The stables at Audley House had been a wedding present. “Getting too old for it myself,” his father had said on James’s wedding day. And James—who had prided himself on the distance he had created between himself and his father, who hated the mere thought of being reliant on the duke in any way—had found himself powerless to resist. Because of Violet. He was about to marry Violet Grey—Violet Grey! A rather hasty wedding, it was true, but this was all to James’s liking. Those ten minutes on that balcony had been the most fortuitous of his life. While he’d planned for them to live in the house on Curzon Street on which he’d spent a chunk of his inheritance from his mother, he loved the idea of being able to offer her a country house as well.

The fact was, he’d been twenty-three and foolish, and he’d have agreed to just about anything if it offered him the chance to make Violet happier.

James had surprised himself with his own competence at managing the stables—and this fact was deeply satisfying to him. He was good at mathematics—not a genius, but very good. He excelled at working out the finances of the stables, maximizing their profits. He didn’t find the buying and selling of horseflesh to be particularly fascinating—he found, in truth, poring over the books related to the home farm at Audley House to be far more interesting—but it was certainly not beyond his abilities. The time spent in the stables—an issue that had caused no small amount of friction between himself and his wife in their happier days—also quickly grew old. But he was determined to make a success of it—to prove to his father that he could, to show Violet that he could lay the world at her feet.

He immersed himself in every aspect of the running of the stables, and it was, if he were to be honest, not entirely satisfying—except for each time he was able to reply to an inquiry from his father with an informed report of his success. That made it all worth it. Or so he had always told himself.

Now, five years older and no longer blinded by an absurd schoolboy lust for Violet, he saw matters differently than he had at the time of his marriage. He knew now—had realized it soon after the wedding, really—that his father was just hedging his bets. The Duke of Dovington left nothing to chance. If there was the slightest possibility that West, his elder brother and the heir, wouldn’t be able to carry on the family line, then it only made sense to ensure that the younger son—who was about to marry a nubile young lady—was well provided for, since his son might very well be duke someday. Of course, James reflected wryly, his father had never been much worried about hedging his bets before—it was West’s curricle accident, an event that had taken place not long before James had met Violet, that had suddenly made the duke worry for the future of the dukedom. This accident had seriously wounded West and killed Jeremy’s elder brother—against whom West had been racing—and had apparently given the duke rather a fright about the future of the Audley line.

The fact that James and Violet now seemed extremely unlikely to produce an heir was perhaps the only thing James found at all positive about his current arrangement with his wife. He had always had a sense of vicious satisfaction in thwarting his father’s plans.

In any case, James now found himself the owner of a successful set of stables, which mercifully kept him occupied enough to ensure that he didn’t spend his days merely reading newspapers at his club, manufacturing excuses not to return home. It was hardly a substitute for a loving, happy, fulfilling marriage—or even for a project he felt more passion for—but it was better than nothing, he supposed. And yet, today he didn’t find his work as distracting as he usually did. Everything seemed to frustrate him; he felt as though he were crawling out of his skin, and he didn’t know why.

No. That was a lie. He knew perfectly well why. He couldn’t get his damned encounter with Violet out of his head.

It was galling that a woman whose bed he hadn’t visited in four years, with whom he routinely carried on conversations of five or fewer sentences, could destroy his calm like this. It had always been this way, though, from the first night he had met her. James had always prided himself on his cool head, his ability to distance himself from any situation, to not let others get under his skin. It was a skill he had perfected out of necessity, during the long, lonely years of his childhood at Brook Vale Park. Prior to meeting Violet, he had kept himself at a distance from others, even his closest friends. It was lonely, at times, but it was certainly less frustrating, less likely to end in hurt.

Violet, however, had waltzed into his life and upended it. And he had let her—hadn’t even minded, because he had been so besotted. Looking back, with the benefit of five years’ distance and experience, he could see how unutterably foolish he had been. This was why he had never let himself get close to a woman, prior to Violet—and look what it had led to. A wife who had at the first opportunity lied to him, plotted against him; a wife whom he’d fought with—bloody shouted at, for Christ’s sake—and with whom he now shared long, unpleasantly silent dinners. It had been satisfying, somehow, to see her own icy demeanor shattered for once. Some men would have dreaded an angry wife; James found he vastly preferred it to an indifferent one.

In any case, after a day filled with thoughts like these running through his head, he returned home in the afternoon, drawn by some vague unformed hope that perhaps Violet would be sitting down to a late midday meal and he could join her. No doubt it would result in another bloody argument, but he found the prospect oddly enticing. He’d fought with her often enough, after all, even if he was a bit out of practice.