarreled, you know.” “Oh? When was this?” “After that run-in with Bridewell seven years ago. I showed up at his front door at midnight, the worse for drink—he was not amused, as you might guess.” “Indeed.” Sophie hated to think of West like this—younger, full of grief and pain and heartbreak, drowning his sorrows in brandy. “I told him that I knew he had something to do with frightening you off— that he was the reason I couldn’t have a happy marriage.” “Did he deny it?” Sophie asked evenly. “He did not,” West said, leaning back slightly in his chair, his jaw flexing. “I think that might have made me almost as angry as the fact that he’d interfered in the first place—the fact that he admitted it so brazenly. That he didn’t feel ashamed, or even apologetic. He merely told me that I’d be grateful to him later.”
“Were you?” The words rushed out before she could consider them; she immediately wished them unsaid, and yet also wished, quite badly, to know his response. He turned his head slowly to face her; there was a bit of pink in his cheeks from a long afternoon in the sun, and his dark hair was mussed from the breeze on the river. “Not for a single second.” He held her gaze in a moment that stretched taut between them. She wished to reach out and touch him, to rest her palm against the sharp lines of his face, to let him relax into her touch, just once. Instead, she carefully knotted her hands together in her lap. “I did, however, have my revenge,” he added conversationally, breaking the tension that built with each moment the silence between them lengthened. “Did you?” “I may have led him to believe that my accident had left me in capable of having children.” He said this easily, cheerfully, and she proceeded to choke on air at this revelation. “Are you all right?” he asked solicitously as she coughed and gasped for air. Before she could recover, there was a knock at the door; it opened a moment later, revealing someone bearing a tea tray. Two someones, in fact—not maids, however, but... “Hawthorne. Briar.” West’s voice was dryly amused. “This is... unorthodox.” Briar, she recognized as West’s butler. He was perhaps in his late thirties, dark-haired, with a stern brow. The other man was shortish and wiry, with hair of a dark blond and a shrewd, intelligent face; after a moment, she registered the name. “You’re West’s valet!” she said delightedly; she had memories of West mentioning him, years earlier, when they’d been courting. From what she recalled, they were from the same village in Kent, and had known each other for years. Hawthorne sw ept her a surprisingly gallant bow as Briar carefully set down the tea tray. “Does my r eputation precede me, my lady? How thrilling.” He batted his eyelashes at her; Sophie suppressed a laugh. She had the distinct impression that Briar, next to him, was resisting the urge to offer a very unbutler-like eye roll only with great difficulty. “How do you get his cravats knotted so precisely?” she inquired curiously. “They ke ep his chin tilted at such an attractive angle.” “I contemplate how much I’d occasionally like to strangle him, and channel that fervent energy into my craft instead,” Hawthorne said, straight-faced. Sophie laughed, while Briar—evidently deciding that things had gone quite far enough—reached out to clamp a firm hand upon Hawthorne’s arm. “We thought you might want some refreshment, my lady,” he said, very politely.
