Say No to the Duke

by James, Eloisa

  “War burns the gentleman out of a man.” It was true.

  Betsy scowled. “I don’t believe that.”

  Oh, sweetheart.

  That was why men went to fight on battlefields far from home, if they possibly could. No one wanted a woman to see what happened there. What it cost a man to survive, let alone what happened to those who didn’t.

  He would never take a woman’s virtue, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t enjoying himself. “Believe it,” he said, dropping his voice to a growl. Desire burned in his gut and down his legs. He hadn’t wanted anything since he left the service. But now?

  He wanted her.

  He wanted this complicated, mad girl who had managed to fool most of polite society into thinking she was docile and demure.

  Betsy didn’t show the faintest sign of being unnerved; indeed, her mouth curled into a genuine smile. “You’ve had most of a bottle of whisky this evening, and you’ve never beaten me, even once.”

  He had never tried to beat her. He didn’t say a word, just looked down at her and waited, letting his eyes do the speaking.

  “Ladies play first,” Betsy pointed out.

  She was planning to shut him out of the game entirely. This wager came down to whether he had a chance to play at all.

  She’d been missing shots in the last hour, probably tired from the long day, so he had a chance.

  He nodded.

  Betsy cracked a smile, a naughty smile even for a Wilde. “Would you truly bring me to the city? You’d have to show me how to walk like a man.”

  Jesus.

  Would he?

  He’d have to speak to her father. Or her brothers. But look at her: She was like a bomb on the verge of exploding. If he refused, she might do something mad that would truly ruin her reputation. Or get her married to the wrong man.

  No lady he knew would dream of traveling to London in boy’s clothing. But he got it. Betsy’s older brothers went out into the world, and she stayed at home and arranged flowers. Listened to poetry. Ladies weren’t allowed to have adventures. Or own property. It wasn’t fair.

  He nodded.

  “All right,” Betsy said, turning away.

  Jeremy reached out, and his fingers slid down the silky skin of her arm. “Is the wager on?”

  “You’re going to lose,” she told him. The faint melancholy that had cloaked her all night was gone. She looked cheerful.

  “You cannot travel alone with me,” he pointed out, just to be fair. She opened her mouth, but he shook his head. “Put it down to fear of my lost reputation, if not yours. Your aunt must come along. Or one of your brothers.”

  “I suppose,” she agreed reluctantly.

  He moved to the other side of the table and stood there, arms crossed, watching like a hawk. A few moves later, he flinched, and she hastily lowered her elbow. “Better?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re hardly helping your own cause by correcting my stance,” she said, glancing up.

  Mostly Jeremy watched her breasts rather than her stance.

  He felt surprisingly alive. What’s more, the realization didn’t throw him into a cauldron of grief, the way it usually did. Tonight, in this shadowy, quiet room, it seemed a good thing to be alive.

  To be making a foolish wager, and lusting after a woman’s breasts, and generally behaving like a member of the human race.

  She caught him looking at her bosom again.

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  “Last shot,” Betsy said, scowling at him. If she made this, the game was over.

  She kept her elbow down. He watched her eyes and realized that she was planning a simple shot: left wall to the right pocket.

  The cue struck the ball, the ball struck the wall . . .

  Jeremy’s mouth curled into a smile.

  Slowly, Betsy straightened and met his eyes.

  Chapter Seven

  “That’s the game,” Betsy said, feeling a wave of relief that put her slightly off-balance.

  She’d won an adventure.

  She would go to London in a pair of breeches. She would play billiards with the best players to be found in England. She sucked in a deep breath.

  Jeremy had come around the table and was standing before her. “You did indeed win, Bess.”

  For the moment, she ignored his adulteration of her name. “I get to wear a pair of breeches,” she said, smiling. “I used to borrow a pair of Leonidas’s breeches and put them on under my dress when I was a girl. I adored wearing them.”

  “That would explain why you have such a damned good seat on a horse.”

