Page 69 of The Duke's Promise to Her Child
“She has everything she needs now.” He spread his hands. “Her stepfather will provide for her. Whatever arrangement you have secured, she will have a dowry, a future, connections. She does not need a small plot of land in the country. It is of no practical use to her.”
“But it is of practical use to you,” Helena said. “Do you have a buyer?”
He looked at his shoes. Then at the wall. Then shrugged in a way that confirmed it entirely. “That is beside the point.”
“It is precisely the point. You have come here to ask me to hand over my daughter’s only inheritance from her father so that you may sell it. Without offering any compensation whatsoever.”
“It ought to be in the family?—”
“It is in the family. Lavinia is Huxley’s daughter. The land is hers.” She looked at him steadily. “No. You will not have it.”
His expression darkened. “You are hardly in a position to?—”
“I am in exactly the position I need to be in,” she said. “I am her mother, and it is her inheritance, and I will not sign it over to you. Not for any amount of money, and certainly not for nothing at all.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “What if I were to tell your husband the truth about your background? There were certain rumors in London before you left, after all. Rumors he might have to have explained to himself. What would he say if he knew that you are a commoner with no pedigree, that your daughter’s noble heritage comes entirely from her father’s side, and that you have been deceiving your way through society since before you were out of the schoolroom?”
“He already knows.”
“Does he now? Well, given how he became a duke, I should not be surprised that he is a part of your scheme. Does he also know what a horrible wive you were to my brother?”
Her anger rose but she swallowed it down. “Your brother was not exactly a good husband either.”
Emmett sneered. “He was the husband you deserved.”
A thought came to her then and she squared her shoulders. “Was it you who wrote the letter with veiled threat when I was still at Bloomsbury? Did you write it to scare me? Or because you were angry about Gideon’s request for funds?”
He shrugged. “I do not know what you are speaking of. You make no sense. As you never have. You were never able to express yourself properly. Shameful.”
Her nostrils flared. She was certain he’d written the letter. It didn’t’ matter now, of course.
“Baron Vale…” Gideon’s voice came from the doorway. She had not heard him enter. He crossed the room and came to stand beside her, and when he extended his arm toward the door his voice was very quiet — which she had come to understand was considerably more dangerous than when he was loud.
“You will leave, Lord Vale. And you will not trouble our family again.”
Emmett rose slowly. He looked at Gideon, seizing him up.
“What a sorry excuse for a family,” he said. “A wife who is a commoner, a stepdaughter with a bare inheritance, and you —who would be standing on my level in the Lords if not for a dead cousin and a carelessly driven curricle. You will never be what your predecessor was.”
He got no further. Gideon had taken him by the collar, not violently but with an absolute and immovable firmness, and was walking him toward the hall. Two footmen appeared at the top of the stairs. Heathcliff materialized at the front door.
“Heathcliff,” Gideon said. “Please see Lord Vale off the property.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
The door opened. A shaft of afternoon light fell across the hall floor. Emmett was escorted out with the quiet efficiency of a well-run household, and the door closed behind him.
Gideon turned back to her.
She was standing in the middle of the drawing room with her arms wrapped around herself, and she knew from the look on his face that he could see all of it — the tension in her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the way she was holding herself together by main force.
“That,” he said, “was a thoroughly unpleasant man.”
But she could not reply. Her throat was tight. She had watched him march Emmett out and she had felt it — the relief, thegratitude — and underneath both of those the thing she could not shake, the thing that lived in her bones regardless of what her mind told her. The anger in his voice. The certainty and the force of it.
“I told you,” she said. Her voice came out very quiet. “I told you I do not want this. This anger. This kind of confrontation. I thought you understood.”
He looked at her, genuinely confused, she could see that, and she knew she owed him an explanation. She knew she should tell him. The whole of it, properly, the way she had never managed to before. The way Huxley had used that same voice. The way she had learned, over three years, what came after it.
