Chapter Seventeen

A blast of smoke hit Giles in the face when he burst through the doors into the courtyard. He held up his arms to shield himself, eyes watering in the caustic assault. The whim of the wind shifted, changing direction. Free, he stalked toward the pyre.

The canvases curled. The wood frames cracked. The paper had long since turned to ash. The drawings had probably vanished first, erased from existence.

The two hulking manservants who’d been throwing things onto the fire brushed off their hands and came to flank their master. They were large men, all brawn and muscle.

Giles curled his hands by his sides, his muscles tense with an inability to act. Unaccustomed to impotence, his heart beat in his throat, and his stomach turned. He was too late to stop it. It was ruined. All of it. If there had been even the slightest chance of saving his work, he might well have charged into the flames, heedless of the danger, so mad he was to reclaim the earthly vestiges of his soul.

The fire beckoned. He stared, unable to blink. Unable to look away. If he threw himself into the flames, he could be done with it. His shoulders relaxed. He could do it. All he needed to do was fall in and let it take him. He could withstand pain.

In truth, he was there in the fire already. The part of him that mattered. If he went on without his paintings, what would he be? Nothing. A dried husk living in eternal night.

A hand wrapped around his elbow. Startled by the touch, he jerked away, but the hand held firm. He looked down. Painted mica swirls glistened on the fingers, their pretty plumpness so strange and foreign in the ragged and broken moment of his life.

“Miss E—Mrs. Warrington?” The sounds he made were dry as they crackled from the scorched desert of his throat.

“Don’t, my lord.” She shook her head, her eyes stark and her mouth set in a grim line. “You can always paint more.”

He couldn’t answer. Paint more? But they wouldn’t be these paintings. His record of his time, his thoughts, the beauty he painstakingly brought to life from nothing more than powdery pigments mixed with oil. So many times, he’d tossed aside a drawing or painting that wasn’t working. But he relied on having all the traces—even the worst of his work, the remnants he might one day order to be burned after his death. All the failed attempts meant something to the finished whole. They stood as witness to his passion. His thirst for life. A testament to him.

He didn’t always like painting. More often than not, he hated it—whether his slavish need to capture the ineffable or his frustrating inability to do so to the standards he thought he should reach. For every one success, there were at least a thousand failures, very probably many times more, all of them available to be viewed on paper or canvas.

But never—never—not in his darkest moments, no matter how his fallibility and imperfections disgusted him, had he wanted to destroy what he’d created.

Giles caught the duke staring. Weakness evaporated. Maybe it was his vow to live how he wanted to live, his father’s wishes be dammed. Then again, it could well have been the woman by his side. Whatever it was, the tidal force of Giles’s resolve gathered, strong and callous. His jaw set. No, he would not surrender to the flames. He would be damned before he gave the duke that satisfaction.

And there was his mother to consider. The one person in the world whose love for him was as unselfish as it was unwavering. He wouldn’t do that to her. He would endure anything before causing his mother pain. The duke did that well enough on his own. If her son betrayed her…

The thought didn’t bear entertaining.

Giles faced the man who’d fathered him. The duke’s face, pale and calm, stood out from the blackness around him. He slowly lifted his head until his chin was level with the ground. The fire reflected in his eyes, and it seemed as if the force of his anger alone had been enough to spark the first flame.

“Seems I’ve captured your attention, at last.”

“You have no right to be here…” Giles clenched his teeth and spat out the next words. Never let it be said he forgot who or what his father was. “Your Grace.”

“You, Ashcroft, are my heir.”

Stinging drops of rain began falling. The fire sizzled and popped where the water hit the burning materials. Giles wiped a lock of hair from his eyes and stood firm. “That gives you no claim to me.”

“I warned you.”

“So you did. And now it’s done. Be gone.”

“This is but my opening gambit. Don’t think I don’t have more to strip away from you.” As he spoke, he closed the distance between them, his voice low as he spoke with deliberate care. “And whatever you do, don’t think I will stop.”

When Giles was seven, the duke had whipped his bare bottom with a leather strap for spilling pencil shavings on the rug where he’d been lying on his stomach, drawing by the fire on a late-winter evening. When he was two and twenty, Giles—a man full grown—had long been taller than any other man in the county, save old mister what’s-his-name, the blacksmith with a twisted leg. The duke, no longer able to whip his son, had shot Giles’s horse, Icarus, instead.

His sin? The duke had discovered him not once, but twice, in the arms of large women, and had drawn the correct conclusion about his son’s preferences. “I couldn’t be more disgusted if you let some limp wrist bugger you,” he’d said.

Giles had been sent away for a few days. His father had left the creature in the field, forbidding any of the grooms or stablemen from disturbing the carcass. When Giles returned, he’d found Icarus half-buried in mud and swarming with maggots.

The duke would never stop trying to control him. But Giles would never be under his father’s control again. The duke had already cost Giles too dearly. Icarus had been the last horse Giles had allowed himself to care for, instead electing to lose himself in bringing color and shape to life on canvas. His father had taken that from him—the living being he’d loved, trained, ridden, day in and day out.

“You’ll never stop until what?” Giles struggled to breathe. “You’ve brought me to heel?”

“You’re a disgrace. My child. My son. My legacy. And I can’t stand to look at you. As hateful as it is to me, I am your father. Therefore, you’ll do what I want you to do. You’ll be what I want you to be.”

“I’ll never submit to you.”

“Easy words.” Silverlund’s voice was characteristically cold. “I can make it difficult for you to follow them. More difficult than you can imagine.”

“Do your worst.” Giles remained hard. The rain began to pelt harder, and a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes in the castle walls behind them. “I’ve never been what you want. I never will be, no matter what you do.”