  “Yes.” Betsy’s heart lit with the pure joy of sharing a secret. “I’d take my sidesaddle off in the meadow and practice riding bareback.”

  “How improper,” he observed, but his eyes were laughing.

  “I also practiced archery,” she confessed. “I had a target. And standing on top of my horse’s back, as I told you before. She was an old mare with a broad back. It was so much fun.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “I could only do it because an accommodating stableboy, Peter, never told anyone. He helped me with the saddle and the rest. I was only ten years old when I first showed him my breeches.”

  “He must have been horrified!”

  She shrugged. “He was twelve. We rode out together whenever I could arrange it, but a couple of years later he decided to apprentice to a blacksmith.”

  “I’m amazed your brothers didn’t stop you.”

  “Alaric and North are quite a bit older than I am,” she pointed out. “Leonidas was always away at school. I’m very close to Joan and Viola, but they are both far more ladylike than I am, and Viola is afraid of horses.”

  Jeremy bellowed with laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are widely seen as the most ladylike maiden on the marriage market.”

  “And so I am . . . in public.” Happiness swelled up inside Betsy. “Could we leave on Monday, do you think?”

  “Not without a chaperone.” He stepped backward. “I’m sorry, Bess. You did win, and I agreed—but I highly doubt that anyone will agree to chaperone us. I am friends with North and Parth, and neither of them will approve.”

  “Why do we need a chaperone? I’ll be dressed as a boy! No one will know who I am, and I trust you implicitly.”

  “How do you intend to explain your absence from the castle? With me? The family would be within rights to believe that I had kidnapped you and was planning to marry you at Gretna Green or something equally absurd.”

  “They would never believe that,” Betsy said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Why not?”

  She gave him a little push. “Your lack of interest in me is obvious and everyone’s seen it.”

  Either that, or they’d decided he was as feeble as an octogenarian. “Your reputation would be damaged,” he said, stating the obvious. “Your downfall would be all the greater because so many fools have put you on a pedestal. We’d be forced to marry.”

  “Who would possibly find out?” Betsy grinned at him, mischief glowing deep in her eyes. “You don’t understand, Jeremy. I look good in a pair of breeches. No one will guess I’m not a boy.”

  How in the hell had she been able to conceal that she was the wildest of the Wildes?

  “I won’t do it unless you tell a member of your family and that person accompanies us,” Jeremy said, putting his cards on the table. “If I marry someone, I’d prefer to choose the woman myself than face the end of His Grace’s dueling pistol.”

  “I am so tired of being treated like a piece of china that will break at the slightest jarring,” Betsy growled. “I am a grown woman.”

  Jeremy stepped forward again, eyes intent on hers. Suddenly she was acutely aware of his size. Her mind neatly supplied her with an image of the sharply defined muscles on his chest.

  If she pushed him again, she might feel those muscles under her fingertips.

  Slowly she raise
d her eyes from his powerful neck that a half-open neck cloth did nothing to conceal. To his square chin and blunt cheekbones.

  Jeremy looked like a warrior. He could have been in the legions of angels commanded to guard heaven’s door. Until he fell.

  A dark angel, then.

  She lifted her eyes all the way to his, because the room had gone peculiarly silent. She could hear his breathing, and her own.

  For most of the evening, he’d sat in the shadows. But now they both stood within the pool of light thrown by the lamp hanging over the billiard table. The light was bold and bright, since a shadow might throw off a player’s calculations.

  Jeremy’s eyes were not black, as she’d always thought, but flecked with gray. Dark gray with a lighter ring around the outside.

  She stilled when she saw the expression in them.

  In the last two months since he had arrived at the castle, she had seen him scornful, bitter, grieving, desolate. Buried in guilt. Pained as if he’d been stabbed in the chest. Issuing withering sarcasm, mostly directed at her but occasionally flaring in all directions, even at Aunt Knowe.

  Outrageously arrogant.

  But this she had never seen.

  Need.

  What was in his eyes was pure physical need. For her?

