Say No to the Duke
Page 18
“One kiss. Please.”
“No.” And then, “Why would I kiss you again? It wasn’t something worth repeating.”
“To me, it was.”
Ugh. Her whole body responded to his expression. And his truthfulness. But she didn’t like his brand of honesty. Did she?
She could jerk her head toward the window and he would leave. She knew that in every part of her being. Even if she lost her head and followed her most reckless impulses . . . she could trust him to stop whenever she wished.
The thought that exploded into her head next was life-changing. If a yellow-haired Prussian came to a country house party hosted by Jeremy . . . she would never leave him. Never.
Perhaps she would have fled marriage with Thaddeus, but never Jeremy.
So she stayed where she was and he took that final step and put his arms around her. By rights he should feel cold and damp, but instead his chest was hot. She eased forward until her breasts flattened against him.
He said something under his breath and his arms tightened. Heat spread through her body, spiraling from every place they touched: his arms on her back, her cheek on his shoulder, her right foot against his boot. His cheek against her hair.
Fire kindled in improper places. She would like him to slide one of his callused hands down to her rump and pull her even closer.
“May I kiss you?” His voice sounded irritable, the tone with which he snarled comments from the corner of the room.
Those eyes that seemed mercilessly unkind were hot and desirous.
For her.
She leaned forward and put her lips on his, because if she was going to throw in her lot with her mother, she might as well go all the way. Their lips brushed softly for a moment and his tongue caressed her bottom lip.
All that lazy fire spilled into open flame. Her body prickled until even the backs of her knees felt hot and weak. She wound her arms around his neck and melted against him until her nipples flattened against his chest. Finally, finally, one of the hands on her back slid down and cupped her bottom.
She shivered and nipped his lower lip, which made him growl. She wanted more.
Yet Jeremy didn’t seem to follow her inclination to move toward the bed and she didn’t have the courage to step in that direction herself. In fact, he pulled away and she swayed toward him before she caught herself.
His eyes were raw with an emotion that went far past her experience of lust. Need, perhaps. Need for her.
“Not a good idea?” she asked with a little gasp.
“Not at this moment.” His eyes skated down her front and then jerked back to her face.
Betsy looked down too, and found her nipples making little bumps in the soft fabric of her nightdress. She squared her shoulders and gazed back at him.
“There’s my Bess,” he said, voice rasping.
She had floated through the Season as if it were a prolonged masquerade, a game in which the prize was a wedding ring. Here, in the middle of the night, facing a man with stubble on his jaw and no coat, with no more apparent similarity to a gentleman than she had to a queen . . .
This was real.
He was real.
“Please sit,” she said, pointing to the chair by the fire.
One eyebrow arched, but he sat.
“I will sit in your lap,” she told him. “We had better not kiss again, though. It seems to go to my head.”
“Nothing so depraved,” he promised, seating himself. Betsy sank onto his lap, his arms came around her, and her head settled against his chest. It felt like the end of a book, the part of a marriage that authors leave to the reader’s imagination: daily affection and sweetness, a layer of desire never alluded to on the page.
“So you’re my friend again, even though I was an ass?” he asked.
“If you find yourself in the grip of another temper, you must keep it to yourself.”
Jeremy rested his chin on her head. “He touched you.” There wasn’t an ounce of apology in his voice.
“What will you do if I marry him?” she inquired.
“Move to Italy, I suspect. Or Russia, as that’s even further away.”
He didn’t sound as if he was jesting, and his arms tightened possessively. Betsy felt a stab of such pure joy that she didn’t bother searching for a response, just snuggled closer.
“The Season is a game,” she said later, drowsily. “My father says I allow men to hang about me like horseflies at the trough.”
“I shouldn’t have been harsh.”
“Before I debuted, everyone viewed me as a version of my mother, and now they don’t. They think women can be bred for chastity and obedience.”
“You are a Wilde, and a magnificent example of the breed.”
