The Duke's Perfect Wife

Ian shook his head and kept shaking it. “You need to show Eleanor the house. Once you tell her everything about it, you will know.”

“I will know?”

“Yes.”

“I will know what?” Hart’s exasperation grew. “Whether Eleanor can run at double speed to get away from me again? Whether she’ll stop to kick me in the backside before she goes?”

“Yes.”

Hart let out his breath again. It didn’t steam as much, the morning having grown warmer. “I can’t take her there. There are things I still don’t want her to know.”

“You have to. Eleanor needs to understand you, as Beth understands me.”

Ian’s jaw tightened as he spoke, his hand as tight on the railing. At least he’d stopped shaking his head like a stubborn mule.

“You’re a hard man, Ian Mackenzie.”

Ian did not answer.

Tell Eleanor everything.

Angelina Palmer had taken it upon herself to visit Eleanor Ramsay in Scotland a few months into their engagement and tell her about Hart. That he owned the High Holborn house, that he entertained ladies there, that he’d pleasured them in ways well-bred young women could not imagine. Angelina hadn’t described things in detail to Eleanor, thank God; but the hinting had been enough.

Hart had deliberately not visited the house and Angelina while he was courting Eleanor, not wanting to be that sort of liar. Feeling virtuous because of this, he’d coaxed Eleanor to surrender her virginity to him.

But Eleanor had awakened something inside Hart, an excitement he’d not felt before or since. He’d wanted to explore it, had explored it as much as he possibly could.

Angelina’s motives for revealing her existence had not been to make Eleanor jealous or to convince Hart to return to her. No. Angelina had known as soon as she’d made the decision that her actions would lose her Hart forever. The marriage to Eleanor had been important to Hart, and Hart was not the forgiving sort. But Angelina had done it anyway.

She hadn’t gone to Eleanor to reveal Hart’s sexual exploits. She’d gone to warn Eleanor of her danger, because Angelina knew exactly what sort of man Hart was on his way to becoming.

And Angelina had been right.

Eleanor’s rejection had taken the arrogant Hart unawares. Astonished and furious, Hart had threatened both Eleanor and her father with dire consequences if Eleanor broke the engagement, because that was the brutal sort of man Hart was learning to be. His father had beaten his lessons into Hart very well.

Hart had never learned how to mitigate his anger or even speak to someone without immediately deciding how to manipulate him. Hart had hated his father but had become much like him, having had no other example to follow.

And so, Hart had no idea how to simply be with a person and, as Mac had admonished him, let things happen. He could have had the chance to learn with Eleanor, but he’d thrown that chance away.

A beam of sun dazzled the water and stabbed into Hart’s eyes. When he raised his head, he saw that they were drawing near a lock, the lockkeeper ambling out of his house toward the pumps at the gate.

“I can’t tell Eleanor the things I did, Ian,” he said.

Ian shot him an impatient look. The approaching lock was far more interesting than complicated conversations with Hart. “You had two sets of rules,” Ian said. “One for Mrs. Palmer and one for Eleanor. You think that if you follow the wrong set of rules with Eleanor, it means you don’t love her.”

Hart opened his mouth to hotly deny this, but the words stuck in his throat. Thoughts he reached for—things he’d been certain of—shattered like glass at his touch.

Ian pushed himself from the gunwale, finished with worrying about Hart’s problems. “How many gallons fill the lock per minute, do you think?” he asked.

Without waiting for an answer, Ian turned from Hart and jumped from the boat to the bank. Ian caught up to the man guiding the horse and walked with him in silence, probably busy calculating the depth of the pond and the time the water in it would take to fill the lock.

A spring rain began, pouring down in earnest as the canal boat pulled over to the bank. The Romany had steered through the last lock below Hungerford, and now they’d reached the part of the canal that marked the boundary of Cameron’s property.

Hart looked up the green field that ran from canal to the house on the rise and saw that it was full of people. Annoyed, dripping people with umbrellas, most of them Mackenzies.

Not all of them. A tall Scotsman who was not a Mackenzie stood very close to Eleanor, holding an umbrella over her head. Hart recognized him—Sinclair McBride, one of Ainsley’s many brothers, the one who was the barrister. Hart felt his rage begin to boil as Sinclair bent down to Eleanor to shelter her with the umbrella, and Eleanor smiled serenely up at him.

Eleanor watched Hart standing on the deck like a king about to address his subjects. Bloody man. She’d been terrified when his lackeys had returned in the middle of the night, saying they’d lost him along the woods by the canal. Only early that morning, when Angelo had ridden up to say that Ian and Hart were safe with his family, had the panic lessened. Now Eleanor was simply angry.

She started forward, but Ainsley’s brother Sinclair touched her shoulder. “Best not. It’s muddy and you might have a fall.”

He was sweet, really. Sinclair McBride, a widower, had arrived with his two children this morning to further fill the nursery. Ainsley had invited him and the rest of her brothers to stay at Waterbury this spring, but thus far, only Sinclair had been able to turn up.