“You’ll have to wait and see,” she said coyly.
“I have six pounds for lot twenty-five. Any advance?”
“Six!”
Fleur’s mind wouldn’t let her stay on the current bidding war between Mr. Heber Reverand and Dr. Issac Gossett.
“Hartwell?” she whispered.
Hartwell pulled his attention from the front. A question glinted in his faintly disgruntled gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
Frowning, he glanced at her. “For what?”
“I’m distracting you from bidding onThe P—”
“I don’t want the work.”Get on with your question, he said, without saying.
“Did you love Meghan?” she blurted.
“No.”
“Eight pounds fifty from the distinguished gentleman at the front.”
And she believed him.
She would rather she didn’t.
Sad for the jilted duke who had been about to marry for reasons other than love, Fleur forgot all about the fact he considered her family his enemy.
Back when she was a girl of nine or ten, spending a rare summer at her family’s Kent property, she had come upon a village boy. He had a dead frog pinned by all four tiny, spindly legs to a board. When she had confronted him, the lad insisted he only did so in the name of science. That had been the first broken nose she had delivered.
She had cried for weeks—not about hurting the Little Scientist, bugger him—but for the loss of that Natterjack toad.
All the amusement Hartwell packed into a single syllable on the matter of loving—or in his case,notloving—the woman he had been betrothed to somehow disturbed Fleur even more than the Tragic Summer of the Frog—as she came to call that day in Kent.
Not that she wanted him to suffer a broken heart. But that he didn’t left her sad for him.
All the men in Fleur’s life freely smiled. They believed in love. They married for love.
How was this man even related to the affable, playful Captain Jeremy Tremaine, who desperately loved Fleur’s cousin, Linnie?
And more, what had made the Duke of Hartwell this way?
Chapter 2
“That which I am, I am; I did not seek For life, nor did I make myself.”
Lord Byron
Henry Edward William Charles Tremaine, the Marquess of Dorchester, 11th Duke of Hartwell—known as “Hart” to the privileged few—had that nickname forced upon him by the late duke at birth, less from affection than from tradition. The Hartwell dukes, after all, proved, through history and inheritance, immune to love. Love was weakness.
As heir to the dukedom, Hart had been too important to send away, and so he had been raised on the lap of his father, guarded and protected like the Hartwell jewels, awarded by William I upon the inception of the title. Except where no fewer than four footmen guarded the Tremaine heirlooms, Hart’s safeguarding fell to the only man the duke truly trusted—himself.
The then marquess’s first spoken word was “duke,” an understanding of Hart’s place known even before full consciousness began.
As a babe, Hart’s nurses received strict orders for his care. No coddling. No affection.