A Good Debutante’s Guide to Ruin by Sophie Jordan
Chapter 22
The week passed in a blur. Rosalie moved into the Earl of Merlton’s residence. From there she was ushered into a flurry of activities in preparation for their wedding. Dressmakers. Long hours with Cook poring over the menu. Aunt Peregrine labored over the guest list until shadows rimmed her eyes. All names of people Rosalie didn’t even know, so she had little to contribute in that arena. Then there were the rounds of parties, balls, routs. All carefully selected by Aunt Peregrine. Dec attended with her, dutifully at her side. The perfect fiancé. Blast him. Not so much as a stolen kiss. Not even the brush of his hand against her.
At first she told herself she was imagining things. He was not distant and quiet, but merely overwhelmed with the flurry of activity. But when she had tried to entice him out onto the balcony with her at a dinner party thrown in their honor by a friend of Aunt Peregrine and he politely refused, she knew. He didn’t want to be alone with her.
She was careful from then on not to reach out to him. Cowardly perhaps. She was marrying the man, but she could only take so much hurt and rejection.
“Miss Hughes, you’ve a caller.”
She looked up from the same page she had stared at blindly for the last half hour. Aunt Peregrine was out meeting with the milliner. Aurelia accompanied her. Rosalie had begged off and, for once, stayed behind. She should have guessed her solitude would be short-lived.
“Your mother, Her Grace, the Duchess of Banbury.”
Her stomach sank. She had not seen her mother since Dec fetched her home. “Show her in.” It was inevitable. She would have to face her eventually, and Melisande would have heard of the news by now.
Her mother breezed into the room, a vision in an emerald green day dress trimmed in black ermine. At least she was alone. No Horley. There was that.
“Rosalie,” she exclaimed, kissing her on the cheek before settling into the armchair across from her. “So good to see you! I believe congratulations are in order.” She nodded to the waiting maid. “Biscuits, please. Bring a variety.”
With a nod, the maid curtsied and backed out of the room.
“Well.” Melisande untied the strings from her bonnet, a confection that was mostly ribbons and black feathers to match her stylish dress. “You’ve won quite the coup. A duke! And my title, no less.” She shook her head cheerfully. While her manner was all smiles and warm cheer, there was a certain light in her eyes that made Rosalie uneasy. “Seems you’ll have my leftovers. In more ways than one.”
Rosalie straightened. “I’m sure I don’t understand.”
“Well, I’ll become the Dowager Duchess of Banbury. A dowager.” She shuddered. “Can you imagine? It sounds so old.”
Rosalie gave a wincing smile.
Melisande continued. “You shall become the Duchess of Banbury. A title which used to be mine. And you’ll have Declan.” Her smile grew tight and wide then. “Who also used to be mine.”
Rosalie angled her head, her folded hands tightening in her lap. “Your meaning still eludes me.”
Just then the maid rolled into the room with the tray service. Silence fell as she positioned it between the two of them and poured them each their tea. Rosalie’s foot tapped anxiously beneath her skirts.
“I’ll serve, thank you,” she said.
The maid bobbed her head and backed out of the room, once again leaving them alone.
Melisande leaned forward and selected several biscuits. She bit into a pink frosted one with a moan. “Delicious.” Her gaze fastened on Rosalie. She licked a bit of icing from her finger with slow deliberation. “Just like Declan.”
Silence stretched between them before Rosalie whispered, “You lie.”
“Oh.” Melisande feigned a wounded look and tsked. “A mother doesn’t lie to her child.”
Rosalie laughed. She held her side, rocking where she sat even though humor was the last thing she felt.
It cracked her mother’s facade of composure. “What is so funny?” she snapped.
“You. Acting the loving mother.” Her laughter died and she leveled her gaze on Melisande. “Let’s end with the pretense of caring mother. Why are you here?” Clearly it was only to cause trouble.
Melisande blinked wide eyes. “I thought you should know the man you’re marrying . . . well, I had him first.”
Rosalie struggled to keep her expression blank, but her right eyelid flickered wildly. “Get out.”
Her mother gathered her bonnet and rose with a satisfied sigh. At the door, she paused and turned in a half circle, smiling back at Rosalie. “Congratulations again.” With that parting remark, she left.
Rosalie fell sideways on the sofa, burying her face in a pillow to muffle her cries.
Her mother was a beast. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Dec hated her mother. He wouldn’t have . . . he couldn’t have been with her. Sitting up, she dashed the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, resolving to find out.
Dec looked up from his desk as Rosalie barged into the room. He stood at once, alarmed at the sight of her. She looked pale, ashen. Her eyes, however, looked haunted. Large topazes in her bloodless face.
“Rosalie? What’s wrong? Why are you here?”
