The Duke Is Mine - Eloisa James [99]
“Your Grace,” she said, “it will be the honor of this nation to welcome your son back to the shores of England wreathed in rightly deserved glory.”
Olivia did not look at Quin again.
She could not look.
Twenty-three
Why Heroes Are Not as Much Fun as Dukes
The dinner that followed the arrival of the Duke of Canterwick was never forgotten by any of the delighted and—after the joyous popping of champagne corks—inebriated guests. Though there was one participant who, even years later, would remember feeling utter despair in the midst of all that celebration.
Quin wandered among the guests feeling like a ghost: a human shell with a semblance of a face but no other distinctions than incredibly bad luck when it came to women.
He danced with Georgiana after dinner. He tracked Olivia from the corner of his eye, saw how she passed from man to man, how they ogled her and laughed with her and generally fell in love with her and into envy of the marquess.
Of course, no one would voice such a shabby emotion: not tonight, not after the French had surrendered that fort, which had been so hard-sought with lost English lives.
He walked from room to room, because if he kept moving, people didn’t try to stop him and talk of the marquess. “Envy” was a pale word to describe the emotion he felt: it was more like rage, pure hatred, livid, bone-deep jealousy. His mother put a hand on his sleeve, stilled, let him go.
He didn’t know what she saw in his eyes. It didn’t matter.
The devil of it was that he would walk out of the room where Olivia was . . . and find himself walking back into it a moment later. He couldn’t fool himself that he walked randomly. He tried to walk away. . . .
He found himself looking for her again. And again.
It seemed an eternity until the majority of guests retired to their rooms and the still excited and voluble duke was escorted to the Queen’s Chamber, so called because Queen Elizabeth had slept in it on three occasions.
Quin went to his chambers and bathed. He put on his dressing gown, then dismissed Waller and dressed himself all over again. He slipped out of his room, down the corridor, opened the door to Olivia’s bedchamber and entered.
She sat with her back to him, toes stretched out toward the fire, reading a book, just as in his dream. His body became a throbbing, aching torch.
He approached silently, swept her silky hair to the side, and bent down to kiss her neck.
His heart was pounding. He recognized the emotion flooding through his veins. He may not be the best at identifying emotion, but any fool could grasp this one. It was fear.
Rupert had done it. He was a war hero, now. A war hero.
Olivia had the choice of marrying a man who stayed at home, no better than a man-milliner, or marrying a man who scaled the ramparts, held the fort, and saved the day. Hell, Rupert might even have turned the tide of the war. He and his piddling hundred men.
His lips touched her neck as he breathed in that delicate combination of flowers and mystery that was his Olivia . . . as he waited with a sense of dread that stretched from the tips of his fingers all the way to his soul, wherever that mysterious organ might be situated.
He’d been in this state before: the first night Evangeline didn’t come home. When she’d returned with the dawn light, she’d said that he was boring, with his talk of nothing but mathematics until she wanted to scream. She had spent the night with a local squire.
“I couldn’t say no,” Evangeline had said dreamily. “He had gone out on a hunt and startled a gang of smugglers, captured them all. He’s a hero.”
Even months later, when the “smugglers” came to trial and turned out to have been starving villagers, desperately trying to poach rabbits in woods the squire liked to think of as his own . . . even then she’d still thought of the man as a hero.
Now, here, Olivia’s arms