Married to the Marquess (27 page)

“Oh my.” Diana winced. “Rule Ten?”

“Among others, I expect,” Derek sighed, looking over at David, then back up at his sister. “We have got a serious situation, Di.”

“I suspected we might. Come on in, I shall be right down.”

Within moments, the three siblings were seated in the front drawing room, and Diana had ordered light refreshment and tea for her and Derek, and a cold compress for David’s throbbing head. When the maid brought it in, Diana took the compress and laid it across David’s eyes, and sighed. “Honestly, David, are you determined to break every single one of those rules?”

“No,” he said stubbornly as he looked at her from under the compress. He grimaced and put his hand on top of the cloth and leaned back. “Just most of them.”

“Imagine that,” Derek remarked with a smile.

“I have a few that I like,” David brought up with a finger. “Rule Eighteen being the primary.”

Derek thought back for a moment. “Always dance with a wallflower?”

David nodded, his wild grin the only part of his expression any of them could see. “It’s probably the best part of the night, when I do that. They don’t care that I’m wealthy or the son of a duke, and they don’t ever think that I am going to propose matrimony. I have the best conversations with wallflowers.”

“Well, hurrah for you,” Diana snorted, sipping her tea. “But what about the rest of the rules?”

“I always carry a handkerchief, I always wear gloves… in public, and I always change for meals.” David shrugged, then groaned at the motion. “Other than that, I see no reason to have the rules at all.”

The two remaining Chambers siblings looked at each other and shook their heads, both smiling. David had always been the most outspoken of the three of them, and in adulthood he was only growing more so. But one could not help loving him regardless.

Well, maybe one.

Derek sighed and told Diana what David had let slip the night before, with some now sober clarification and elaboration from David himself. The frown that formed on Diana’s face was so impressive and imposing that Derek suddenly knew whom she had learned it from. It was the very image of their father, and it had the same effect.

“I do not understand that man,” she muttered as they finished the story. “As if David would marry a milkmaid or a courtesan.”

“I might,” David said with a grin, “if she were pretty enough and had the requisite intellect.”

“The point is,” Diana overrode loudly, giving her younger brother a look, “that our father should trust David to behave with as much respect as he does the rest of us, especially where his marriage is concerned.”

“I agree,” Derek sighed as he reached for a biscuit. “But he is immovable. He is determined that David be married soon and that his wife meets all of the necessary criteria,” he broke off with a snort and shook his head.

“I don’t want to get married now, I am not ready to get married now, and I
will
marry
my
choice, not his,” David announced from his semi-recumbent position on the sofa.

“We know,” Diana soothed with a slight roll of her eyes. “If we have learned anything from Derek’s example, it is that there is great danger in marrying early and to a person of someone else’s choosing.”

“Yes,” Derek murmured, thinking back on his wedding day, on his life up to this point, on the very subject of his wife. “But it turns out I may have been fortunate after all.”

“Apparently,” Diana agreed with a grin. “But it did take a while. And David is not nearly so open.”

“I beg your pardon!” David protested, sitting up slightly.

Diana rolled her eyes again. “Oh, please. Mountains are more movable than you are. At any rate, I think you will need to get out of England for a while. Explore the continent; get all that wicked wildness out of you.” She grinned mischievously. “You know, get your priorities aligned.”

“I am all for it,” David said, returning her grin with one of his own in spite of his headache.

“It will never work,” Derek told them both, shaking his head. “The duke will not allow it.”

“He will when I tell him that his first grandchild is expected to arrive in about six months,” Diana muttered darkly, still smiling. “That should get the old codger to shift his stance.”

It took a good half of a minute for either brother to react, and then it took another three minutes or so to calm them down. Even David, with his raging headache, shouted out his jubilation and even went so far as to leave the sofa and race over to give Diana a hug, while Derek merely maintained his position, and grinned broadly.

Diana beamed under their attention, and thanked them, then waved David away like an irritating insect. His headache apparently returned, for he gingerly excused himself from the room, taking his compress with him.

“So help me, Derek, if I find anything resembling regurgitated remains of breakfast in my house, I am marching over to your house and dragging you back here to clean it up.”

Derek grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about that. He is only going to sleep it off somewhere. Would you mind very much housing him until he is able to take care of himself again? I would, but… I am… that is to say, Kate and I…”

“Yes, Derek, he can stay,” Diana interrupted gently, smiling. “You are quite occupied at the moment, aren’t you?”

He nodded, not seeing any need to expound further.

“How are things?” she asked quietly, watching him with curious, but kind eyes.

He hesitated for a moment, not because he did not want to share with her, because he did. He and Diana had always had a special bond, and they always told each other everything, things they never shared with other people. It had been suggested that they were actually twins, but given the year’s gap between them, it was obviously not true. They were just that close.

No, he hesitated because he had no idea how to respond, how to define what he was feeling.

“I think…” he began slowly, choosing his words with great caution, “I think I might be…” He couldn’t say it, he could not define it as such yet. There was too much uncertainty, too much unknown.

“You might be what?”

Of course, Diana would not let things go so easily. There was nothing for it. “I think I might be falling in love with her.”

