The Duchess Hunt by Elizabeth Beacon

Author:Elizabeth Beacon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

There was such sincerity in Jack’s voice and that admission he wasn’t always comfortable in his ducal shoes had caught her on the raw and made her pause. She gave him a thoughtful look and wondered—did he truly need her? Very likely Jack needed someone to unburden himself to, a listener and perhaps even a lover, but not specifically her, surely?

‘I can’t do it, Jack,’ she told him finally and, when he would have argued, held up her hand to ask for his patience. ‘No doubt we’d rub along well enough if you endured the derision of your peers and I ignored the whispering and spite caused by such as me catching such as you, but there’s only one thing that would make it all possible for me and that’s the one thing you can’t give me.’

‘Now you’re talking in riddles,’ he said with a wry grin that still refused to take her ‘no’ as seriously as he should. ‘What is this marvellous quality I so signally lack?’

‘Love,’ she said starkly, refusing to plead for something he didn’t feel.

‘Oh, love,’ he said hollowly.

‘Yes, unfashionable of me to demand such an unlikely emotion from my husband, is it not?’ she asked and wondered at the brittleness in her own voice.

‘To the devil with fashion, but why would we put all our hopes on a fleeting infatuation all wrapped up with Cupid’s bows, Jessica, when we could have a lifetime of mutual respect and delight in each other? You can’t deny we’re as compatible as a man and woman can be after what almost happened just now. Would you truly throw away all we could be for the sake of a romantic delusion? I can’t believe I’m hearing such blithe nonsense from you, of all people,’ he exclaimed.

‘Why do I deserve love less than any other woman?’ she asked curiously.

‘Because you should know better,’ he said as if the answer had been goaded out of him and she should never have asked it in the first place.

Rising hastily from the intimacy of the extravagantly cushioned bench, he began to pace impatiently, as if it was the only way he could stop himself shaking her. So why must her senses note how the sun-warmed herbs gave up their scent ever more sensuously wherever he brushed them when he was obviously far too preoccupied to note such wonders of nature himself? Because her senses were as dazzled by him as the rest of her, she realised in a horrified daze.

Of course she wanted his love or nothing at all; it was what she’d secretly longed for ever since she’d decided not to love him at sixteen. How stupid of her not to let herself see that self-denial of any other future for what it was until now. She was in love with the wretched, arrogant, demanding, wonderful man. It made her feel alive to her fingertips and contrarily as if she was being tortured by some perverse fate, sitting laughing somewhere about this faulty human who had just been offered all she’d ever wanted.

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