Seduction Regency Style

by Louisa Cornell

  “My household is not prone to gossip. Is his?”

  A flush of color dusted Bea’s cheeks. Her eyes widened, and she put a finger to her lips. She scurried, no mean feat for a woman of her height, into the dressing room.

  What the devil?

  Rhiannon erupted from her chair. She strode to the dressing room door and peered inside to see Beatrice across the room pulling the door into the large bathing chamber closed. The maid turned the lock and removed the key. When she saw Rhiannon standing in the doorway, she put her finger to her lips once more. Then Rhiannon heard it, the sound that had her friend and maid in such a state. Male voices, faint, but definitely male. Bea shooed her into the bedchamber and followed closely behind her. She pulled that door to and locked it, as well. She handed Rhiannon the keys.

  “They put him in the duke’s chambers?” Rhiannon nearly shrieked.

  “He is the duke,” Beatrice hissed and tried to lead her away from the door.

  “Of course, they did.” Rhiannon threw up her hands. The thought of him on the other side of her dressing room set her feet in motion. She paced to her chamber door and back to the open window. Her mind raced, unable to hold a thought for more than a moment. “They set the table as if Prinny himself were coming to dine. Cook made all of his favorite foods.”

  “So I heard.”

  “She made orange pudding and trifle.”

  “Who?” Beatrice’s face blurred as Rhiannon stormed by, but she didn’t miss the ghost of a grin on the maid’s face.

  “Cook! Who do you think?” Rhiannon’s voice rose, and then fell when Bea pointed at the closed dressing room door. “She has never once made orange pudding for me.”

  “Was she in charge of the kitchens when His Grace was—”

  “No, actually. She started as a scullery maid in the old duke’s day. She’s only been in charge since my father died. That isn’t the point,” she snapped and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t Bea’s fault the servants had revolted or had taken leave of their senses. Or both. Rhiannon stopped in her tracks. “Who has he brought with him, Bea? Who came with him besides the marquess?”

  Bea snorted. “Who didn’t? His Grace brought his own footmen, grooms, a valet, and a man of business, to name a few.”

  “Good. I have a task for you,” Rhiannon said as she crawled into bed and propped a few pillows behind her back.

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” Beatrice replied as she brought the night rail over to lay it across the foot of the bed.

  “The valet and the man of business. What are their names?” Rhiannon retrieved her leather-bound journal from the bedside table, opened it, and plucked the stubby pencil from between its pages.

  “The valet is Mr. Meeks. Appropriately named, as he hardly says a word. The man of business is Mr. Babcock. Vaughn has declared him to be quite full of himself.”

  Rhiannon smiled at her butler’s assessment of Endymion’s man of business. “Good. Start with them. I want to know why His Grace is really here and how long he plans to stay.”

  “You know why he is here. Lest you forget, I read that awful letter,” Beatrice reminded her. “I always thought dukes were raised to at least pretend to be charming.”

  “Apparently, His Grace played truant from those lessons.” Rhiannon made a few notes in her journal. “Find out what you can, Bea. I need to discover what provoked this sudden interest in the family seat after all these years.”

  With a last check of the bedchamber, Bea went to the door. “I will find out what I can,” she said as she opened the door into the corridor. “But rumor has it his sudden interest is in you. Good night, Your Grace.”

  Rhiannon flung a pillow in the direction of Bea’s fading laughter. In the sudden quiet, she listened for the sound of voices across the way but heard nothing. The case clock in her sitting room next door struck eleven. Perhaps he’d gone to bed. She looked at the keys where she’d placed them on the bedside table. Mrs. Davis, the housekeeper, kept all the spare keys on her chatelaine. Would she give them to the duke if he asked? Of course, she would. All he had to do was ask in that dark commanding voice and turn those green eyes on her and the woman would crumble like a Christmas biscuit.

  “Oooh,” Rhiannon screamed into her pillow and then punched it for good measure. “I don’t care what Josiah says. There has to be a clause in English law that allows for a duchess to shoot a duke who deserves it.”

