The Ice Duchess by Tracy Sumner
Chapter 3
Dex stared out the window in his father’s bedchamber, the rasp of lungs trying valiantly to draw air and mostly failing the only sound. Snow was starting to fall, the flakes drifting to the ground in ghostly swirls. This land called to him, even if he’d left in a blind panic only to return when forced. Pushed away by ambition, drawn back by obligation.
Some would be surprised to find the Marquess of Westfield loved Derbyshire more than any place he’d ever been, and he’d been many places. The rolling hills and hamlets, limestone caverns, and broad rushing rivers. The northeast quadrant where Markham Manor resided was gently mountainous, abundant in all the wondrous things that held his supreme interest. Coal, iron ore, lead, zinc, manganese, barytes. Caves layered in marble and fluorite, littered with fossils and minerals.
He couldn’t imagine growing up anywhere else. With anyone else.
Which brought his mind back to Georgie.
He tapped his knuckle to the chilled windowpane. Those glorious cobalt eyes, the dimples that flared to life when she smiled, had led him on a merry dance this eve. He laughed and shook his head. Still susceptible to her charms. Before, she’d been too young and he a foolish boy who wasn’t sure what he wanted, what he needed. He’d had much to prove, many people to disprove. He’d done exactly what he’d said he would, made a living, a remarkably sound one, off the hunks of sediment his father claimed would be the ruin of a five-hundred-year-old duchy, when Dex was the most proficient mining surveyor in England, his inane knowledge of rocks coveted by those willing to pay and pay well.
But ambition had exacted a personal cost, no doubt about it. Cost her, too, he was coming to suspect.
Bracing his arm on the wall alongside the velvet drape, he drew a breath smelling faintly of vinegar and decay. He’d never wanted to marry anyone. Truthfully, because he could be truthful in his dying father’s dank bedchamber when there was no one, not even the dying father, to listen—he’d never wanted to marry anyone but her.
The dilemma? He wanted a wife when Georgie quite adamantly didn’t want a husband.
“Impulsive fool,” he whispered and bumped his forehead to the glass. How had he imagined making a reckless wager would ease the burden of seeing Georgie again, touching her again, and realizing he’d indeed made a grave mistake leaving her behind?
Now, she wanted adventure.
Dex glanced to the turbulent storm raging outside the window, a world of flawless, fluttering white. How to provide an adventure when the roads would be inches deep in mud and ice come morning? Travel of more than a mile or two a nightmare. If he could have taken her to the limestone caverns in Chinley, the ones they’d explored as children, shown her everything he hadn’t known to show her before, things he hadn’t known how to show her before, that would have been a start. Surely, passionate kisses surrounded by thousand-year-old quartz was an adequate quest.
A petite adventure, a beginning.
He lifted his head from the frigid pane. A beginning, not a spot mired in the middle of life, which was what his conversation with Georgie at Buxton’s gathering had felt like. An unsullied start was what they needed, with no repulsive earls who’d turned out to be atrocious husbands or indecisive, inexperienced future dukes mucking it up. Dex had until Twelfth Night to give his father an answer. A ticking clock, as it were. Which he would do because denying a dying man’s wish was an act Dex couldn’t stomach.
And, frankly, he worked well under pressure.
His mind shifted to the wooden crates stacked in the Oak Room, ones he’d shipped from all over the globe the past three years. He grinned and shoved his hair from his eyes. There were adventures aplenty in those boxes if the right person was there to unpack them.
His spontaneous wager was set to put Georgie’s disdain for marriage to the test.
Because he planned to tell her what he wanted in a wife, what he wanted in life, what he could give of his heart, mind, and soul, which was substantial. He would cheerfully review her list of suitables while he went about convincing her she was his only suitable.
Very politely, he would consider each one, without considering any at all.
In the process, he’d get to know her again. And she him.
Then, on Twelfth Night, Dex would find out if Georgie meant to keep him.