  Her lips parted, surprised, and her hand began to rise to his chest before she snatched it back.

  “That’s right, Bess,” he said, his voice cordial but still low, a growl hidden in its depths. “I am not a safe companion. Especially not if you put on breeches and I could see every outline of your luscious bottom.”

  “Jeremy!” she breathed. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Don’t lust after you? They all lust after you, princess, don’t you understand? All those men who proposed to you.”

  “No, they don’t!” she said stoutly.

  “Surely you don’t believe they’ve fallen in love with you, poetry or no poetry.”

  “Love doesn’t enter into the calculation. I’ve presented a lady whom they want to marry: obedient, demure, quiet.” Her voice had an edge. “Well-bred on one side, if not the other.”

  He made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “You’re wrong, Bess. They aren’t in love with you, but damn, they are in lust. You walk across the ballroom, looking like the perfect embodiment of a future duchess—and at the same time, the most sensual woman in England.”

  Betsy gasped, and ice went down her spine. She lost all inclination to pat his chest and glared at him, stepping back until she bumped the table. “No, I do not! You are absolutely incorrect.”

  He frowned. “It was a compliment of a sort, Bess. I can assure you that gentlemen watch you with your duchess airs, your touch-me-not innocence, and the main thing that comes to mind is a violent wish to have you. To be the one to break that ice and set free the fire inside you.”

  Betsy gasped, horror welling up in her chest. If he was right, all those proposals she’d received were because of her mother, rather than despite her.

  What if those men thought they saw the shadow of her mother’s debauched behavior? The kind of lust that drove a woman to throw away the best match in the land? To leave her children?

  Acid burned up her throat from her stomach, and for a moment she thought she’d vomit.

  Jeremy’s eyes sharpened with puzzlement, and he wrapped his large hands around her upper arms. “I meant it as a compliment.”

  He had no idea that he was making her heart burn with disgust, and she certainly wasn’t going to explain.

  Her mother, Yvette, was her burden, and the last thing she’d do was reveal that weakness to one of the few men in the world who had always told her the truth. A shudder ran through her body, and Jeremy’s hands tightened on her arms.

  “What’s the matter, Bess? It doesn’t make sense that you’d fall for the idea that men view ladies like delicate angels. You don’t turn up your nose at a bawdy joke. Hell, you were the one who called me ‘flaccid’!”

  “Excuse me,” Betsy said, marshaling all her strength to remain calm. “But any man who thinks about me that way is quite mistaken. I am not a loose woman, puns or no, and there is nothing about me that might suggest I would readily fall into bed with a man.”

  That included her future husband, but she kept that to herself.

  She’d decided years ago that she had to get through the bedding part of marriage without giving her husband even the faintest suspicion that she enjoyed the act—if indeed she did. Enjoyment would be fatal.

  If she expressed pleasure, he would watch her like a hawk. And rightly so. Just look at her mother, giving birth to four children in five years, before fleeing with the count. The evidence of her enjoyment of men’s favors had been written on Yvette’s body in language that anyone could understand.

  “That is exactly why you and I cannot make a five-day journey in which you are dressed as a boy,” Jeremy said, his voice patient, as if he were instructing a slow student.

  Betsy opened her mouth and stopped, floundering. He was right, of course. She rarely accompanied a man out of a ballroom without a chaperone. She zealously guarded her reputation.

  And yet—

  “It wouldn’t be me,” she said, looking back up at his eyes. “You could call me by a boy’s name. Fred or Pete. Don’t you see, Jeremy? It wouldn’t be me, so how could I lose my reputation?”

  “Are you planning to bed down in the stables with the grooms and other male servants?” His eyes were sympathetic, but his voice was unrelenting. “It would still be you, albeit in breeches, and if you were discovered—which is likely—the consequences would be terrible.”

  “How would I be discovered?”

  “London is five days’ journey from here. Anything could betray you. Did you know that men whip out their cocks and piss against the wall?”

