It Had to be the Duke - Christi Caldwell Page 0,2

with him. Tears flooded her eyes. “You are making this impossible for me, you know,” she whispered, her voice threadbare.

“Good,” he said sharply, when his voice had never been sharp and only ever gentle and loving. “I want it to be.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, and a tear slipped out, rolling down her cheek.

And yet, despite that flare of his fury, Geoffrey palmed her face, and despite the need for distance from the death of… the dream she’d had for a future together—nay, the dream they’d both had for it—she leaned into his touch. Stealing these last and final moments. Taking his caress for the last time. It would be enough.

It had to be.

He caught that drop with the pad of his thumb, brushing it away, and she made herself look at him once more.

Lydia tried to arrange her features into a mask, tried and failed. “I’m marrying Lawrence,” she stated quietly. How was her voice so calm? How, when she was trembling and her body splintering apart?

His entire body stiffened, a recoil that felt much like the time she’d pretended to practice firing a pistol in her father’s office, and the weapon had discharged. “No.”

His was such a perfectly ducal response, a declination of someone else’s statement of fact. “I have to, Geoffrey,” she murmured.

He scoffed. “Of course you don’t.”

“My father wishes to join our families. The responsibility falls to me or… Marion.”

Her sister, who was younger by just ten months and with whom Lydia had always sought to protect. Lydia might be less than a year older, but she was still the elder sister to her more gentle, fragile-hearted sister.

“Marion is in love,” she went on to explain, while her voice was still steady.

“She’s sixteen,” he scoffed.

“We loved one another long before that,” she reminded him. “And…” She drew in a breath and told him the secret her family had only just learned. “They eloped, Geoffrey.”

His breath hissed through his teeth.

“We just found out and my parents are insisting we act as though nothing is amiss,” she whispered, her words rolling together. “She’s gone off with Mr. Cheevers and he is a merchant, Geoffrey. A poor man. With hardly any funds. My father is refusing to release Marion’s dowry… unless…unless…” She bit her lower lip.

“Unless you wed Wainright,” he filled in for her, his voice empty.

She managed to nod. “They will have no funds, and my sister and the children she has one day will have no future.” It was not just about Marion’s happiness, but her entire future, and security. And worse, the lack of security.

Silence surrounded the gardens, enveloping the grounds in quiet, and everything was all confused, where she couldn’t sort out whether the moment was a dizzying quick one or whether it stretched on. Suddenly, Geoffrey took several steps away from her, and she thought he intended to leave her standing there, and as wrong and selfish as she was for it, she didn’t want him to leave. She wanted to steal whatever was left of their time together. But then he stopped those frenetic strides and cursed, roundly and blackly, and Lydia stood there, allowing him that volatile emotion.

“But what about your happiness?” he implored, a thread of desperation lining his plea.

She squeezed her eyes briefly shut. “It is about more than happiness, Geoffrey,” she said, her voice threadbare. “Their life will be…impossible.” And she’d have given her very soul to Satan to see Marion safe.

He stalked back over. “And what of me?” he asked, dropping his brow to hers. “How will I live without you?”

A sob slipped out, and she stifled it with her fist. “Being forced to choose between you,”—the man she loved—“and a sister whom I share half a soul with is breaking me, Geoffrey. It is breaking me,” she whispered.

Geoffrey drew back and dragged a shaky hand through his dark locks.

This time, it was he who shut his eyes, so tightly his face scrunched up. When he opened them once more, he was in full control, his features a perfect mask, so that she might have imagined the heartbreak there from moments ago.

“He won’t make you happy,” he said matter-of-factly.

“He is your friend,” she chided.

The wry twist of his lips ran counter. “That is how I know as much. He’s dull and lacks passion.” Geoffrey looped an arm about her waist and drew her near. “And you need passion, Lydia. You want it.”

Her breath quickened, as it always did at his touch.

“Geoffrey,” she whispered, her voice trembling, and of