“And none of the maids were available to perform their duties?” West asked sk eptically. “I wouldn’t wish them to become overly excited at the sight of a lady of gentle breeding,” Briar said. “Of course,” West agreed. “Odd, though, that that’s never been a concern on the numerous occasions Violet has come to call.” Hawthorne grinned. “I caught him attempting to eavesdrop at the door, and told him to fetch a tea tray and preserve some of his dignity.” “A Trojan horse, if you will,” Sophie agreed cheerfully; Briar looked mortified. “Without the bloodshed, I would hope,” West said. He paused, then leveled a glance at his staff. “Was there anything else, gentlemen?” “Of course not,” Briar said, beating a hasty retreat, his hand still with a firm grip on Hawthorne’s forearm. “We’ll leave you to it, my lord.” He caught sight of the complicated, extremely suggestive eyebrow waggle that Hawthorne was offering West, and more or less shoved him bodily from the room. Sophie turned to West as soon as the door clicked shut. “Very friendly staff you have here.” West cleared his throat, looking a bit embarrassed—a rarity for him, and one that Sophie took a moment to savor as a small pleasure. “They are most intrigued by our betrothal.” He lifted a milk jug in her direction. “Do you still take your tea black?” “A splash of brandy would not go amiss, if you have it,” she said boldly, and was rewarded with a lift of that arrogant brow but no further commentary as he stood, rounded the desk, and opened a drawer, extracting a decanter that was three-quarters full. He added a splash of brandy to her tea, then looked at her inquiringly; she tilted her head to the side, and he added another splash. There was a moment of brief consideration, and then he added a splash to his own cup as well. She leaned forward to gently tap her cup against his. “Cheers.” There was silence for a moment as they both sipped their tea. “My father is why I agreed to this betrothal, you know,” West said. Sophie, who’d had her teacup raised halfway to her mouth, lowered it again, a chill coursing through her. “What do you mean?” “When I... misled him as to my r eproductive capabilities, shall we say... he stopped fussing about me finding a suitable bride, and focused all his energy on James, since he was now the one on whose shoulders the future of the dukedom lay.” A bitter note cr ept into his voice. “I had cause to regret that later.” “As well you should,” Sophie agreed; the duke’s meddling had led both to Violet and James’s marriage and to their subsequent estrangement, though they’d now sorted things out once and for all, and seemed very happy. “Recently, however, he has learned that I was not being entirely honest with him, and so he came to see me the other day—the same day you did, in fact. He implied that he should be happy to sell Rosemere, since
I—lacking a wife and children—had little need for a country estate.” Sophie felt a rush of anger at these words, at the realization that it had been seven years, and the duke didn’t even have the decency to come up with a better way to threaten his son, and those who loved him. It was just a house. It was a pile of stones in Derbyshire, for heaven’s sake! She was irrationally angry—with West, for caring so much about a stupid house; with West’s mother, for loving the house in the first place; with herself, for feeling angry at all, as well as helpless and frustrated and a dozen other things she didn’t know how to put a name to. And, most of all, with the duke. She dearly hoped she ran into the Duke of Dovington in the very near future, because at the moment, she thought she could quite happily murder him. And while murdering dukes was undoubtedly a hanging offense, she was beginning to wonder if perhaps she couldn’t get away with it—who, after all, would miss him? “Nice to see his tactics haven’t changed the slightest bit in the past seven years,” she said coolly. “It’s my fault,” West said, rubbing a rueful hand over his face. “I made the mistake of letting him know how much I loved that property—how much it meant to me. Not in words, of course—” “Of course not,” said Sophie, amused in spite of herself. “—but I didn’t hide it well enough. And now he sees it as nothing more than a weakness to exploit.” Sophie thought of her own father—he was not a perfect man, but he loved his daughters fiercely, and wanted only the best for them, wished for their happiness above all else. So, too, did her mother; for all that she had been irritatingly obsessed with finding a husband for Sophie, during her years on the marriage mart, she knew that her mother had wanted her to find love, not merely an impressive title. “You deserve better than a father who sees everything you love as an advantage to seize,” she told West softly. He glanced down into his teacup, and she frowned; did no one else tell him this? “You’re a good man, West,” she said, the words simple but true. “And your father knows it, and takes advantage of it, because he’s an ass.” This surprised a chuckle out of him; the sound of his laugh always seemed like a precious gift, so rare was it. He glanced back up at her, an expression in those vivid eyes that she couldn’t quite decipher. “You deserved better, too,” he said. “What my father did to you—the way he sought to manipulate you—” A note of bitterness cr ept into his voice, and it made something in Sophie’s chest ache to hear it. “You care for your sisters—you cared for me—and my father knew this, and took advantage of it. And you did not deserve this.” “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, realizing that the expression she’d seen in his eyes a moment before was guilt. In being honest with him, had she merely given him another thing to feel guilty about? Would things between them always be this way, laced with pain and guilt and thoughts of what might have been? Moments like this made her feel even more convinced that there was no future for them—not when they were still so mired in the past. Not, too, when his mention of fatherhood—his duty to provide an heir—only reminded her of another obstacle to any future they might share. An obstacle that she did not feel ready to divulge, on the heels