  How long she lay abed, never truly falling asleep, Rhiannon did not know. However, she’d very nearly succumbed to exhaustion when a persistent noise in the corridor roused her. The embers of the fire offered enough light for her to find the candlestick on her bedside table.

  Voices in the corridor, one she recognized and one she did not. Footsteps, back and forth, and whispered discussions. And then galloping? Something was galloping down the Turkey carpets of the second-floor corridor outside the ducal apartments?

  “Oh, for goodness sake.” Rhiannon padded to the hearth and lit her candle. She placed it on the mantel whilst she fetched her night rail from the foot of the bed and snatched it on over her nightgown. Almost as an afterthought, she plucked the keys from the bedside table and slipped them into the pocket of her night rail. “One night. One night in my house, and he robs the entire household of sleep.”

  Unfair of her?

  Perhaps. The Duke of Pendeen was certainly responsible for her own inability to sleep, but he had been for quite some time before his return to Gorffwys Ddraig. She picked up the candlestick and stormed into the corridor.

  Empty.

  Not a soul in sight.

  She peered into the darkness to her right, toward the duke’s chambers. The doors into his bedchamber stood ajar. To her left, the corridor went past the door to her sitting room, past doors on either side to the family rooms—bedchambers and apartments long silent in disuse. The servants ensured they were clean and free of dust, but the rooms stood as empty testament to a man who drove one son to self-destruction and the wife and children of the other out of the house. A decision he later came to regret. If a man like him could feel regret. The late Duke of Pendeen had much to answer for, but she had guilt of her own to contemplate. Guilt might be pushed to the back of one’s mind, but it could never be silenced. Not completely.

  Rhiannon took a step closer to the heavily carved doors into the duke’s rooms. A flicker of light drew her attention beyond the doors toward the stairs leading to the first floor. She debated whether to return to her own chamber.

  “Hell and damnation,” she muttered as she marched to those heavy oak doors and flung them wide. A swift perusal of the pretentiously large bedchamber revealed it to be unoccupied.

  Where the devil is he?

  The last thing she needed was a man she suspected of nefarious purposes wandering about the house in the middle of the night. Even if the law deemed that house his. Endymion had spent some of his early years at the family seat, until the old duke had made the biggest mistake of his life—a mistake that cost Rhiannon’s husband everything. How much of Gorffwys Ddraig did he remember? What if he intended to breach her study?

  “Oh no you don’t.” Rhiannon raced down the stairs to the first-floor landing. She nearly took the next flight to the ground floor, but a liveried figure at the far end of the wide first-floor corridor caught her attention. Once she traversed the thick green and ivory Aubusson halfway, she saw the man was dressed in the blue and gold livery of Endymion’s London household.

  “Where is His Grace?” she demanded once the footman saw her and offered her a bow.

  “I am not certain, Your Grace.”

  Someone needed to teach the young man that if he sought to lie to a duchess, he would do well not to blush, tug his collar, and look at his feet. Worse, he would do even better not to glance nervously in the direction of the east wing.

  Rhiannon smiled and started toward that portion of the house.

  “His Grace does not wish to be disturbed…Your Grace.” The foo
tman wilted under what her household called her duchess stare. He returned to his position against the wall.

  She should have taken the time to step into her mules. The marble floor in the portrait gallery would be cold. Somewhere, a mantel clock struck the hour. Endymion had left his chamber at four in the morning to visit the one place where she’d wrought the most changes in defiance of the old duke. Did he suspect? Had he been told? Or were his reasons for visiting the shrine to his much-vaunted ancestors something more personal? And painful.

  Her candle flickered as she traveled the twists and turns that led to the long gallery in the Elizabethan part of the house. For six hundred years, each Duke of Pendeen had added to Gorffwys Ddraig, had left his mark on the house and the land. What mark would Endymion leave? It was no concern of hers. Just as his reasons for visiting the portrait gallery in the wee hours of the morning were not her concern. He was not her concern, save for the havoc he might wreak on her life whilst he remained in Cornwall.