Thankfully, Diana’s reaction to his admission was far more reserved than his and David’s had been to hers. She said nothing, did not even squeak or shift. More than a little unnerved, and wondering if she were alive and breathing, he looked up, only to find her eyes swimming in tears. Oh dear. That was not good.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes, and laughing a little. “Ridiculous, I know, but I have been so emotional lately, and I never expected to hear you say that.” She sniffed into her handkerchief.

“Nor did I.”

“You need to leave.”

“What?” he cried, looking back up at her.

“Sorry, I mean you need to go back home. Go be with her, find out if you really are in love with your wife. Spend time with her, court her, lose yourself in her. You cannot figure this out if you are here, Derek. You need to leave.”

“All right,” he said hurriedly, getting up, but still watching her with concern as the tears continued to course down her cheeks. His sister rarely lost control of her emotions, and the idea that he was the cause of this sudden break in control was not only disconcerting, but worrisome. If Edward should find out that Derek had made her cry, he would lose the function of his lower half.

“Go. Go now,” Diana urged, waving him out as she dabbed at her cheeks.

“Are you going to be…?”

“I am
fine
, Derek,” Diana barked. “Go!”

“All right, all right,” he replied, holding up his hands in surrender. “I’m leaving.”

And he did, but with heavy reservations. The whole walk back to his home, he wondered at her words, at his words, at his own thoughts. Was he in love with Kate? It was possible. It was quite probable, actually. He was certainly growing more and more fond of her as the days wore on. He had promised to stay for two weeks, and now he couldn’t even think of leaving. He wanted nothing more than to stay and explore these new emotions; he wanted to understand his wife more clearly; he wanted to understand himself more clearly.

Because never had he been more confused about the man he was than right now.

Before he was aware of it, he was standing in his own entryway, handing his hat and gloves to Harville. “Where is Lady Whitlock?”

“The drawing room, my lord. I am afraid she is a little down at the moment, sir. Lady Aurelia came by this morning and has taken Miss Jessie and little Alice back home. We are all a bit forlorn about it.” In truth, the butler did look a little older at the present.

Derek smiled a touch. “I can imagine. Thank you, Harville.” He went in to the drawing room, and Kate, though happy to see him, did look sad.

When he asked about it, she hesitated, but thanks to his uncanny ability to prod information out of people, she eventually sighed, and said, “I miss Alice.”

He nodded. “So do I. But you may call me a brute when I tell you that part of me is relieved to have her returned to her home.”

“What?” she cried. “How can you say that?”

“Because now I have you all to myself again. I love Alice dearly, you know that, but when she was here, you spent most of your time with her, and while I can hardly blame you for that, I was profoundly jealous of my beautiful niece.”

“You were?” she asked with a small smile.

“Mmhmm,” he said with a nod, shrugging. “I missed you.”

“I was right here.”

“I missed you.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Then she stood and walked over to where he was, still leaning against the fireplace, and wrapped her arms around his waist, laying her head against his chest.

Finding breathing and swallowing a trifle difficult with the sudden lump in his throat, Derek put his arms about her and held her to him. “What is this for?” he asked softly, his voice surprisingly raw.

“That was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” she told him, nuzzling against him ever so slightly. “I… I missed you, too.”

Derek closed his eyes and restrained the urge to sigh as he touched his head to hers. He had to amend his previous statement; he was most definitely falling in love with Kate. There was no maybe about it. And suddenly, he had to ask the one question that had been eating away at him since he had come back to London.

“Why did you send for me, Kate?” he murmured, loving the feel of her hair against his cheek. “Knowing we didn’t like each other, knowing how your mother felt about me, knowing how I felt about her, why did you send for me still? And don’t tell me it was for propriety; we caused more of a stir because I
was
there.”

She lifted her head and looked up at him. “Is it important?”

He nodded. “It is to me. Please.”

She swallowed and he could see the faint shimmer of tears in her eyes. “I didn’t want to be alone.”

“You had your father and your sister,” he reminded her.

“Yes, but… I wanted you.”

That hardly seemed likely, and he knew he showed his surprise. “You did?”

“I didn’t know who I was without my mother, and the only other person I could identify myself with was you. I wanted you to come and remind me who I was.” She smiled up at him. “You did, but not in the way I imagined.”

“Well,” he said after a moment, once he had swallowed that lump again and managed to smile, “I do aim to please.”

She laughed in a low voice, and he could not resist leaning down and capturing her lips in a gentle, teasing kiss that, while designed to render her both speechless and breathless, actually turned
his
thoughts to nothing but a babble of sounds that was rather rapidly fading into a faint humming.

As if she knew this, Kate broke off the kiss and quirked one brow at him, which made him smile, in spite of his sudden state of stupor. He toyed with her still-intact locks of hair, and tilted his head ever so slightly.

“Will you play for me, Kate?”

She leaned back just a touch in surprise. “Now? But it’s still early.”

“Who says we can only have concerts at night? I love to hear you play any time.” He brought one finger to stroke her cheek ever so softly. “Please?”

She shook her head with a smile. “You are incorrigible.”

He grinned. “Is that a yes?”

She laughed and stepped out of his hold, but took his hand and led him to the music room. She sat down with a small sigh of mock frustration, and began to play.

Derek propped his elbow on the arm of the sofa and rested his head in it, feeling more than content to sit here forever, watching his wife with an amused smile on his face as she played for him.

He had never known that life could be this sweet.

But he was so grateful it was.

C
hapter
F
ifteen