Betsy puzzled over that and decided it was a compliment. Her eyes kept closing because the thump of his heart against her ear was mesmerizing. She almost missed what he said next.
“You’re the best of the Wildes,” he murmured. “The most loyal and true, a brilliant player at billiards and life.”
Did he really say that?
Betsy woke up when her maid pulled the curtains open the next morning. She was tucked in bed, alone.
“We won’t be returning to Lindow today,” Winnie said. “There’s more snow on the way.” She opened the door and ushered in a procession of Lindow grooms carrying buckets of hot water. Lady Knowe would never allow strange servants into an inn bedchamber when one of the family was in bed. It was too easy for strangers to be bribed.
Betsy lay watching and trying to think through a fog of happiness. Just at the moment, she didn’t care about wearing breeches to the auction, or playing billiards in a men’s club. She was contemplating a far more scandalous move, from the view of polite society: rejecting a future duke in favor of a war-damaged man with a lesser title.
She was out of the bath and dressed by the time Winnie discovered Jeremy’s bundle tucked behind a chair. “What on earth is this?” her maid asked.
“Oh, that’ll be my breeches,” Betsy said airily. “There’s an auction in Wilmslow this afternoon, and I plan to wear boy’s clothing.”
“Lady Boadicea!” Winnie cried—using Betsy’s full name as a measure of her distress—“after all the work we’ve done to make you into a proper duchess! With the future duke and his mother in the inn. You mustn’t, you really mustn’t!”
“The duchess plans to wear men’s clothing as well, if they can be made to fit in time. Her great-aunt tried to escape a marriage by fleeing in breeches. Think of it like a fancy dress party.”
“How very peculiar,” Winnie observed. “I have no wish to wear men’s clothing.” She took a pair of green velvet breeches from the bundle. “I suppose if Her Grace . . . I can’t imagine her in men’s clothing!”
“My Aunt Knowe will wear breeches as well.”
“I wouldn’t want to put on nasty old breeches.” Winnie shook out the matching coat. “I think it will fit you, but this costume is wretchedly out-of-date.”
“There’s a portrait of my brother Alaric wearing it in one of the east wing bedchambers. I think he was around twelve. He threatened to slice the painting to ribbons and feed it to the goats, so it had to be stowed in a guest room.”
“He’s a wild one,” Winnie sighed. Like the rest of the nation, she had succumbed to Alaric’s books depicting his adventures. No one had cried harder when Wilde in Love was performed at the castle and Alaric’s supposed fiancée was eaten by cannibals.
“I suppose if I steam these carefully, I can make them look respectable.” And with that she tucked them under her arm and set off for the nether depths of the inn.
Aunt Knowe poked her head in the door shortly afterward. “Breakfast, Betsy.”
“Mayn’t I stay here and read?” Betsy was seated with her toes close to a burning log, reading a rather bawdy play she found on the mantelpiece.
“You, my dear, are wearing a pink morning gown, the better to dazzle Emily. Why waste it?”
“Emily has gone to church, but she will be back soon. Given that she’s a lackadaisical church-goer at best, I think she means to pray that the three of us be forgiven for our breeches-begotten sins. You must come to breakfast and thank her. She’s so pleased that you are both perfectly behaved and wild, not with an E.”
Betsy sighed.
“You’ve made her happier than she’s been in years. From Emily’s point of view, the curtain is rising on a new duchess who promises to perform the role with verve. She can’t wait to play a supporting role.”
“She understands my so-called perfection is a performance?”
Aunt Knowe waggled her eyebrows. “Everyone does. Most of polite society is agog, waiting to see you throw off the shackles of propriety and arise from the ashes like a phoenix. That would be the female half, as the men are too foolish to discern that you are no demure maiden.”
“You mean those ladies are waiting for a Prussian to cross my path,” Betsy pointed out. The prediction of her disgrace still stung, but it had lost the power it wielded when she was fourteen.
