He wasn’t happy.Had perhaps neverbeentruly happy.He had come close, on any number of occasions, for a moment or two.Riding a fast horse across the vast land of his country estate.Kneeling on his brother’s sitting room carpet to play hobby-horse with his nephews.
And, of course, countless moments with Geoffrey.The half-remembered nights of drunken card games until neither knew how many points he had earned.The pact they had made never to study the rules and strategy of chess, so that their meandering games were always as absurd and lighthearted as the time before.
Or how about that summer after Eton?Donovan had attended a musicale at which a dozen debutantes performed, and decided to take up an instrument himself.There was not a huge demand for solo performances by seventeen-year-old dukes, even beneath Donovan’s own roof.
To date, the only regular audience member the duke had ever had, was his valet Geoffrey, who had good-naturedly agreed to practice the violin along with him.Side by side, they had painstakingly learned to tune their instruments and rosin their bows and eke out sounds that were not entirely painful.Eventually, they outgrew the duke’s tutor and continued studying on their own.Donovan acquired sheet music from all over Europe.The men crafted duets of all their favorite songs.
It was in those moments when the duke had been closest to happy.But what kind of life was that?Secretly playing Vivaldi with one’s valet in the confines of one’s private sitting room?
Lustingafter said valet, despite all the reasons such an attachment was forbidden?
As much as Donovan hated to admit it, his mother was right.
From the moment he left his leading strings, the duke had been aware that it was his duty to continue the ducal line with care and honor.That he must one day take a wife and beget heirs of his own, instructing them in matters of comportment and responsibility so that they too would be prepared when it came time to inherit or pass down the title.
He’d successfully avoided that part of his destiny for six-and-thirty years.He could not keep doing so indefinitely.If the gap in ages between himself and this season’s crop of debutantes seemed insurmountable now, the chasm would only grow worse the longer he procrastinated his fate.
Yes, this idea of finding a tolerable, romantically disengaged widow was the least distasteful solution.The upcoming matchmaking festival was old-fashioned and perhaps a sign of desperation, but it was a viable last resort.Bernard had met his wife at just such a May Day gathering, had he not?As had countless other lords.Why not Donovan, too?
“Because you don’t want a wife,” he muttered.
True, but since when had that signified?He didn’twantto balance accounts or attend his mother’s parties or listen to droning speeches in the House of Lords.But it wasn’t up to him.These tasks were part of the job.He was a duke, like it or not, and therefore had a duty to act like one.
Which meant there was another change in store.One Donovan had been dreading for twenty years.His throat tightened.
When it came time to welcome a wife… it would also be time to dismiss his valet.
Nausea roiled in his gut at the thought, as it always did.He could not imagine a life without Geoffrey.He was the first person Donovan saw every morning, the last voice he heard every night.His constant companion, year after year, day after day.Whose stalwart presence Donovan had never once tired of.
If anything, to be separated from Geoffrey by so much as a common wall was to crave his company viscerally.And to be reunited, bliss.If perhaps a qualified bliss.Donovan could be seated across from his valet at a gaming table, or naked in a bath willing his cock not to rise, or holding perfectly still whilst the handsome hulking Geoffrey fussed with the duke’s collar or buttons or stubborn cowlick… andpinefor him most dreadfully, despite there being nothing more substantial than linen separating Donovan’s flesh from Geoffrey’s own.
It was this infernal pining that could not be withstood.Donovan could not give his future wife the romantic love or sexual desire any spouse would crave, but he was not so vile a creature as to force her to live in a house where her husband actively lusted for another inhabitant, day in and day out.Donovan would be far from a perfect husband, but at the very least, he would not disrespect his wife or break his marital vows.He could promise that much.
The duke lowered his hands from his face and shoved his journals of accounts aside.He drew toward himself instead fresh parchment, and pen and ink.He might have dreaded this moment for twenty years, but he had practiced it an infinite number of times in his mind.
His plume flew across the page as he extolled Geoffrey’s talents, character, and expertise.Never in the history of England had there existed a letter of recommendation so effusive and iron-clad as the ones Donovan crafted now.Geoffrey would not simply be able to walk out the front door straight into alternate employment.He would be able to work for the king himself, at a salary unheard of for a servant.
Once the letters were written, the duke sagged back against the chair to watch the ink dry.Identical sheets of parchment papered his desk like the tiles of a roof.He’d made far more copies than Geoffrey could possibly use.More copies than existed peers of the realm.
But the duke would do nothing to jeopardize Geoffrey’s future, even if Donovan could not be part of it himself.
When the ink was dry, the duke could not put off his abominable task any longer.
He gathered the letters into a tall stack, and encased them safely in a pristine leather satchel he had purchased for just this purpose.
In an hour, it would be time for tea.Geoffrey would be awaiting him in the private sitting room that had long since begun to feel liketheirsrather thanDonovan’s.
But there would be no more teas.Not today or ever again.
He rang the bell-pull.A ridiculous series of events would now fall into motion.The cord traveled along the walls and down two floors to a corridor of bells just outside the scullery.A maid assigned to monitor for summons would alert one of her colleagues, who would race up two flights of stairs, normally to send a footman in to see the master.But Geoffrey had insisted long ago on being the one to interrupt Donovan, when such interruptions were necessary.So the maid would alert the valet, rather than a footman, and seconds later—
The door to Donovan’s study swung open.Geoffrey was so tall and so wide as to fill every inch of the wooden frame.Donovan drank him in, unable to bear the realization that this would be the last time he would ever be able to do so.
At some unknown flicker behind Donovan’s pained eyes, Geoffrey’s easy smile faltered, and his warm expression turned to one of confusion, then alarm.
He strode forward quickly.“Is something wrong?”
Yes.Everything.
