“It’s a prison,” he said. He still didn’t look at her. “Like marriage.”
“What did you say?” she asked.
He didn’t answer her, scratching again at his neck and then taking a drink of his wine. She couldn’t tell if his silence was due to his own inner turmoil or because he simply did not think she deserved a response.
“It doesn’t have to be a prison for either of us,” she said quietly, deciding to lend him the benefit of the doubt, and also grateful her parents were too occupied with Sloreley’s mother and sister to pay her unusual conversation with her fiancé any mind.
“But it is. I’m too young to be married,” he complained. “Many dukes don’t marry until they’re twice my age or older.” He glared at his wine glass. “It’s not fair.”
Almost nothing in their Empire was fair—nothing at all—which anyone with any sense at all would see if they paid any attention. But that was perhaps a conversation for a different time . . . or at least for when Sloreley was sober. “Surely you cannot begrudge your uncle his wishes when you stand to gain so much by remaining in his good graces?”
“I’m owed the title by my birth as his nephew,” Sloreley said, still glaring at the glass. “I don’t have to earn it by wedding the daughter of some country lord.”
It was only years of being Serene, Equanimous Eleanor that kept her voice steady and her hands in her lap. “Then why are you marrying me, Lord Sloreley, if I may ask?”
“Jarrell’s got his fist around my allowance,” Sloreley admitted in a mumble. “If I don’t marry, he’ll cut me off.”
So it was money. She might have guessed as much.
She considered for a moment, then decided she had very little to lose by being frank. “Is there any agreement we can come to, together, to make this arrangement more palatable?”
Sloreley turned to blink at her. “What do you mean?”
“Only that I imagine some of your objections to marriage come from the restrictions that typically come along with it. I don’t consider myself prudish, and I want to assure you that I will not ask you to tailor your appetites or your pleasure-seeking, so long as you can promise discretion in your private affairs. So long as you allow me the same freedoms.”
Her heart thudded as she spoke the last part—she had very little practice declaring things she wanted for herself—and though she’d spoken in a low voice, she was still aware of their parents just across the table.
Sloreley’s face twisted. “What?”
She was used to putting other people’s comfort ahead of her own, and there was a real urge to undo what she’d just done, to assure him she’d misspoken and hadn’t meant it. Except she had meant it, and unfortunately, this was too important to leave unsaid. “I’ve no argument with liaisons on your part. But I must insist I be granted the same latitude, my lord, that’s all. I know it’s rather unusual, but I have seen people with arrangements like this before.”
Well, she’d only personally seen it the one time at the Countess of Kellow’s party, but still, there were others. Lady Melbourne, Lady Jersey. The Duchess of Devonshire herself. It wasn’t unheard of, even if one only heard about it through gossip. Not that Eleanor had any plans to be the subject of gossip.
She would be like the Countess of Kellow instead and evade all whispers.
“I think if we can both agree to—”
“Absolutely not,” he sniffed. “I’ll not have any wife of mine embarrassing me—”
“I have no wish to embarrass you,” Eleanor assured him. “I’d be extremely discreet, as I myself have no wish to be embarrassed.”
“—and it’s not natural,” he continued. “How else will I ensure my heirs are my own?”
“That can be negotiated around,” Eleanor pointed out. “I can wait until I’ve born an heir. We can try periods of exclusivity, or I’m told that there are prophylactic measures . . .”
“No,” Sloreley said, this time loud enough that he startled her parents and his family into looking at them. He didn’t bother to apologize or explain. Instead, he turned to glare at Eleanor and said in a voice only she could hear, “You’re a means to an end, Lady Eleanor. If I must marry in order to inherit, then I’ll do it, but let me make it clear how things will be: you will do as I say and you will behave as I want you to. By Christ, my mother said you were supposed to be easy and biddable.”
She wanted nothing more than to slosh her cup of wine all over Sloreley’s elaborate wig and snowy-white neckcloth and see how biddable he thought her then. She managed not to, but only just barely, and only by locking her fingers into fists in the folds of her skirt and forcing herself to drag in several long, ragged breaths.
Sloreley gave her a final glare and then drained his cup of wine, wiping at his mouth with his sleeve when he was finished. A maroon smear was left on his silk jacket after.
Grateful. Her mother wanted her to be grateful? Because in exchange for her body and her biddability, she would have a title and a fine house?
No. No, she couldn’t be grateful. Far Hope was compelling in an Ann Radcliffe novel sort of way, with its medieval bones and with the moors all around, but it wasn’t worth this. It wasn’t worth Sloreley.
The door to the dining room had flung open then, sudden and sharp, and everybody at the table jumped—except for Sloreley, who simply froze with his fingers digging under his neckcloth like a schoolboy caught fidgeting.
A tall, muscular man stalked into the dining room, his sun-bronzed face spattered with rain. He wasn’t in dinner clothes, but riding clothes, his mud-flecked boots as far away from fashionable or appropriate as possible.
His features matched the house and the rain outside; they were like something from another time. A time of heathens and heroes. He had roughly hewn cheekbones and a powerful jaw, a high forehead and a rugged nose. His hair wasn’t powdered or curled decoratively—it was black as sin and pulled into a loose queue at his neck, and several strands had blown free on his ride to hang around his face.
In the glinting light of the candelabras, Eleanor could only make out the silver near his temples and sprinkled throughout the dark stubble covering his warrior’s jaw. A man well into his prime, then. A man old enough to be hardened.
Eleanor couldn’t stop staring at him. He was so unlike her father, and so unlike every preening youth she’d met in London. His very existence was forceful, his very being an energy that couldn’t be controlled or directed. His eyes were a blue so dark they were nearly black, and his mouth—
His mouth.
Firm and sculpted and a little cruel.
Eleanor shivered just to look at it.
“Apologies for my late arrival,” the man said. “Please forgive me.”
He said please forgive me like any other man would say fuck off.
The man strode over to the empty seat at the foot of the table and sat. His eyes met Eleanor’s from across the table—a flash of glittering indigo—and then he gestured for a footman to bring him something to drink.
“Your Grace,” Eleanor’s father greeted him. “How wonderful to see you. May I present my daughter, the Lady Eleanor Vane?”