Page 27 of A Bride for the Heartless Duke
Nicholas grunted. “I got married.”
“Ah.” Oliver took a sip of his gin. “I would offer my congratulations, but by your face, it appears you’d be hoping for commiserations.”
Nicholas toyed with the truth for a long moment, before finally deciding to go for it. After all, Oliver still had no knowledge of his true identity while he was masked. “This isn’t my first marriage,” he admitted.
“Your first wife died?”
“Several years ago now.” Nicholas drained his ale and peered into the empty cup, wishing there was more. “My second wife—mycurrentwife… ask me when I’m sober.”
“Do you like her?”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“I think it’s very much the point,” Oliver objected, topping up Nicholas’ cup with his gin. “If you married her.”
Nicholas harrumphed and swallowed it whole. “Affection has had precious little to do with my life, let alone either of my marriages. The first was duty. The second was necessity.”
“A mother for your daughter.” Oliver whistled softly. “That’s a great deal of woman to hire for one post.Andshe willfully accepted? Seems like you’re a fortunate man. Or will she scold you when you come back home at this hour?”
Nicholas thought of Isadora, probably in bed by now. After her promise to no longer follow him, he was reasonably sure she would keep to her word. Tomorrow, she would make no mention of it, and they would go on living as strangers.
“No,” he mumbled. “I suppose she won’t.”
“Blimey, are you trying to make the rest of us jealous? She is the wife most men dream of. Devoted to the cause, not the man.” Oliver beamed a crooked smile. “If you’ve truly no interest in her, then say the word. Perhaps I’lltake her off your hands.”
The hackles rose on Nicholas’s neck, which was absurd, given how little this veritable stranger in the house meant to him. “No one else touches her without a torn-off limb to show for it.”
“Ah, so it transpires youdolike her after all!” Oliver crowed, delighted. “Or if you don’t want her, you don’t want anyone else to have her either, which is an approximately worse position for her to find herself in, poor woman.” He drained the last of his ale and settled forward on his elbows, perfumed in bergamot and ambergris, far too fine for this tavern of ne’er-do-wells. Of whichNicholas must count himself among, given Oliver’s description of him just then.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Will. My sister swears I can’t keep my trap shut even when the Lord Himself would advise it. But my advice to you is that you go home tonight and tell her how fortunate you are to have such an unexacting wife.”
Nicholas snorted, thinking of the home he had contrived and the wife he had forged for himself.
But he nodded, and found, despite himself, that he liked this man with his ready tongue and his even readier smile, and his determination to see the world through rose-colored spectacles. He, himself, could never be quite like that, but he admired the man who could.
“I’ll do that,” he said, knowing he would do no such thing.
Another man peeled away from the bar and wove toward them, tankard of something foamy slopping over his knuckles. Early thirties, perhaps, and drunk in the loud manner of a man who wished his audience to appease him. He hovered by their table and squinted at Nicholas. For all his swagger, his eyes—a muddy brown—were clear, and he had only the faintest trace of liquor on his breath as he leaned in, examining.
“Mm… no. She looks nothing like you.” His voice, like Oliver’s, held the cultured tones of a man who mingled in high society.
Nicholas half shot up. “What?”
Blood surged in his head, and he curled his hands into fists. But the man was already crossing the room to the exit, merging into the other patrons of this dimly lit establishment, a cloak over his head. Nicholas just caught sight of his tankard abandoned on a bench, and the door swinging shut.
“Strange fellow,” Oliver murmured, beckoning across the tavern for a refill, “you know him?”
Nicholas didn’t answer, launching himself from his chair and shouldering through the crush, out into the busy street. The night met him with lamplight and noise and a dozen retreating backs, any of which might have been the right one. A woman posted by the door stepped into his path, rouged to the cheekbones, henna-red hair frizzed loose from its pins, her bosom shoved up hard against laces that had seen better years.
“Ooh, in a hurry, are we?” She looked him up and down without a scrap of shame. “Who’re you after, sweetheart?Ican be anyone you want.”
“A man just left here. Which way did he go?”
“Oh, you one ofthosetypes?” she slurred with a giggle and a hiccup. “I don’t think I can dothatfor you, love.”
“Where did he go, lady?” Nicholas growled.
She sucked her teeth, unimpressed. “Growl all you like, big man. I see a hundred faces before the church bells. How am I meant to know your one from Adam?”
