“I like your breasts,” he said flatly.
She was wearing a velvet coat buttoned to her cravat. Savoring the moment, he looked lower.
“Well?” she asked, when he remained silent.
“Women should wear breeches all the time,” he said, registering the hoarse sound in his voice without embarrassment.
“You oughtn’t look at me that way,” Betsy said, sounding somewhat delighted.
“What way?” He couldn’t pull his eyes from her rounded thighs, though every gentlemanly instinct in his body—luckily, there weren’t many—demanded that he gaze somewhere else, say, to the corner of the room.
“Heated,” Betsy said.
Jeremy forced his gaze back to her face.
“I am too curvy, especially in profile. If every man looks at me the way you do, I can’t go to the auction.”
Jeremy took a deep breath and rubbed his hands over his face. “Give me a moment. I’ll try to look at you as if you were a stranger.”
Betsy turned and started fussing with her wig, pulling it lower on her brow.
From behind . . .
Her coat was quite short—designed for a young boy—with double vents in the back that were not lying flat. Betsy had an arse designed by the gods. Her coat displayed that curve in all its magnificence. Now he knew what she meant.
“That coat won’t do,” he said, steel in his voice.
“I know!” Betsy cried, whirling about. “I look like a fool, don’t I? It’s far too short and not fashionable.”
“Among other problems.”
She turned to the mirror again. “I can’t go to the auction.”
To his horror, her lower lip trembled before she bit down with even, white teeth. “It was a stupid, stupid idea. Looking like this, I’d be found out. I’d have to live in the country like a hermit because I wouldn’t be received anywhere.” She took in a shaky breath.
Some part of Jeremy’s brain, an ancient, wary part, was instructing him to leave the room. But the part of him that had watched Boadicea Wilde practice with a billiard cue day after day before she sailed into the ballroom to play a role as a demure maiden opened his arms and pulled her against his chest.
Sweaty or no.
“You can do it,” he murmured. “We’ll do it together.”
She snuggled against him, cheek against his chest. “You smell good.” Her voice trembled. “I knew inside that it would never work.”
Jeremy tightened his arms and rested his chin on her bristly wig. “It will work. I am taking you to the auction. I will not fail you.”
“What if we are caught? We’d have to marry and then you’d have to become a hermit as well.”
“I am already a hermit,” Jeremy said, dodging the question of marriage. If and when he proposed to Betsy, it would be at a time of his choosing.
If?
When he proposed to Betsy. She had somehow carved a place in his chest and it wasn’t going to go away.
“All right,” he said, reluctantly stepping back. “I shall pretend that I don’t know you.”
He raked his eyes up and down, pushing away the scorching wave of desire that followed.
“We should make you plump. It would be better if we could find you a different coat, but if you didn’t have such a slim waist, your rear wouldn’t be so obvious.”
Betsy frowned at him. “My rear?” She peered over her shoulder. “What about my legs?”
Jeremy obediently looked down. Lovely thighs. Plump above, slender below.
“Your ankles are rather small,” he said.
“I have boots!” Betsy pulled forward a pair of battered boots and stamped into them. “I used to wear them riding when I was a girl, so I asked Aunt Knowe to have them taken from the attic.”
“You wore riding boots as a girl?”
She nodded. “It looks better, doesn’t it?” she said, before the mirror again. “My legs don’t look as skinny.”
No wonder lust was one of the seven deadly sins. It was as strong as the instinct to live.
“No, they don’t.” His voice could be classified as a groan, if one were so inclined.
A grin crossed Betsy’s face. “Jeremy! Regard me as if I were a stranger, remember?”
“Do you have any more of the material you bound your breasts with?”
“Muslin? Yes. My maid brought rolls of bandages.”
“Wind them around your waist until you look like a stocky young lad.”
Nodding, her hands went to the buttons on her jacket.
“Not until I leave. Where’s your sense of self-protection, Bess?”
“I don’t need that around you.” But she dropped her hands.
It was the work of a moment to wrap his hands around her shoulders, bend his head, and catch her lips in a hard kiss. He was no tamed and toothless alley cat.
She giggled and kissed him back, her tongue lapping his until his mind blurred. And when her teeth closed on his bottom lip? He growled and his hands slid down her back, rounding that luscious bottom.
“You’re sweaty,” she said, sometime later.
That was when Jeremy realized that Betsy had her hands under his shirt in the back, tracing his muscles. He jerked. “Bloody hell.”
Her hands slid from his back. “I watched you pitching snow in the courtyard. I couldn’t stop wondering . . .” To his shock, she raised a slender finger and licked it. His tool throbbed, demanding attention. Demanding her.
“Mmmm,” she said with throaty pleasure. “Salt.”
Jeremy’s brain had seized up, and he came up with only one response. “You must say No to the duke,” he said. “Conclusively.”
She licked another finger. “Duke? What duke?”
“Greywick.”
“Thaddeus is not a duke, but a viscount.”
“Bess. He’s courting you.”
“Oh, all right. I must say no to being a duchess, is that your command?”
“Precisely.”
