“I love you too,” she said, dimpling. She leaned forward and brushed her lips over his. “Now read this.” She pushed the letter into his hands.
“I needn’t read it,” Thaddeus said. “The Wilde solicitors will forestall attempts to publish if there are other copies somewhere. How on earth did you get it?”
“Your father thought I was the ghost of Henry VIII.” She struck a royal posture. “You didn’t know this, but spectral royalty carries out a kind of visiting deathbed service for men who are kingly. He gave the letter to me of his own free will.”
Thaddeus grinned. Even holding his father’s despicable letter in his hand, he found himself grinning. “My understanding is that Henry was a great deal larger around the middle than you are.”
“I played Henry as a boy, silly,” Joan said. “That’s when His Majesty visited Lindow. Admittedly, there’s not much sense to his ghost lurking about. I forgot to use the royal ‘we’ a few times. Oh, and by the way, your father knew he was dying when he traveled here.”
“He said as much,” Thaddeus said.
“He didn’t want his other family to have to experience the indignities of his death.” Joan nodded at his hands. “Open it.”
Thaddeus looked down, feeling a pulse of deep rage at his father. Wasn’t it enough that the man had destroyed his legal family, tried to ruin his wife’s life, and left his heir scrambling to please a father who loathed him?
“I could just rip it into shreds and throw it to the winds,” he suggested.
“You could,” Joan said.
Thaddeus turned it over. “I don’t understand. I don’t bloody understand the man. I suppose he wanted to ensure that I’d support his family, but this idiocy makes it equally likely that I’d spurn their claim.”
“He babbled about revenge,” Joan said. “Even quoted Hamlet on the subject.”
“One of the most self-destructive emotions a person can have,” Thaddeus said. “This ends here.” Methodically he ripped the letter, unread, into tiny pieces and launched it into the air. The breeze caught the tiny scraps and carried them over the parapets and away.
Thaddeus leaned forward to brush a kiss on Joan’s lips the way she had on his, but that wasn’t enough. He lifted her into his lap and found himself in that happy place that existed only when they were alone together, whether on an island or a turret.
His entire body soaked in the happiness of having her in his arms. The world, lying in shards at his feet, knit itself together. She was the glue, the one thing that made his father’s petty cruelty irrelevant.
Sometime later, he murmured, “My father taught me something about love.”
Joan blinked up at him, her eyes dark with desire. “What?”
He could just see the sweep of her lashes and one rosy cheek. “He loved his second family. I told him I’d send my half brother to Eton.”
“He scorned you for being honorable, yet he depended on that very quality,” Joan pointed out. “He came to you, at the end. He could have sent the letter to London without you knowing it had been written. I think the letter was a pretext. He knew no one would send it on to the newspapers.”
She turned her head and kissed his chest. “Would you like to take off your coat, perhaps?”
Thaddeus choked. “No, I would not like to unclothe myself on a mattress that’s been here God knows how long.”
“Since April,” Joan said helpfully. “New ticking and a cover every spring.”
Thaddeus could just imagine how many of his soon-to-be brothers-in-law had taken advantage of the mattress since April. “No,” he said firmly. “Picnic with ants, yes. This mattress, no.”
“Such a duke,” Joan grumbled. She kissed his chin.
Thaddeus drew her to her feet. “Much though I would love to escort you to your bedchamber, despite Aunt Knowe’s admonishments, there is something I have to do.”
Which was how the Duke of Eversley—vengeful and embittered as he was—left this mortal coil with one hand firmly held by his son and heir, and the other by a young Henry VIII.
He sank into that final darkness with a germ of joy in his heart. A king had attended his deathbed. He had breathed his last under an ermine throw.
Finally, his worth had been recognized.
Chapter Twenty-four
At the breakfast table the next morning, Joan carefully spread Aunt Knowe’s marmalade onto her toast, keeping her gaze far from Thaddeus. Every time their eyes met, she found herself trembling like a ninny, pink color rushing into her cheeks.
Yesterday . . .
Yesterday had been marvelous.
Oh, not the death of the Duke of Eversley. But the rest added up to the happiest day of her life: Thaddeus’s proposal in Percy’s sty, making love on the island, the birth of little Otis, their conversation on the turret . . .
Afterward, in her bedchamber, when Thaddeus made love to her so tenderly that she started crying, and then burst into laughter at the dismay on his face.
She had woken to find Thaddeus propped on one elbow, warm eyes smiling at her. His jaw still had an arrogant slant, but it was part of him, and she adored everything about him.
Even after an illicit night in which they slept only in snatches, he looked elegantly composed, whereas her hair fell a tangled cloud around her shoulders. The white sheet draped over his flat stomach as if it had been carved from marble by a master sculptor. His hair was rumpled just the right amount to make a woman’s breath catch; his eyes burned with emotion.
Truth be told, it wasn’t the fact that she’d spent the night in a man’s arms that was making Joan blush over her toast. It was the emotion she saw in that man’s eyes.
A growl at the other table made her head jerk up. Her father was staring down at the post just delivered by Prism. Joan’s heart sank when she saw what he was holding.
The Duke of Lindow was rarely enraged, but the one thing certain to drive him to a fury was the proliferation of prints depicting the “wild Wildes” that continued to circulate throughout England. They were collected by kitchen maids and countesses, and unfortunately, the more outrageous prints sold like hotcakes.
In the last couple of years, she had often been the subject of the best-selling print in the kingdom, a dubious honor at best. She tilted her head, but from her viewpoint, it didn’t appear to be a sketch of her, thank goodness. The last thing she wanted to do was remind Thaddeus just how much the gossip columns relied on her for material.
“Look at this!” His Grace said, holding up the print contemptuously by one corner. “Sent to me straight from one of the stationers.”
“What does it depict, darling?” his wife inquired, looking completely unconcerned. When the third duchess first married, she had disliked being a subject of entertainment for the popular press. Now she was inured to it.
He crumpled the print and tossed it on the table, where it bounced and ended up beside Jeremy’s glass. “It depicts me buying wedding licenses by the dozen,” he grated.
Parth was the first to laugh, but everyone in the room followed.
“There’s more than a grain of truth to it,” North chortled. “You did marry three times.”