Jillian Hunter - The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

The duke reclined, his eyes half closed, on the red tufted couch. Except for the bitter tang of cinders in the air and a brand upon her breast, there was little evidence to raise suspicions when, a half minute later, Charlotte Boscastle escorted Lady Primrose Powlis, Lady Dalrymple, and the duke’s young niece into the room.

Griffin could barely remember the last time he’d felt like laughing. Certainly not in the fourteen months since his brother’s death.

Nor during the eternal journey to London with his meddlesome aunt and his morbid young niece, Edlyn, whose guardianship he had inherited along with a dukedom he did not want. It was assumed that his cousin’s academy would draw the girl out of her gloom and introduce her to a glittering world. He hoped for her sake that such a miracle would be wrought.

It was also assumed that he would take a wife. More than a miracle would be required to bring that momentous event to pass. Before Liam’s death, Griffin had led a charmed life. He’d served his obligatory stint in the cavalry and returned home to the family castle with the full intention of doing absolutely nothing. Liam would inherit the dukedom, and a damned good thing, too.

Griff had no aspirations to either a peerage or the responsibility that went with it. His brother, however, relished the role, riding day for night across his lands, playing the dutiful lord to those who for centuries had depended upon the duke’s largesse.

If a pretty lady crossed his path, Liam thought nothing of taking her to his bed. If a love child resulted from some forgotten affair, he would assume responsibility. What was another benefactor added to the list of a duke’s retainers? Yet as the years passed, the family elders, composed primarily of aging aunts, closed in to curb his reckless ways.

A boy could pursue wicked pleasures for only so long. Did he intend to fulfill his duty as the Duke of Glenmorgan or not? If so, the time had come to leave sporting to his younger siblings and settle down.

He resisted.

His factors had made an unofficial offer of marriage on Liam’s behalf to a young lady in London in the months that followed his father’s death. Liam had met her during a family holiday in Italy. Her beauty was the stuff of legends. So was her fortune. And yet after he came home, he ignored the stream of letters from her family solicitors that first invited and then insisted he step forth to announce his intentions.

Griffin thought it was all a game. Liam was playing everyone like a pack of cards. Why should either of them settle down? Why should he believe the rumors whispered in the village that another woman had captured Liam’s heart?

The answer arrived one early April evening when a castle servant discovered a little girl of seven years or so abandoned on the drawbridge. She had jet-black hair and eyes an unearthly shade of blue that in a certain light looked almost violet. All that could be coaxed from her was that her name was Edlyn and that her mother had left her here to live with her father, who was a duke. She knew, or refused to reveal, nothing else of her background.

Father and daughter loathed each other on sight. Edlyn grieved her mother with a vengeance that seemed unnatural in a young child. She threw fits and refused to eat. She threatened to jump off the turret. She bit her nursemaid’s finger clear to the bone.

Her very existence eclipsed the lives of those who struggled to care for her. Her young aunt Ravenna and the two great-aunts who ruled the castle stopped reassuring themselves that she would outgrow her sorrows.

She ran away the day she turned thirteen and twice a year thereafter. She gave her best gowns to the gypsies and dressed herself in the black crepe of perpetual mourning. She grew her hair to her waist, only to cut it off above her ears one Christmas Day. She sat at the dinner table like a wicked sprite.

Her father forbade her to utter another word about the mother who had abandoned her.

And for reasons he could never fathom, Griffin became her champion. She never confided in him, and for that he was glad. But he was the one she ran to when she was upset, the one who hoisted her on his shoulders and let her swing from the wrought-iron chandelier while he ran around the hall three times, then shouted, “Drop!” And she did, safely in his arms.

It wasn’t that he considered himself to be the family peacemaker. He merely seemed to be the only person in the castle who did not incur her wrath.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you,” she was chanting with her usual malevolence for her father as he sauntered through the passage screen one morning. “I hate you so much that I would burn my bones in acid for a potion to make you die.”

Griffin grabbed an apple from a bowl on the banqueting table. “I hate him, too,” he said genially. “What has the knave done to upset our beautiful Edlyn today?”

Liam, slumped on a bench by a blazing fire, snorted in disgust. “Beautiful? Both of you belong in Bedlam.”

