truth.
“But why shouldn’t your heart be strewn in pieces throughout Regent’s Park?” Langdon mused. “You courted the young lady for several months, and you told Ellingsworth and I that you’d already received her father’s grateful acceptance of a marriage offer.”
“She never agreed to anything,” Alex said flatly.
“A modest girl, that Lady Emmeline.” Ellingsworth nodded with approval. “She wouldn’t have said yes right away. They never do. Nothing to be alarmed by.”
“How would you know?” Alex’s voice was edged. Ellingsworth had little experience with offering for ladies’ hands, committed as he was to a life of reckless pleasure.
Langdon added, “It’d be unseemly for an earl’s daughter to eagerly snap up a marriage proposal the moment it was offered.”
Alex scowled. Despite the fact that, at thirty-eight, he was sixteen years her senior, they would suit well as a wedded couple. Lady Emmeline had been perfectly trained in the responsibilities of an aristocratic wife. Though he wished she stated her own opinion rather than constantly agreeing with him, there were worse faults one could find in a prospective bride.
They could marry at Christmas, eight months from now. It would be a small but elegant wedding, followed by a lavish breakfast and a wedding journey in the Lake District. And then, if everything went well, in less than a year, Alex and Lady Emmeline might welcome their first child—hopefully a boy so the line would be secure. It would’ve been precisely the sort of match Alex’s father would have approved, considering Lady Emmeline’s faultless background and her spotless reputation.
“Look at him now, mooning away,” Langdon sighed, smugly thwarting Alex’s attempts to step around him. “He looks poorly.”
It would be bad form to knock his friend to the ground. Damn the social niceties that dictated a man couldn’t punch another without repercussions.
“Perhaps he should be bled,” Ellingsworth suggested with his habitual smirk. It was his constant companion since returning from the War, as if he refused to take anything seriously.
“I am perfectly well.” Alex looked back and forth between these two rogues whom he called friends. “No need to call for a quack.”
“He’s already had an amputation,” Langdon noted, raising a brow as he always did. “One prospective bride—gone.” He made a sawing motion at his ankle, as if cutting the shackles of matrimony.
Alex glanced down at his own lower leg, as if he could see the invisible links that might have bound him to Lady Emmeline. He’d come so close to becoming a married man and sharing the rest of his life with one woman—the faultless duke his father had bred him to be. It hardly mattered that Alex felt nothing for the gel other than a sense of distant respect. She would have made a fine duchess.
“We were at White’s yesterday when we heard about what happened,” Langdon said with disapproval. “Didn’t even tell your two closest friends that Lady Emmeline had run off with a cavalry officer. No, we had to hear it from Lord Ruthven, of all people.”
Alex didn’t need reminding that the whole world knew about his embarrassment. He’d been ensconced in his study reviewing land reports from his holdings when the butler announced a surprise visitor. Lady Emmeline’s father came into the chamber, pale and shaky and full of abject, groveling apologies. He’d handed Alex a note written by his daughter that stated she’d run off to Gretna Green with a poor but dashing cavalry captain. Alex had stared at the short missive for a good five minutes, trying to understand its significance.
“You should have come right to us with the news,” Ellingsworth drawled. “So you could spare us the humiliation of learning about it secondhand.”
“Forgive me for failing to consider your feelings in all this,” Alex snapped.
What could he say to his friends that would make them understand how the pain he felt was mostly embarrassment, not sadness? He wasn’t even certain he desired their understanding.
He was a duke. The holder of countless profitable estates and assets. A prime mover in Parliament. A frequent advisor to the Prince Regent—though the profligate fool almost never took Alex’s advice. Marriage to the Duke of Greyland would be considered a huge coup for any young lady of gentle birth. But Lady Emmeline had thrown away a chance to be a duchess . . . for love.
That’s what her note had said. “Forgive me, Your Grace. But I love him terribly, as he loves me. You deserve better than a wife whose heart belongs to another . . .”
“Ah, he’s well off without the feckless chit,” Ellingsworth insisted. “Had no backbone, that girl. She trembled like a willow whenever he spoke. A fearful lass can’t be very amusing in bed.”
“Don’t talk about Lady Emmeline that way,” Alex said, but there wasn’t much heat in his words.
He backed away from Ellingsworth and Langdon, thinking perhaps he could dodge around them. But they were clever, curse them, and Ellingsworth edged behind him, blocking him in.
Ah, damn and damn.
Alex scowled at his friends tormenting him in the depths of his ill humor. While he felt no loss of affection from the girl’s elopement with another man, pain lanced him at her desertion. Was there something about him . . . ? Something that made women flee from him? Was he truly that intimidating? Was he—was he unlovable?
But that word, that concept—love. He’d never felt it at home, though he’d heard it existed. He’d seen it in the way cottagers at the family estates acted with their children—the fond looks, the touches and smiles. Love was real, but it had been in short supply for the Duke of Greyland’s children.
His jilting brought back that same, gnawing question. If his own mother couldn’t show him affection, perhaps there was something about him that was fundamentally unworthy of love. An absence, a lack of a key inner component that would cause someone, anyone, to feel for him.
Lady Emmeline would have been a fine mother, raising sons and daughters in a way that befitted their station. She wouldn’t have loved him, but that wasn’t a requirement for marriage. They could have gotten along with mutual respect. If he felt a cold emptiness from this thought, he shouldered it aside. He’d gotten this far without love in his life. He could exist without it now.
Alex still smarted at her desertion but the greatest damage was sustained by his pride. At least neither Langdon nor Ellingsworth looked at him with sympathy.
“He’s definitely going home to sulk,” Langdon said disapprovingly.
Ellingsworth looked horrified. “I never spend a night at home, unless I’m too ill, and even with a scorching fever, I go to the theater.”
“I’ve had a meal out, and now I’m heading home to read a new translation of Euclid’s Elements.”
“You see, Langdon,” Ellingsworth noted. “He’s got a romping good time already planned. He’s no need of us.”
“Right about one thing.” Alex grabbed hold of Langdon’s shoulders and forcibly moved his friend aside. He stepped up into his carriage, but to his annoyance, Ellingsworth and Langdon followed, seating themselves opposite him. “I don’t have need of you.” He rapped
