“As you ran from me, and half of London believes me guilty of some kind of nefarious plot, yes. It matters.”
“They think me dead?”
“They don’t say it, but I imagine so. Your sisters don’t help, glowering at me whenever we cross paths.”
She inhaled sharply, hating the way her chest tightened at the reference to her four younger sisters. More loves lost. “And the other half of London? What do they think?”
“Likely the same, but they don’t blame me for it.”
“They think I deserved it. Of course.” He did not reply, but she heard the reason nonetheless. She deserved it for trapping the poor, eligible duke into marriage, and not even having the decency to deliver him an heir. Ignoring the pang of injustice that came with the thought, she said, “And here I am, very much alive. I imagine that shall set tongues wagging.”
“Where did you go?” The question was soft and if she hadn’t known better, Sera would have thought it was filled with something other than frustration.
Her attention fell to a row of black crows perched on the roof of the opposite wing of the building, shimmering in the August heat. She took a moment, counting them before she answered. Seven. “Away.”
“And that is all the answer I am to receive? I—” The reply was clipped and angry, but the hesitation was the thing that drew her attention.
She turned. “You?”
For a moment, he looked as though he would say something more. Instead, he shook his head. “So. You are returned.”
“Ever more troublesome, am I not?” He leaned against his great oak desk in shirtsleeves, waistcoat, and trousers, long, muscled legs crossed at the ankles, a crystal glass dangling from his fingers, as though he had not a care in the world. She ignored the way her chest tightened at the portrait he made, and raised a brow. “You do not offer your wife a drink?”
His head tilted slightly, the only evidence of his surprise before he straightened and moved to a nearby table adorned with a decanter and three crystal glasses. She watched as he poured her two fingers of amber liquid—he moved in the same way he always had, all privilege and grace, lifting the glass and delivering it to her with an outstretched arm.
She sipped, and they stood in silence for what seemed like an eternity, until she could bear it no longer. “You should be happy with my return.”
“Should I?”
She would have given everything she had to know what he was thinking. “Divorce will give you everything you ever wanted.”
He drank. “How did you ever guess that I longed to be plastered across the newspapers of London?”
“You married a Talbot sister, Your Grace.” Five girls, infamous in the London gossip rags that had named them the Soiled S’s, daughters of the Earl of Wight, once a coal miner with a skill for finding valuable stores of the fuel—skill enough to have bought himself a title. Earldom or no, the rest of the aristocracy could not stomach the family, loathing them for their remarkable ability to climb, labeling them celebrities for celebrity’s sake. The irony, of course, was that their father had worked for his money, not been born into prestige.
How backward the world was.
“My destiny, then, a Dangerous Daughter.”
Sera held back the cringe at the moniker—the one she’d inherited for them all.
You trapped me.
I did.
Get out.
“Not just any,” she said, refusing to bend. “The most dangerous.”
He watched her for a moment, as though he could see her thoughts. She resisted the urge to fidget. “If you won’t tell me where you went, perhaps you will tell me why you have returned?”
She drank, considering the lie she would have to tell. “Did I not make myself clear?”
“You think divorce so easily obtained?”
“I know it is not, but you would prefer . . . this?”
He did not look away, his gaze so unsettling, seeming to see so much even as it hid everything. “We would not be the first to suffer a loveless marriage.”
They had not always been so loveless.
“I’ve suffered enough.” She spread her hands wide. “And, unlike the rest of the aristocracy, I have no reason not to end our unhappy union. I have nothing to lose.”
He leveled her with a look. “Everyone has something to lose.”
She matched it with one of her own. “You forget, husband. I have already lost everything.”
He looked away. “I don’t forget.” He drank, and she watched the muscles in his hand tighten and strain against the glass, a small, secret, locked-away part of her wondering at it.
That part could remain locked away. She did not care what he remembered.
She cared only that he was a powerful man, with remarkable resources, and that the dissolution of their marriage was essential to the life she had chosen for herself. The one she had built from the ashes of the life she had left. “Let me be entirely clear, Haven,” she said, forcing the formality. “This is our only chance to be rid of each other. To be rid of our past.” She paused. “Or did you have another plan to exorcise the demons of our marriage?”
He exhaled, heading around the desk, as though he were through with the conversation. She watched him, considering the action. Imagining what he was thinking. “Did you?”
“I did, as a matter of fact.”
Surprise flared. There were only three ways to dissolve a marriage. Hers was one. The others—“Annulment is not possible,” she said, hating the thread of sadness that threatened at the words. At the idea that he might have pushed for it. There had been a—
There had been a child.
He met her gaze then. “Not annulment.”
“Then you were intending to have me declared dead.” It had occurred to her, of course. At night, when she thought about the possibility that he might desire an heir. That he might have changed his mind. That he might have decided another woman and another family were desirable.
There was only one way to clear the path to a new heir. With the exception of the fact that she was not dead. And one other minor issue.
“Four years hence?” The law required seven to have passed before a person could be declared dead. He looked away. “Ah. But you’ve the funds and the power to circumvent a little thing like the passage of time, don’t you, Duke?”
His gaze narrowed. “You say that as though you do not plan to use those same funds to convince Parliament to grant us a divorce—something so exorbitantly costly that there have been, what, two hundred and fifty authorized? Ever? In history?”
“Three hundred and fourteen,” Sera answered. “And at least at the end of my plan we are both alive. Was I to die soon? Am I lucky I arrived before the summer recess and not after it? When Parliament returns from summer idyll, rested and ready to disappear one duchess and make room for another?”
“It no longer matters, does it?” he said, the words calm enough to tempt her to rage.