Then, when she stormed off in her usual melodramatic fury, the armorial swords mounted above the fireplace dropped to the stone floor with a clatter that sent the three dozing hounds into a howling frenzy. Liam jumped out of his chair. Griffin fell against the table laughing like the lunatic his brother had just called him. It never occurred to him that Liam might not be immortal. No one in Castle Glenmorgan had died before his time. An unhappy girl’s curse could not alter the course of history.

Liam knelt to the fallen swords. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she did that on purpose.”

“Perhaps she did,” said Aunt Glynnis, studying the tiny spider that dangled from a gossamer thread above her pianoforte.

“She’s definitely inherited the Welsh talent for strangeness,” Aunt Primrose said in concern, the three hounds settling in her tiny shadow.

Liam looked up in vexation. “Is she going to behead me if I don’t obey her nasty little demands?”

Griffin gave him an evil grin. “You’d better start wearing a helmet, or I’ll be the duke, and everyone will be in trouble then.”

“Take the dukedom,” Liam said, touching one of the swords to Griffin’s shoulder. “I dub thee the Most Wicked Duke Who Ever Was. Anyway, I’d rather ride horses in hell than stay in this moldering castle and have a girl who may or-well, damn her, anyway. The next time she runs off, I will not chase after her.”

The two aunts drew a simultaneous gasp that frightened the spiderling up its thread into the blackened rafters. “Don’t say things like that, Liam,” Aunt Glynnis whispered. “That spider might weave your words into the devil’s own web.”

Griffin raised an eyebrow in mischief. “Then I wish I could marry an Irish princess who would make me laugh every night-”

“Unfeeling fools,” Aunt Primrose said from her chair. “Don’t you realize that the girl wants her mother more than anyone in the world, which is hardly a surprise considering that her father is a rude young rakehell who cannot even behave when his elders are in the room?”

Griffin and Liam straightened, bowing this way and that at the aunts, at the dogs, at each other, until Aunt Glynnis picked up a pair of apples and stuck one apiece into their grinning mouths.

In the months following Edlyn’s outburst, Liam reluctantly made plans to travel to England to court the woman brave enough to be his wife. He and Edlyn still clashed whenever they spent more than a few minutes together. Griffin, their two aunts, and their twin siblings, Ravenna and Rhys, were still forced to intervene more times than the allied powers completing the peace treaty.

Was there a woman in London, in the whole of England, strong enough to bridge the family divide?

Edlyn withdrew until she became a shadow. Everyone wondered why she seemed agreeable to accompanying Liam to London. Could she be growing up at last? She didn’t object when Aunt Primrose explained that she would make friends her age at school and no longer be allowed to wander about with the gypsies who lived nearby. A week before the journey, she had already packed her own bag and talked the guards into promising to feed the crows that nested on the parapets.

Griffin challenged his older brother to one last ride through the woods and over the river wall. Liam never refused a dare. Griffin had never lost a race.

Not a day had passed since that Griffin didn’t picture Liam standing in the stirrups with his windblown hair bristled up like a hedgehog. “Come on!”

Griff guided his horse down the incline. “I’ll go first.”

“No, you won’t. You challenged.”

They stared across the river, absorbing the beauty of Glenmorgan, young pagans who preferred wildness over London’s pleasures, warriors at heart.

Griff lifted his face to the sky. The light was swiftly fading. The mystical irradiance that bathed the battered castle stones would soon disappear. Storm air drifted in the breeze.

“Let’s do it tomorrow,” he shouted to Liam.

“Giving up already? I’ll jump,” Liam said, wheeling. A dying ray of light caught his smile and outlined his agile figure as he set in his spurs.

A crow flew toward the castle turret. Griffin felt the drum of his brother’s hoofbeats through his bones. Invincible.

His brother’s mare had never before balked at a jump or thrown a rider. Not that anything could hurt Liam. The great vital lump that landed in the water had steel woven into his body and soul.

“Duke! If you want to cede the race right now, I won’t tell anyone what a bloody fool you’ve made of yourself.” Griff waited, then dismounted. He knew as he slogged through the water that at any moment his brother would tackle him by the knees and half-drown him to prove he could. This day would not be different than countless others.