  Rhiannon turned the corner and entered the gallery. Her toes curled at the sudden imposition of the icy, gold-hued marble floor. Someone had pulled the heavy velvet drapes hung to keep sunlight from harming the portraits. Moonlight streamed in the long, mullioned windows and bathed the length of the gallery in an ethereal light. A lone figure stood before a portrait halfway down the long row of painted de Waryn ancestral memorials. A lamp had been turned up and placed on the marquetry table before the portrait. The arrangement of red roses glowed in the lamp’s light.

  “Oh, Dymi,” Rhiannon whispered. She took a step forward. A shadow rose from the floor halfway between her and that lone figure. Near to the size of a Shetland pony, the shadow emitted a low, resonant growl. Its eyes gleamed in the darkness.

  “I told you I did not wish to be disturbed.”

  She chose to ignore the huge mastiff that padded into a strip of moonlight a few feet away. “Then you should have stayed in London, husband.”

  A harsh bark of baritone laughter echoed down the gallery. “You may have the right of it, wife. Down, Turpin.”

  The mastiff subsided onto the floor, but watched Rhiannon as she went to join Endymion before the portrait she’d had hung the day she received the news of his grandfather’s death.

  “Turpin?” she inquired as she stood beside him.

  “Being a male, I thought he might take offense at the name Black Bess.” He continued to stare at the portrait. “I know what it is to have a cumbersome, inappropriate name.”

  “I happen to like your name…Dymi.” He smelled of crisp, clean linen and a very expensive sandalwood soap. A long, black silk banyan was belted over his shirt, waistcoat, breeches, and boots. And here she stood in her nightclothes.

  “It is good to hear you like something about me.” He finally looked down at her. The smallest of smiles creased his lips. “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “I gave up wondering if you liked me three years after you left,” Rhiannon said matter-of-factly. The chill of her feet crept up her body and lodged beneath her breasts. “About the time your uncle informed me you’d been deathly ill those first months and remembered little of your life before our marriage. Burned away by fevers, or so he said.”

  “I remember more than he or grandfather knew.” He shook his head. “But less than I would like. Like a puzzle with pieces missing.” He took a step closer to the marquetry table, raised the lamp, and fixed his gaze on the portrait. “The duke said he’d ordered this burned.”

  “He did.” Rhiannon turned to take in the larger than life image—the handsome gentleman of thirty or so years standing beneath an ancient oak tree, his beautiful wife, from whom Endymion had inherited his green eyes, dressed in white and seated on a bench, the gentleman’s hand on her shoulder. Endymion, all of ten years old, with a grin on his face that spoke of mischief and adventure, stood behind his mother. That grin was embedded in so many of Rhiannon’s childhood memories that it hurt to see it. Of the two other boys, the one next to Endymion favored their mother and the youngest, seated on the bench next to their mother, looked very much like their father.

  The wind rattled the windows. The mastiff raised his head and whined briefly. Then silence settled in the broad space between the windows and the display of de Waryns past, but not forgotten. Rhiannon remained, because she could not do otherwise. As she had so many times in their youth and he had done so many times for her, she stood beside him whilst he sought answers for the unanswerable.

  In this moment, he was not the Duke of Pendeen. At least, not the one who had written that ridiculous letter, not the one who’d confronted her in her study. Rhiannon allowed herself to compare this man to the fifteen-year-old boy she’d married in a hurried late-night ceremony neither of them had really understood.

  The striking face and piercing green eyes had matured into the features of a stoic English lord, but the wild boy who had wandered the moors and ridden hell for leather down roads and across fields was still there. Shadows beneath his eyes belied the leashed control he’d evinced since his arrival. Taller and broader, he no longer had the lean and hungry look his childhood had honed from loss and a too early introduction to responsibility and blame.

  He was handsome, dammit. Too handsome, too tall, too broad, and too much still the Endymion who had stolen and broken her heart. In spite of that lingering hurt, she slipped her hand into his. Her traitorous heart pounded like a miner’s hammer when his fingers squeezed and held onto hers as if she might be the only barrier between him and the anguished waves of the past.