Her hands went back to her coat. “Unless you want to help me transform into a plump schoolboy, you’d better leave.”
For a moment, time froze. Jeremy’s eyes caught on the laughing curve of her red lips, the heat of her gaze as it met his.
“I do want that,” he said, his voice a ragged groan.
“Next time?”
Next time. His mind obediently served up an image of Betsy in her breeches, laughing from horseback.
It wasn’t until he was sluicing himself in water that he realized he’d imagined her in the courtyard of the house where he grew up.
The house he had sworn never to return to after he’d disgraced his name.
When he first returned from the colonies, he and his father had fought bitterly; he couldn’t remember the precise words now. But he had left believing that he was thrown out.
It seemed he had been entirely wrong. Unsurprising. In those first months, anger had raged inside him to the point where he hadn’t been able to sleep or think. The only sounds in his ears were the ricochet of bullets, and the moans of dying men.
The anger was still there, the grief and guilt too. But it felt as if a snowstorm had covered those emotions. They were muted by soft mounds of snow. The voices of dying men quieted.
Not silenced . . . but muted.
The voices of his men would always be with him. His experience on the battlefield had changed him forever.
But he could live in this wintry landscape better than the hellfire he had walked through for the last months.
He shook his hair, drops of water flying across the chamber. He felt clean.
Chapter Eighteen
While Betsy waited for Winnie to return with a greatcoat, she stripped off her coat, waistcoat, and the long white shirt underneath. Her breasts were tightly bound. Below them her waist curved in and her hips curved out.
The breeches strained over her hips, and when she turned to peer in the glass over her shoulder, she could actually see the stitches that held the fabr
ic together over the roundest part of her bottom. She’d be lucky not to split them down the middle.
A giggle escaped her at the memory of Jeremy’s expression. She put a hand on her rear and slowly ran it over the curve. There was something erotic about breeches on a woman.
Her hand slipped off her rear as a frisson of anxiety hit her. This excursion was mad. It was as if she’d pent up her love of mischief and her reckless impulses, and now they were exploding.
It had been an interesting year. She had fulfilled her fourteen-year-old self’s ambitions. She had collected enough proposals to prove that her mother’s disgrace didn’t define her.
Every time she refused a proposal, she wielded a small amount of power over her own future. But the world wasn’t ready for the unnerving prospect of women who made their own decisions, society be damned. In fact . . .
She sank into a chair, feeling stunned.
The only woman she knew who had made her own decisions in the face of social disgrace was her mother.
The infamous second duchess. She still didn’t agree with Yvette’s choice.
But now she understood it.
The one decision Betsy had made in defiance of social rules—going to an auction in breeches—was almost as likely to cause a scandal as Yvette’s flight with the Prussian. The scandal wouldn’t be on the same scale, but still . . .
It could be that she did have an inheritance from her mother. She had looked at Yvette through the lens of Clementine’s disgust.
But what if Betsy inherited courage and decisiveness from her mother? What if she inherited a wish to create her own future? A dislike of being penned in by society?
What if she inherited the ability and the wish to astonish people?
What if that drove Yvette?
Until that moment Betsy hadn’t realized how taxing it was to dislike one’s mother, even an unknown one.
The door swung open and Winnie flew in. “Here I am! Oh, you undressed again.”
“We have to make me fatter,” Betsy said, standing up and trying to ignore her giddy feeling. Freedom? Was this what freedom felt like?
“Fatter?” Winnie didn’t like that. “Why?”
Betsy turned around and pointed to her rear. “It’s too obvious.”
“I suppose I see your bottom every day, but I don’t think about it,” Winnie said, taking the bundle of muslin strips Betsy handed her.
“If I’m rounder all over, it won’t be so obvious.”
“Hopefully that’s true.” Winnie began to wrap Betsy like a mummy from the British Museum. “Straining over the belly means that straining over the bottom won’t matter.”
“I’m filling in back and front,” Betsy said, a moment later. “That’s good enough.” When she buttoned up the last button, she turned to face the glass and they both broke out laughing.
“You look like a stuffed goose, ready for Christmas!”
“More like a goose egg,” Betsy said, giggling. “I’m so round in the middle!”
“No one will think of you as a woman,” Winnie said.
“More like a pillow out for an excursion,” Betsy said, pulling down the hem of her coat.
“Time to go!” Aunt Knowe bellowed from the bottom of the stairs.
“It’s a good thing there aren’t other guests in the inn,” Betsy said.
“You’ll do,” Winnie said, adding a final hairpin to Betsy’s wig. “Just don’t bend over because the egg might crack.”
Betsy nodded, savoring the feeling of adventure that flooded her. She took pleasure thumping down the stairs in her riding boots because her demi-boots always tapped in a ladylike way and her slippers swished.
The corridor was full of people. With a rapid glance, she saw that the duchess resembled a round-faced mayor. Jeremy’s father had an expression of suppressed glee, and Lady Knowe looked exactly like her twin brother, the duke. Jeremy . . .
He was waiting for her. Looking for her. As if she were the only person who mattered.
