It was practically a sacrilegious thought. The man was married.
“Where is your lovely wife?” her mother was demanding. “Do tell me that she’s indisposed due to an interesting event?”
“I’m afraid the duchess was too tired to leave her chambers tonight,” Gideon replied in his calm voice. He nodded to Eleanor and bent to give her mother a kiss that made the duchess beam. It was the sort of kindness that marked his ways.
Eleanor held out her hand to be kissed. He bowed, touching his lips lightly to her glove. She considered whether he gave it a special pressure, but she couldn’t delude herself.
Since the very moment that Gideon had discovered his father’s will included a marriage contract wrought between the late duke and Ada’s father, he had never touched her in any sort of intimate way. Never.
“We have such exciting news for you!” her mother burst out.
“Mother!” Eleanor protested. “It isn’t—”
“Oh tush, Eleanor, the duke is part of our family.” And, turning again to Gideon, “Our own Eleanor is finally going to take a husband.” She caught herself. “Not that I mean finally as it sounds. Of course, Eleanor could have married any time in the last few years, but she’d never chosen to do so. And now she has agreed to a husband.”
A courteous smile shaped Gideon’s lips, but Eleanor thought she saw pain in the depths of his eyes. It made her feel better.
“It seems I owe you felicitations, Lady Eleanor,” he said.
An uncertain smile wavered around her own lips. She could hardly say, I would have waited forever. “I am grateful for them, Your Grace.” There. That was dignified.
“Surely you heard that the Duke of Villiers is looking for a wife?” her mother burst out.
“I had heard that rumor, but I could not believe that Lady Eleanor would consider such a spouse.”
Eleanor was starting to feel quite cheerful. After years of trying not to watch Gideon with longing eyes, of trying to erase him from her dreams, it was satisfying to see that flash of fire in his eyes.
Let him experience what she had endured, watching him wait at the altar to marry Ada.
“Yes, the Duke of Villiers,” she confirmed, giving him a lavish smile. “I am persuaded the two of us will be remarkably suited. You do remember how I used to beat you at chess, don’t you?”
“You know how foolish my Eleanor has always been,” her mother put in, laughing. “She announced years ago that she would marry a duke or no one. I was beginning to worry, I don’t mind telling you.”
“There was never any reason to worry,” Gideon said. “I’m sure Lady Eleanor has her pick of eligible men.”
“I wanted only a duke,” Eleanor said. “And that meant so many men were ineligible. I suppose it was a foolish restriction to set for myself.”
“Life does not always give us the choices that we might wish.”
He was growing furious, and she rejoiced in every involuntary signal, in the rigid way he held his shoulders, in the firmness of his jaw.
“Luckily for me,” she said cheerfully, “a duke came along just at the moment when I had decided to put away my childish feelings.”
“Childish,” he repeated.
“Yes. You know what it’s like when one is very young. One believes in such foolishness…in men who will throw away the world to be at one’s side. Fairy tales. I had just decided to discard all those romantic notions when, to my great surprise, a duke appeared who seems as charming as I could possibly wish.”
“What does your childhood have to do with anything?” her mother said. “You two were always talking in riddles, but you’re far too old for that sort of thing now.”
“Far too old,” Eleanor said, with a rueful smile just for Gideon. “Those riddles are nothing more than nursery rhymes, to be put away as one matures, along with childish emotions.”
His jaw was clenched. “I was under the impression that the Duke of Villiers suffered a grievous injury last year after losing a duel.”
Gideon didn’t approve of duels, which was no wonder, since he’d lost his father as a result of one. When he and Eleanor were young, they had talked for hours about how unlawful and dangerous these confrontations were. And, since ascending to his seat, he had made it his life’s work to convince society to see the duel as an indefensible and horrific act. She was always reading about speeches he’d given on the subject.
The duel alone would make him despise Villiers. Which was just as well, she thought, because once she married that dark-eyed fallen angel, she didn’t want to think about Gideon ever again.
“So is dear Ada increasing?” her mother was asking. “I do hope you don’t mind my inquiring. I adore her, of course, but she’s so fragile. I must have my cook make up a good strengthening lettuce soup for her.”
Gideon started to reply, but Eleanor’s mother wasn’t to be stopped.
“I expect that she is quite nauseated. When I had my first, I was so sick that I could barely stir out of the bedchamber for days. I drank lettuce soup morning and night. I shall send some over tomorrow. Nay, I shall send over my cook tomorrow to train your—”
“Your Grace.” Gideon’s quiet voice cut across her mother’s rush of speech. “I’m afraid that Ada is not increasing. She’s merely suffering a lung complaint.”
“Oh.”
Eleanor knew she should feel sorry for fragile little Ada, who always seemed to be in her bed or on a settee, coughing delicately. But try though she might, she still resented her. Ada’s father had paid for Gideon, had sewed him up in a marriage contract when Gideon was only eight years old.
Which meant that Ada had the one thing that Eleanor had ever wanted in the world.
“Please sit down and tell me all about it,” her mother said, patting Gideon on the hand. “That poor angel. Did she take a chill?”
The worst of it was that Ada didn’t even care for Gideon, as far as Eleanor could tell. She had paid Ada dutiful visits over the past three years and seen the polite, uninterested manner with which Ada greeted her husband.
If she had been Gideon’s wife, she would have leaped from the settee to greet him when he walked into the drawing room. In the first year or so after he married Ada, it was all Eleanor could do to keep herself frozen in a chair when he entered a room, and to stop a besotted smile from spreading across her face.
But Ada just held out her hand to be kissed and then turned away.
And Gideon…Gideon had gone from being Eleanor’s closest friend, the confidant of her heart and the lover of her body, to bowing as if she were nothing more than a remote acquaintance.
“The duchess’s cough has taken a turn for the worse in the last few weeks,” he was saying now. He was endlessly solicitous of his sickly wife.
It was admirable. Really.
Perhaps it was just as well that they hadn’t married. She could never be as punctilious as Gideon, not even if a dead father’s will required it of her. She would have fought bitterly to marry him. She would have climbed a balcony in the middle of the night and lured her beloved into a clandestine elopement, and be damned with the consequences.
She would have…she would have gone anywhere with that lovely, golden boy. In fact, now that she thought on it, she came perilously close to giving up her whole life, remaining unmarried, and never having children merely because he wasn’t free.