of so many other confessions this afternoon. “Thank you,” he said, gazing steadily at her, and then cleared his throat, dispelling the weight of the moment. “He did not make it clear that he had any particular candidate in mind for matrimony, so I thought perhaps our feigned betrothal could teach him a lesson—teach him to back off. No doubt he’ll be so relieved when we—when it is revealed that we are not to wed, after all...” He shifted in his seat as he spoke, about as close as this man ever came to fidgeting; he was not looking her in the eye. “I suspect he’ll be so relieved that he’ll stop caring overmuch about whom I marry.” A thought occurred to Sophie now—one that perhaps ought to have struck her much earlier, before she in volved West in this harebrained scheme to begin with. “Did you... have someone in mind? For marriage, I mean?” She tried to ignore the current of dread forming within her as she awaited his r eply; she hadn’t heard a rumor of him courting any young ladies, but he was of an age when men of his station began to consider marriage, and he certainly had to be one of the most eligible bachelors of the ton—perhaps even more so because of his accident. The slight air of tragedy that had clung to him ever since seemed to have only increased his appeal, even if it made matchmaking mamas a bit cautious. But if he were to make it clear that he was ready to marry at last—well, he’d be beating them off with his cane. She did not care to dwell on how little she liked that prospect. “I did not.” There was not a single ounce of uncertainty in his words. She opened her mouth. Shut it again. Everything about the past hour— everything they’d revealed to each other—was reason enough that she should stand up and walk out of this room. Go home, where it was safe—where she wouldn’t tell him something she shouldn’t. Where she wouldn’t ask him any more questions she didn’t want the answers to. Instead, she locked gazes with him, and said, “But you’ll need an heir.” That arrogant lifting of a single brow—did they teach this gesture in duke school? she wondered grumpily. “I believe I technically already have one,” he said, adding blandly, “Is it not wonderful to be blessed with the soothing balm of sibling affection?” Sophie laughed in spite of herself. “Is that your plan? Let Audley and Violet worry about providing an heir to the title, and you can go about—what? Raking your way about town?” This did not actually sound remotely like him, but she was bluffing her way through this entire exchange, feigning a comfort and bravado that she did not feel. It was the only way she knew how to speak to him of this. “Yes,” West said dryly. “That is indeed perfectly in line with how I have spent the past seven years.” He took a sip of his tea, then leaned forward to place the cup—still half-full—carefully on the edge of his desk, and shifted slightly in his seat so that he was facing her more directly. “I’ve no interest in marrying whatever debutante fresh from the schoolroom my father thinks has the bluest blood and the best hips for childbearing. I’ve a brother, who is happily married—and if he should not produce a son, for whatever reason, I’ve plenty of cousins. Went to Oxford with the next in line after James, in fact. He
cheats at cards, but is otherwise a decent sort.” This was uttered reluctantly, Sophie noted with amusement; she was fairly certain West would rather lose the use of his good leg than cheat at cards. “The point is, I don’t give a damn what my father hopes for my future anymore—and would very much like him to take his nose out of my affairs.” She regarded him thoughtfully, considering the questions she wished to ask him, the other half of this conversation that she wished, suddenly quite desperately, to have with him. The words stuck in her throat, however; somehow, despite all that they’d revealed to each other this evening, she could not bring herself to risk anything further. “It seems to me, then,” she said, “that if we are to teach your father a lesson, we need to make certain that he is forced to watch us be the happiest betrothed couple on earth.” “Did you have something in mind?” “I believe I do,” Sophie said, leaning forward in her seat. “I think that we need to make a bit of a scene.” And she felt something close to a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She was, all at once, determined to enjoy herself—to enjoy this ruse, this pantomime of the life she might have lived. She could parade before the duke as his future daughter-in-law, even if she would never hold that role in truth. She told herself that she still felt as certain of this fact as she had seven years earlier. And four years ago, too—the last time she had had cause to consider the prospect of becoming the Marchioness of Weston. And she ignored the beginnings of the faintest whispers of doubt, lurking at the corner of her mind, and asking, What if?