The Duke's Disaster (R) by Grace Burrowes Page B

could never leave my children, and certainly not for something as trivial as a tiara.”
    Noah’s heart resumed beating. A child would have been… His stores of civility were unequal to considering that hypothetical.
    “When I am assured you haven’t played me entirely false,” he said, “we will embark on relations with the intent of producing my heirs.” He hoped. Even his breeding organs weren’t entirely without emotional sensibilities. Anger and bewilderment did not make endearing bedmates.
    Thea was back to peering at him over her shoulder, scowling, really. “You’re sure?”
    “You are my duchess.” Also his wife. “I could rely on Harlan to secure the succession, but he’s only seventeen and might turn out every bit as rackety as the generation before him. The most reasonable choice is to content myself with your charms, keep a close eye on you, and hope the good Lord sees fit to give us sons in short order.”
    Though getting roaring drunk seemed a fitting addition to the list too. Noah simply could not muster the sangfroid to interrogate Thea further about the details of her past now, when they were both exhausted, he was naked, and she might well be missing another man’s attentions.
    “And after the children have arrived?” she asked.
    Noah rolled over, so they were back to back. “Enough chatter. Go to sleep, and please recall when you arise that we’ve passed a night exploring conjugal bliss in each other’s arms. If you steal the covers, I will fetch them back.”
    He fell silent, and his bride took a long, long time to fall asleep, though she did not at any point in that interminable and disappointing night intentionally steal his covers.
    * * *

    As Thea lay unmoving beside her husband, she mused that her wedding night had been an exercise in humiliation, but she was mindful another man would have beat her and tossed her into the street by now. Many other men. Given Anselm’s general irascibility, marrying him without disclosing her past had been risky, but he was being surprisingly decent about it.
    The duke thrashed about on his half of the bed, his knee bumping Thea’s hip.
    She recalled him holding forth once to Marliss, explaining he’d promised his grandsire he’d marry by age thirty-two—the grandfather had been pressing for marriage in the next fortnight—and Anselm’s thirty-second birthday loomed at the end of summer.
    His Grace was not quite twice Marliss’s age.
    But he was eons older than Marliss would ever be in terms of experience and world-weariness.
    And that, Thea mused as the duke’s hand stole up to rest on her shoulder, was the greatest humiliation of all. Noah Winters was inured to disappointment in his familiars. His litany of role models—father, both uncles—was a pathetic recitation of all that was self-indulgent and immature about the typical privileged male.
    His business associates had proven no better, nor had his sisters or his mistresses.
    Plural.
    That gave Thea pause, and stopped her march toward canonizing her recently acquired spouse. Anselm was far less pure than she was, far less chaste, and that perhaps was what allowed him to display such tolerance toward her.
    Though for men, of course, sexual peccadilloes were just that, little indiscretions, almost humorous, and they would never be thus for women.
    Anselm was absently caressing her neck, which she attributed to a somnolent habit, one he’d likely developed in the handling of his mistresses—all seventeen of them—and yet she couldn’t resent his touch. She’d disappointed her husband on their wedding night, not because she was barely experienced, shy, self-conscious, and easily embarrassed, though she was all of those.
    Because she’d erred, strayed, stumbled.
    Fallen.
    And the duke, for entirely pragmatic reasons, would catch her. His decision boggled Thea’s tired mind, almost as much as the insidious languor radiating from the touch of a few warm, male fingers on a few inches