  She blinked.

  “You want to masquerade as a man,” he said. “What are you going to do if someone wagers that they can pee farther than you?”

  “Is that likely?”

  “It’s not unlikely. Men like to measure their prowess in ways that are related to the performance of their private parts, ridiculous though it seems.”

  “I needn’t be disguised as a stableboy,” she pointed out. “I could pose as a young relative of yours.”

  “If I travel from Lindow Castle to London with a well-dressed young lad, almost all will wonder if you are one of the Wildes. Everyone knows the duke has thirteen or fourteen children. They would stare at you.”

  “Oh.”

  “On the other hand, if I am merely part of a group that includes Lady Knowe, or North, or even one of your younger brothers, you simply become a young Wilde, traveling with an older relative. Nothing interesting to see . . . move along, if you please.”

  “What?”

  “Constables say that during street riots,” Jeremy explained. “My point is that if I travel to London with you, you would be a subject of interest. But if we brought along one of the older Wildes, that person would absorb the attention. People are fascinated by your family, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  She harrumphed. “I’ve lived with their attention my entire life, so yes, I have noticed.”

  “They would focus on Lady Knowe, or North, or Leonidas, not on a mere boy.”

  “I think your argument is a weak one, Lord Jeremy.”

  “We agreed on first names.”

  “We didn’t really.”

  “You have already addressed me as Jeremy. And I’m calling you Bess, or in extremis, Boadicea. Frankly, this breeches play you’re suggesting is not far from the warrior queen who took on the Romans. I don’t suppose she was wearing skirts, let alone panniers, when she led the charge.”

  “I still don’t think a chaperone is necessary.”

  “I suggest Lady Knowe.”

  “This is ridiculous!” The words burst past her lips. “Yes, I see the danger if I pretend to be a stableboy, if I’m alone with a group of men. But I c
ould be a stray young cousin of yours whom you were escorting to London.”

  He shook his head. “You have the Wilde profile and eyebrows, Bess. There’s no mistaking the look. Every Wilde has it, except—”

  “Except for my sister Joan,” Betsy said resignedly. “You needn’t elaborate. We all know that Joan’s hair is the precise shade of the infamous Prussian’s.”

  “More to the point, the Wildes are well-known for eyebrows, high cheekbones, blue eyes with a tilt at the edges . . . Anyone in the south of England and most people in the north are able to identify a Wilde even from the worst-drawn prints.”

  Betsy groaned.

  She hated to admit that he was right. She did look like her father and her aunt. Joan stood out in the midst of them like a rose in a bunch of lilacs. Even the three younger children, Ophelia’s brood, had the Wilde eyebrows. And the Wilde cheekbones as well.

  “Right,” she said. Her mouth drooped. “I suppose it was a stupid idea.”

  “Yes, it was,” Jeremy stated, not softening the blow.

  She straightened and forced a blithe smile on her lips. “It was a happy dream while it lasted, so thank you for indulging me.”

  He flinched. “That smile is terrifying.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, scowling at him instead.

  “Has anyone recognized how much desperation lies behind that particular smile, the false cheerful one?” Jeremy asked.

  He had her hedged against the billiard table. In an effort to gain a little space, she pushed up so she was seated on the table and wiggled backward, making sure to pin her panniers at her sides.

  “I am never desperate,” she told him. “Despair is an emotion unbecoming to a Wilde.”

  “Believe me, my father expressed similar feelings about my condition on returning from war. And yet . . . when desperation becomes one’s companion, no calls to better behavior seem to ward it off.”

  Betsy shook her head. “I’m not desperate. I’m simply fatigued, after a long Season.” She had an idea. “Could we go to Wilmslow for an afternoon instead? I am so . . .”

  “Bored,” Jeremy supplied, his voice solid and steady. “You are tired of pretending to be a woman whom you are not. You are tired of laughing at unfunny jokes and listening to terrible poetry. You are tired of receiving and rejecting proposals of marriage from strangers.”