…

In the sitting room, Patience rested by the fire. Alone.

The room seemed too large. Everything and everyone she knew and loved seemed so very far away. The castle had become a foreign, leering place. The walls were the same. But the pleasure palace was gone. In its place, a prison loomed.

She shook with the weight of shame squeezing her lungs. Her hair hung in curling locks, droplets suspended from the ends. She pulled the rug more tightly around her, not in the least chilled, but needing to retreat to the safety of the binding.

How could it have come to this? Her mind spun. Her choice to come here with the marquess seemed so foolish. In paralyzing fear, her bones became like jelly.

The Duke of Silverlund appeared in the doorway and stalked into the room. Breath vanished from Patience’s lungs. He looked the type who would thrash a child’s backside to bleeding before the poor wee thing knew better than to sample rocks from the garden.

“The dairy maid.” He looked her over, his bold gaze full of judgment. He made no secret of his intense dislike for what he saw. “How fitting.”

This man was a cut above the rest of his kind. A bladed jaw. Pure white at the temples, while merely streaking the rest of the dark hair. A raw intensity under carefully maintained control that might have rivaled his son’s.

But unlike Giles, Silverlund wore an air of ruthlessness. As if he’d been born with the brutal power to hurt people under his control…and he enjoyed it. Without a conscience to keep him in check.

A duke, too. In the ordinary way of the world, a person like herself would never have come within ten feet of a person of such towering status.

Funny. Where she and Giles felt so evenly matched—as equal in the turns of their minds as in the pursuit of pleasure—the duke had the look of a man who’d see her low birth as a character flaw. Something unforgivable. Something that tainted her.

The two manservants hung back, flanking the doorway, their expressions twins of brutality and vigilance. One was ruddy, with a flat nose, and a face heavily scarred with pockmarks. The second had a deep dimple in his fleshy chin and small eyes. If the duke had sought to hire henchmen with fearsome looks, he couldn’t have selected much better.

The boards underfoot wailed and moaned at each slow tread. Silverlund stopped before Patience, lip curled with disgust. “You foul thing.”

She hung her head at the duke’s words, staring at the polished toes of his boots, unable to stop trembling. Her lips were quickly becoming chapped from licking them. Her mouth was dry, but it seemed all too possible she might retch if she tried to wet her tongue with a drop of wine.

What would Giles do? Patience needed his strength. Come to think on it, where was the marquess?

With every last ounce of strength, she leveled her gaze at the duke. “Leave me alone, please, Your Grace.”

Please, Your Grace? Lord save her from the manners of polite Society. How could she have sputtered nonsense about goat fucking so effortlessly to the girls at the ball, then find years of training locking her tongue with the duke?

Silverlund wasn’t as large a man as Giles. But he was big. In the rank cruelty of his hard features were echoes of his son. It wasn’t much. The line of the brow, the set of the eyes, a flickering movement in the mouth. Sometimes it was there, and sometimes it wasn’t. It was, however, enough for a crackling layer of ice to form over her heart every time a glimpse showed through.

“I think it’s best if you leave before daybreak. There is a carriage being made ready for you as we speak.” He held up a hand. “Don’t worry. Not a thing will be said about your true identity. So long as you leave within the hour. But don’t think I won’t be watching.”

All she had to do was leave? As far as threats went, it wasn’t so very dire. On the surface, that was. It was something she could ill afford to take casually. If news of her tryst ever found its way back to her parents, it would kill them.

Giles appeared in the doorway, his face smudged with soot. His jaw set and his eyes narrowed. The tension in the room could have brought the castle crumbling down around them. “Don’t you dare speak to her.”

“The fat whore who was blinded by lust and allowed herself to be lured to the den of a snake?” The duke sneered at Patience. “Believe me, I wouldn’t debase myself if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”

Both of the duke’s henchmen had to hold a flailing marquess back from attacking his own father. “Don’t you dare speak to the woman who’s going to be my wife in such a manner.”

Patience started, heart leaping at the idea, as the duke drew back in what was assuredly a rare display of surprise. Her hand flew to her throat. She and Silverlund spoke identical words at nearly the same time and with the exact same inflection. “What did you say?”

Ashcroft’s chest heaved. Triumph lit his eyes. “I said, she’s going to be my wife.”

Patience came to her feet with as much dignity as she could muster in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of anger. “I think you’ll find that you’ve forgotten something, my lord.”

He knit his brows and frowned at her. “What’s that?”

“Asking me.” He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand to silence him. If she heard the words from his lips—will you marry me—she might not be strong enough to say no. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how much she wanted that very thing. Not to be a wife, but his wife. Even under the wrong circumstances, it was almost too tempting to resist.

Almost. He’d said it to spite his father. And she would never be a bride of spite. “Don’t bother. The answer is no. I won’t be made a pawn in your games, and I won’t be taken to wife until it’s for proper reasons.”

What she meant by proper…well, it was the best she could do without revealing too much. That is, without exposing that—without irony and without apology for being tenderhearted and sentimental—she intended to marry for love.

The duke snapped at her. “You stupid, stupid woman. You should be grateful for any man’s attention.”

Patience could have drowned in the onslaught of ire. She tugged the gold band off her finger, slapped it upon the mantelpiece, and spoke between clenched teeth. “I will be grateful when it suits me to be grateful. Not a moment before.” She let sarcasm infuse her words with the subtlety of a jar of honey in a thimbleful of tea. “Even the likes of me won’t be made a pawn in this war between you.”

Giles’s eyes darted between where she’d placed the ring and her. He whitened.

With a smirk, the duke clasped his hands behind his back and rolled his weight on his heels. His gaze never left her as he addressed his son. “I’m almost sorry she won’t have you, you worthless whelp. She’s clearly far more clever than you.”