When a Duchess Says I Do - Grace Burrowes Page 0,10
carve your headstone.”
“How I treasure the comfort of familial affection,” Stephen replied, cradling the baby against his chest. “From what I recall, you set the tenant properties at Brightwell to rights and broke the entail so you could sell the place.”
Outside, the weather was threatening nastiness. Fools with two sound legs might consider the first snowfall beautiful, while Stephen hated snow. He’d made the journey from Paris back to London in part because traveling after winter set in was tantamount to torture. Unlike Duncan, Stephen hadn’t remained in Merry Olde once the Season had ended. He’d popped in at his own estate for one excruciatingly boring week, then taken himself back to the safety of the Continent, where Jane’s matchmaking wasn’t a threat to a young man’s sanity.
“I did break the entail at Brightwell,” Quinn said, tossing the ball against the wall with one hand and catching it with the other. “Duncan showed no interest in commerce, and Jane thought he needed to be where he had some interaction with people other than family and servants.”
Jane was a dear woman who thrived on a challenge—witness, she’d married the head of the Wentworth family—but she didn’t know Duncan as Stephen knew him.
“She means well,” Stephen said, turning the baby upside down—slowly—then righting her. “But Duncan’s version of good society is Socrates or Marcus Lugubrious. I dragged our cousin to coffee shops all over the Continent, sat him down in the middle of lively arguments about everything from American government to abolition, to the analgesic properties of intoxicants, and do you know what he did?”
The baby wiggled in Stephen’s lap, stretching out her arms toward her papa. Quinn lobbed the ball into the toy chest, retrieved his daughter, and headed for the door.
“Let’s repair to the library before I break another sconce.”
As children, neither Quinn nor Stephen had had toys. Anything they’d acquired that might have diverted them—a tattered deck of cards, an old hat—had quickly been destroyed by a father fonder of gin than he’d been of his own children.
“Was the sconce lit when you broke it, Quinn?”
“One of them was.” Quinn opened the library door and preceded Stephen inside. “If you dragged Duncan to a coffee shop, he probably sat in a corner—close enough to a lamp to have a little light, far enough from the fire to avoid anybody’s notice—and read some damned book, while you made fourteen new best friends and beggared yourself buying them all drinks.”
Not exactly. Stephen had learned that young Englishmen intent on making a good impression earned only contempt and a sore head with that tactic.
“Duncan truly doesn’t enjoy the comradery of his fellows.” This baffled Stephen, who found the company of other people one of few comforts in the midst of chronic pain.
“He didn’t enjoy the company of your fellows,” Quinn said. “Young men intent on wenching and inebriation.”
A man in a wheeled chair was not seen as a man, but rather as an outsized child, his gender relevant only in so far as the fellow must be decently dressed. Stephen had come to this conclusion before his sixteenth birthday and had been forcing himself to walk periodically ever since.
The only person to support him in that endeavor had been Duncan, and Duncan hadn’t needed any mortifying explanations either.
“Quinn, I’m no longer eighteen. I am of an age to marry, in line to inherit your title until such time as you present me with a nephew, and yet, you insist on thinking of me as a university boy consumed by lust. Is it possible—let’s call this a wild theory—that your view of Duncan is similarly misguided?”
Quinn put the baby to his shoulder and rubbed the child’s tiny back. The duke’s hand was nearly large enough to cover that back, and yet his touch could not have been more gentle.
“It’s possible I do not see any of my family clearly. Jane instructs me on that point regularly, but I knew Duncan as a lad. He was the older cousin who tried to help, but hadn’t the means. I am beholden to him.”
For a Wentworth, a personal debt was a more sacred obligation than any tax owed to the king or tithe owed to the church.
“You owe him, so you disown him?”
For years, Duncan had fought for Stephen, though his firearm of choice had been reason and his longbow nocked with relentless determination. Because of Duncan, Quinn had installed a lift in the family’s London town house. Because of Duncan, Stephen had been given the