“You’re a Wilde, my dear. Your mother was not a Wilde. Those are the only two facts that matter: My friends are intrigued by the fact that one of the Wildes appears to be a model of propriety.”
“You’re wrong,” Betsy said with conviction. “They’re waiting to see me make a fool of myself over a yellow-haired man.”
A tremendous frown gathered Aunt Knowe’s forehead into pleats. “Are you jesting, Boadicea?”
“No,” Betsy said. “I assure you, Aunt Knowe, I learned that lesson on the very first day I went to school.”
Aunt Knowe closed the door and sat down in the chair where Jeremy had seated himself the night before. Not that the fact was relevant.
“My dear,” she said, “you’re moonstruck. Batty. Mad as a March hare. Put your book aside.”
Betsy obeyed, because she was used to obeying her aunt.
“I have wondered why you constructed such a medieval portrait of a lady to perform before polite society,” Aunt Knowe said. “I see now that I have been a very bad aunt because I thought you deserved privacy. I considered your perfection a result of nervousness. It seemed unlikely, but one never knows. That wasn’t it, was it?”
Betsy shook her head.
“I’m a fool,” her aunt muttered.
“The story of my mother and the Prussian was a dragon that had to be slain before I could join society without whispers behind my back.”
“You are a Wilde, Betsy! You have no need to genuflect before foolish matrons who gossip at the side of ballrooms.”
“Because my eyebrows mark me a Wilde?”
“Among other things,” Aunt Knowe said. “No one could possibly think that you were illegitimate.”
“My legitimacy doesn’t alter the fact that my mother ran away with a man and left her children.”
“Yvette’s flight doesn’t mean that her daughter must collect proposals the way a boy collects butterflies. Just sticking in a pin and turning the page.”
“School was difficult—”
“You think I don’t know that?” Aunt Knowe’s cheeks had become as red as her hair. “I heard about the unpleasant gossip; the headmistress warned us. But I never thought you’d pay attention to that rubbish! You are a duke’s daughter.”
“Yes, but—” Betsy began.
“Just look at Joan,” Aunt Knowe said, talking right over her. “She can’t wait to debut—and she has the Prussian’s hair! Why on earth would you think that jealous gossip can define a Wilde? Rubbish!”
“It’s not rubbish,” Betsy said, fumbling to defend herself. “Horses inherit characteristics, so why not people?”
“Characteristics!” Aunt Knowe waved her hands in the air. “Rubbish! Double rubbish! Your mother fell in love. Have you ever asked your father about their marriage?”
“It’s not my business.”
“It is if you behave like a brainless widgeon on account of it,” her aunt retorted. “Your father believed that Yvette would be a good mother to his orphaned sons, but he was wrong.”
Betsy nodded. “The matrons believe I’ll be overcome by lust and invite a man to my bed, as Yvette did.”
“Yvette did nothing remarkable. Just think of your brother Alaric having to flee Russia in order to escape a command visit to the royal bedchamber. Behave like an empress, not like a mouse, Betsy. Although,” she added, “if you intend to invite someone to your chamber, you must be prepared to marry him.”
“I haven’t invited anyone to my room,” Betsy said truthfully.
“Because you don’t have a fiancé,” her aunt continued, “and until you have chosen one, no invitations. Marriage is not like a stable, where you might try riding two or three stallions before buying one, so don’t you dream of comparing those two men on alternate nights.”
“The Empress Catherine does not have to navigate a London ballroom,” Betsy said.
Her aunt grinned. “I’ll echo Viola: Just be yourself, Betsy. You have nothing to worry about.” She rose to her feet. “Come along now; I’m starving.”
Betsy came to her feet, thinking hard.
“I can’t wait until you are in charge of your own nursery,” her aunt said with relish. “I shall visit frequently, once fate gives you the children you deserve.”
“Judging by the Duchess of Eversley’s stories of Thaddeus, her ducal progeny are far better behaved than those whom you raised,” Betsy noted, as they descended the creaking wooden stair.