“Is it true? Did you—” She choked on the words, struggling, it seemed, to spit them out.
“Did you and my mother . . .”
Bile rose in his throat. He knew what it was that she couldn’t say. He understood.
She continued, “Never mind. You don’t need to say it. I can tell by your face it’s true.”
“Who told you?” Will and Max knew, but he couldn’t imagine either one of them told her. That left one obvious culprit.
“She did, of course. She relished every moment in the telling.”
He schooled his features to reveal nothing, donning the familiar mask he wore, carefully blocking out anything he might be feeling. “Of course she did.”
“Not even a denial.” She visibly swallowed. He knew she needed to hear him deny it. More than she even realized, she wanted him to say it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. They couldn’t have been intimate. Not him and her own mother.
“I’m going to be sick.” Turning, she started to flee, but he was there, his hand on her arm, forcing her around.
“And there you are. Just like my father,” he snarled, his mask cracking. He could feel it slipping, emotion bleeding through. Just like it always did with her. “Thinking the worst.”
“You deny nothing! What am I supposed to think?” She searched his face. “Am I wrong? Please, tell me! Is it not true?”
“You would believe me if I were to say it was not?” He snorted. “That would make you the exception. He never believed me either.”
She hesitated, bewilderment flickering on her face. “He who? Who did you tell? Who didn’t believe you?” Again she was wondering, doubting, hoping that perhaps it was all a lie, some twisted machination of her mother.
His heart slowed to a dull thud in her ears. “My father. I told him what happened.” He laughed brokenly, bitterly. “I rather had to. When he walked in on us.”
“What?”
“She hunted me, Rosalie. From the moment she married my father, she was always there with the smiles and long glances. The lingering touches. I was ten and four when she came to my room. I told her to stop—” He stopped to swallow.
He felt her stare, watching him struggle with the words, watching him remember it like it was some sort of bad dream. He gave a rough laugh. “I was just . . . inexperienced. It was rather bewildering . . . waking up with your stepmother’s mouth on your cock.”
She blinked at his harsh language . . . at the harsher, uglier image that filled her mind. He saw that. Saw it in the reflection of her eyes. She covered her mouth with her hand, speaking through her fingers. “She did that to you?”
His voice came out flatly, controlled and monotone. “I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I had never—” Again he broke off, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes tight against the memory.
He reopened his eyes.
She stared at him, eyes so wide. “Fourteen. You were so young. When I was that age . . . I still slept with a doll.” She looked down as though recalling herself then. “An old rag doll my father gave me.” Her gaze snapped back up, fiery and bright, full of wrath. “You were just a boy.”
“Man enough.” His lips twisted. “In my father’s eyes, at any rate. He said I should have known better. Hell, he saw me as the instigator. Rather absurd now when I think on it. When she was in my bed? Had I dragged her there? He was deluding himself.” He shook his head and squared his shoulders. “No matter. It’s all in the past now.”
Except it wasn’t. It was here now. Between them. In her eyes and in the tension lining his shoulders. It was in the distance he felt welling between them.
His mind worked, thinking back to all those years, struggling with fragments of memory that he had fought to bury.
“That’s when he stopped letting you come home from school.”
He nodded. It was all falling neatly into place for her now. He had been fourteen when he stopped coming home from school. The duke’s sudden disinterest in his son. The son he once doted on. His only heir. She understood why now.
Her face scrunched up bitterly. “My mother . . . what she did to you. That’s why your father gave you the cut?”
“The cut? That’s a gentle euphemism, but yes. I was dead to him after that. Your mother did nothing wrong, of course. She was his innocent young bride that his wretched beast of a son had abused. I was a monster in his eyes. If he could have disinherited me, he would have. You should have seen Melisande. She wept such copious tears. She really should have been on the stage. If he could have called me out and withstood the scandal of killing his own son, he would have.”
She blinked at the shock of this. “No, that can’t be. He would not have gone to such—”
“He told me that, Rosalie. That’s not dramatic supposition. Those were his own words.”
The last bit of color bled from her face as it all sank in for her. Her mother had taken so much from him. His youth. His father. The ability to feel, to touch a woman without the memory of her.
She shuddered. “How you must have felt when I turned up in your drawing room.” He watched her throat work as she fought to swallow. “Dear God. You hated me.”
He could practically track her thoughts crossing her expressive face as realization sank deeper, grinding into her. Her throat worked as she swallowed. “You must hate that you are marrying me. Her own daughter.”
He stared at her for a long moment, feeling raw and battered inside. Exposed. Finally, he said, “I made my choice when I came to your bed.”
Her face crumpled. “That’s not a denial.”
Turning, she fled the room. He watched her go.
