The Duke is Wicked (League of Lords #3) - Tracy Sumner Page 0,86

was letting fear guide me. As you are. If you were marrying someone you didn’t love, who didn’t love you, fine. I would never step in and try to change your mind. Live apart, never see each other, except to produce an heir. But this? Do you think to hide away from us for the rest of your life? From the woman you love? That’s your solution?”

“She doesn’t care about the fires.” Case clicked his tongue against his teeth with a pitying lament. “I know my twin. I think she cherishes you more for them. You always talk about wanting to protect her, but she wants to protect you. This isn’t a typical English lass we’re talking about, Ashcroft. My sister is a true original, for better or worse. Not going to allow you to manage her.” He balanced his glass on his chest and dropped his head back to stare at the ceiling. “I’d have thought you realized that by now. Slow to learn, my friend, slow to learn.”

Sebastian cast his eyes to the silver threads in the Aubusson carpet, unwilling to reveal how hearing Delaney loved him colored his gaze. He was hopelessly devoted, heart and soul, but he didn’t need everyone in the goddamned room to know it.

“She said she’ll agree. To the marriage.”

Sebastian jerked his gaze to Finn’s. “When?”

Case wagged his index finger back and forth like a pendulum. “Not so fast. You have to figure out why she said no, twice, first. Her words, not mine.”

The surge of fury brought Sebastian to his feet, the chair bouncing off the floor with a thud. “She’s making this, our bloody future, a competition?”

Finn yawned, his lids sinking low, the only person Sebastian knew who could slumber through a crisis. Any place, any time. “What did you expect? Archery, billiards, chess, poker. Win the girl, duke, just bloody win the girl.”

“Hell,” Case muttered, and polished off his drink. “Do you see the look on his face? The duke knows how to win a war but not my sister. Not a clue.”

“I have a clue.” Sebastian righted the chair and slumped back into it. “I have many clues.”

“Duchesses for everyone,” Finn whispered, on the verge of sleep.

Think like Delaney. An impossible task with such a vibrant mind as hers, but he could try.

What does she want? What can she not give herself?

Her words, so softly spoken, fluttered through his senses, soothing his ire and his uncertainty as effectively as her finger trailing along the nape of his neck.

Love is healing.

Love is healing.

And, unexpectedly, he understood exactly what to do.

Chapter 18

Delaney had read the passage so many times, that even without Charles Dickens’s fixed placement in her attic, she would have known his words—now Sebastian’s—by heart.

You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me. But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in marriage, you could draw me to any good—every good—with equal force.

The ruin of me.

A simple statement. When being someone’s ruin was hideously complicated. Letting someone ruin you even more so.

Sebastian had said she was terrible for him, and he’d meant ruin. Her heart had broken in that moment, beyond repair broken. Yet, she’d not understood it was the ruin caused by passionate love, Dickens style. Delaney hadn’t considered weathering the storm, sticking it out, marrying the duke, then worming her way so deeply into his heart he wouldn’t be able to leave her.

A magnificent maneuver, when she was the American queen of them.

Letting his love heal in the way she’d asked him to let hers heal. She’d been, for the first time, afraid to gamble. Hedge her bet. Roll the dice. Pick a card. Loose the arrow.

When she loved gambling.

But not with her heart.

She’d considered herself a fighter until she met a handsome Brit one fine day in Hyde Park and saved him