  “It is my fault they are gone,” Endymion finally said, his voice rough and raw.

  “If that is how you remember it, your memory is wrong. There is a great deal of blame to go around, but none of it is yours.” No one knew that better than she. And wrong as it was, she hoped he never remembered everyone who’d played a part in the dreadful night that took the last of Endymion’s family from him.

  “Who?” He gestured at the painting.

  “Vaughn. He saved it after your father died and the duke ordered it burned. I had it moved here when your grandfather died.”

  He released her hand, picked up the lamp and with a sweeping gesture, invited her to return to the front of the gallery with him. The mastiff, his nails clicking on the floor, paced at Endymion’s side.

  “Thank you, by the way, for trying to distract Voil at dinner.”

  “Distract?” It came to her. “The Mermaid’s Tale?”

  “He doesn’t know…about my mother or that part of my life.” The strain of his voice, and that tinge of confusion and loss wiggled under her determination and threatened to awaken the silly young girl who’d been so infatuated with him she’d done all in her power to keep him safe. And all she’d done had cost them both.

  “Lord Voil is your closest friend.”

  “He is.”

  “And yet you have not told him—”

  “Madam, do you often wander about the house in your bare feet in the middle of the night?” Endymion plucked the candlestick from her hand and blew out the candle. He placed the lamp on the nearest hall table and turned it down low.

  “What!” Before she could protest, he bent and scooped her into his arms. “Dymi, put me down. I am not a child.”

  He shifted her slightly against his chest. “A fact of which I am more aware every moment.” He carried her out of the gallery and continued, in near darkness, down the corridors of the east wing.

  She followed his gaze to her night rail agape enough to reveal her thin nightgown stretched taut across her breasts. “Is this an example of your wooing, Your Grace?”

  “Do you want to be wooed?”

  “Most decidedly not. Nor do I wish to be carried about in the dark. If you fall or run into a wall you will crush me, you great looby.” Rhiannon squirmed against his hold. A mistake. His body was hard and warm, like a brick resting before the hearth for hours on end. She fought the desire to curl into him against the chill of the night air, against
the chill of years of loneliness, responsibility, and the maintenance of a fiery dignity she sometimes had no desire to maintain.

  Foolish woman, this is exactly the sort of self-pitying weakness a man like him looks for in a woman from whom he wants complete surrender.

  “I spent the first ten years of my childhood in this house. I know these corridors as well as I know—Ouch! Dammit, what was that?”

  “A Chippendale commode and a wall,” Rhiannon offered and tried not to smile. He’d shielded her with his body, but she dared say he’d have a bruised arm in the morning. They passed the duke’s footman in his place at the far end of the second-floor corridor. The man did not blink, gave no indication at all that the sight of the duke carrying the duchess through the house in the middle of the night was anything but a perfectly normal event.

  Once they reached the door to her chamber, he allowed her body to slide slowly down his until her feet touched the floor.

  “How is your arm?” she asked, her hands braced on his forearms.

  “Apparently, His Grace’s trophies are not the only things you have rearranged.” He cupped her elbows and pulled her closer. “You needn’t have wondered, Rhee. I have always liked you.” His changeable green eyes ensnared her, fierce and gentle all at once.

  “Dymi, please…”

  “So much I was not allowed to speak of, so much I could not speak of because I could not trust my memory.” He swallowed hard. “It made it easier, not talking about it. Not thinking of it. That’s why I didn’t tell Voil. About my mother or the rest of it. But I never forgot how much I like you.”

  “Lord Voil is your friend. I think he might understand.” She resisted the urge to push his hair away from his face. She dared not touch him. He was a stranger and that was all he’d ever be if he had his way. He’d always liked her, but he’d left her here all alone to take care of the land and the people that should have been under his care.

  “The past serves no purpose. Today is where life is lived. You know all of it, more, probably, than I do. Do you understand it, Rhee? Does any of it make a difference to you, at all?” He bent his head and brushed his lips across hers. He rested his forehead against hers and closed his eyes.