“Thaddeus’s calm might balance out the Wilde blood,” her aunt acknowledged. “Or you could choose Jeremy, and end up with mop-headed devils with no manners. Climbing on the furniture. Peeing on it.”
“That seems unnecessarily judgmental,” Betsy said.
“Based on harsh experience,” Aunt Knowe said. “Speak of the devil . . .”
Jeremy appeared in the door of the dining room. He bowed and bid them good morning. “The innkeeper has a question about salmon delivered from Lindow, Lady Knowe.”
She rolled her eyes. “I should have brought our chef, but Frederic has such a loathing for strange kitchens.” With that, she marched off toward the back of the inn.
Jeremy’s hand closed around Betsy’s wrist and then she was enveloped in clean starched linen and a rough, open-mouthed kiss.
It was like being hit by a gale-force wind: She melted against him, one hand gripping his lapel to hold him close.
A shuffling step from the passageway leading to the kitchens broke them apart like the sides of a clam shell. Betsy’s heart was pounding in her chest. Down the corridor to their right, Carper bore a tea tray through a swinging door to the kitchen.
“Bloody hell,” Jeremy breathed.
Betsy raised a trembling finger to her lips and took a deep breath. “Was that your morning greeting?”
“I don’t offer it to all and sundry,” Jeremy said.
Clatter from the kitchen suggested that the footman would emerge again at any moment.
“I was waiting for herring or at least a strong cup of tea, and then you appeared. You’re very kissable.”
“More appealing than herring?”
“Infinitely. Enthralling, actually, as fish never seems to be.”
She drew in a deep breath and met his eyes.
“I don’t use the word lightly,” he added.
Carper reappeared and came down the corridor, a tray held high on one shoulder. Betsy remained on her side of the corridor and Jeremy on his. With a muttered apology, Carper walked between them into the dining room, his eyes resolutely fixed on the air.
“I smell sausages,” Jeremy muttered.
“And Pekoe tea,” Betsy countered. “Aunt Knowe must hav
e had it brought from the castle.” Neither of them moved until Carper reemerged and walked back down the corridor.
The kitchen door hadn’t swung shut before Betsy tumbled into Jeremy’s arms. Their mouths met as if they’d kissed every morning for twenty years.
She feverishly absorbed each sensation. He smelled like fresh apples, rather than horse and leather. His shoulders flexed under her fingers and need rose in her like a windstorm. She lost her train of thought, but then roused to the caress of a hand on her back that transformed her skin from mere covering to something sensitive and longing.
Another sound down the corridor, and Jeremy put her from him, tweaked the small ruffle on her bodice, adjusted the lace around her left wrist, smiled.
“You’ll do,” he said. “Gorgeous as you are.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Even more gorgeous with a Wildean eyebrow in the air,” he muttered. “Time for sausages. I don’t fancy your aunt catching us dallying in the corridor.”
His eyes had that burning look she’d never seen him direct to anyone else. Usually he viewed the world with a sardonic air.
Betsy walked into the dining room feeling dizzily happy. Jeremy put herring on her plate. She hated fish in the morning, but she ate a bite of one. He poured tea and she nodded when he asked about milk, although she never had milk, especially with Pekoe tea.
They talked and didn’t kiss, although his eyes kept catching on her lips and she kept shifting in her chair, small frustrated movements, because her body felt as wound up as a top.
After a while, Aunt Knowe marched in the door and checked her step when she saw the two of them sitting there alone, then launched into the innkeeper’s appalling ignorance of baked salmon.
Betsy felt keenly aware of her heartbeat galloping along. She looked down at her plate, thinking about all the moments and hours when one’s heart beats without notice, and then after a few kisses, it felt like an unbroken horse that couldn’t be ignored.
Aunt Knowe wound down her discourse on the proper care and cooking of salmon—wasted on two people who didn’t say a word in response. “The innkeeper tells me that the auction will happen today, snow or no snow.”
“What time will it take place?” Jeremy asked.