Somehow her feet kept thumping down the stairs, her hand holding the rail. Aunt Knowe cried, “Here’s the gentleman we’ve been waiting for! I wondered if you would be attractive as a boy. Now I have my answer!”
Betsy walked toward her. “No?”
“You look like a turnip,” her aunt remarked. “All right, everyone. The carriages are waiting.”
Betsy’s heart was beating quickly, but not because she was about to take her first step out of doors in breeches. No, it was the way that Jeremy stepped toward her as if he would always walk at her side.
“Jeremy, Betsy, and the marquess in one carriage,” Aunt Knowe ordered.
“We’ll take my carriage,” the duchess cried, grabbing Aunt Knowe’s elbow.
Betsy glanced up at Jeremy from under her lashes and her heart beat even faster. “Are you ready to take a turnip on an outing, Lord Jeremy?”
“It’s been one of my long-held ambitions,” he said gravely. “Lady Knowe, I think we should congregate in the sitting room first.”
“Why?” Lady Knowe demanded. “I don’t want to miss anything!”
“A lesson in manhood is in order,” he said, nodding to the duchess. “For one thing, Her Grace is now His Grace and probably shouldn’t be holding your elbow.”
“Oh, my!” the duchess squealed.
“Fine,” Lady Knowe said grumpily. “You can give us a few brief lessons. How hard can it be to be a man?”
“To be a gentleman?” Jeremy corrected, his eyes glinting with an edge of wicked laughter. “Hard. Very hard.”
Lady Knowe took off her cocked hat and swatted him, and he laughed like a boy, ducking through the door into the sitting room.
Betsy found herself watching Jeremy’s father, whose eyes were clear and shining.
She followed the group into the sitting room, feeling a complicated knot of emotions: uncertainty warring with excitement warring with desire, happiness, recklessness . . .
“I like wearing these breeches,” she told the room.
“You enjoy looking like a stuffed sausage?” Jeremy asked.
“You have obviously never worn a corset if you think there’s anything new to the sensation.”
Whatever was going on between them felt risky and exhilarating, not like the practiced chatter with which she had enticed her suitors.
“I might wear a corset someday,” Jeremy said conversationally.
Her mouth fell open. “Why?”
“My grandfather used to creak when he bent over; I was twelve by the time I realized that the sound was protesting whalebones.”
“‘Protesting whalebones,’” she repeated, and then laughed. “Are you planning to grow into your grandfather’s girth?” She flicked a glance at his body. “You’ll need to eat more regularly than you do now.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said.
They’d reached the duchess. Walking like a man wasn’t an easy task if you had large hips, as did the duchess.
“That’s better!” Lady Knowe cried, clapping her hands. “Lengthen your stride!”
“This is as long as physically possible,” Her Grace said, with an edge.
“You try it, Betsy,” Lady Knowe said. “Walk from the fireplace to the chair.”
Betsy was waddling, but Jeremy’s imagination nimbly removed the padding from her waist and freed her poor, confined breasts.
Her aunt narrowed her eyes at him.
He moved his gaze to Betsy’s neck. The curls of her white wig hid the back of her neck, but framed the proud lift of her chin. Her throat was satin smooth. He’d like to pull off her cravat, lick her throat, and then bite her ear. She would gasp. He let himself think about what Betsy’s gasp would sound like, until it occurred to him that his breeches were now as ill-fitting as hers.
Lady Knowe had her hands on her hips. “Betsy is passable, but Emily, if you don’t stop swinging your hips, we shall have to leave you in the inn. Do you need me or the marquess to demonstrate again?”
Lady Knowe had perfected a long-legged, raw stride without a trace of femininity.
“Good enough,” the duchess barked, ignoring her comment. “The horses will take a chill if we don’t make haste. Has anyone seen my son?”
“No,” Lady Knowe said.
“He was cross as a child too,” Her Grace said. “Didn’t get his way and he’d be as pickled as a pear.”
Jeremy saw Betsy’s eyes light up. Her pink lips shaped the phrase “pickled as a pear.”
He allowed the duchess to leave the room, followed by Lady Knowe and his father, and then he said, “It wouldn’t be comfortable to be matched with a pickled pear, Betsy.”
“I didn’t know that pears could be pickled,” Betsy said, her eyes shining.
He’d been driven half mad, hungering after the curve of her neck, so he drew her into his arms and waited just long enough so that her eyelashes swept shut before he brought their lips together. She sighed, a sound so erotic that wildfire leapt over his body.
Their tongues were shameless, but Jeremy didn’t allow his hands to slide down to her arse and grip it the way he’d love to do. He didn’t pull Betsy against him so that her legs in those scandalous breeches could wind around his hips, and the better parts of each of them would rub against each other in fierce pleasure.
She tasted joyful and sweet and lustful. “I want to ravish you,” he said, his voice rasping like that of a boy of fifteen. “For God’s sake—”
“Say No to the duke?”
“Exactly.”
“Then you’ll ravish me?” She had a bewitching twinkle in her eyes.
“No, no, I won’t,” he said hastily.
He saw a flash of hurt go through her beautiful eyes.
“Not until we’re married.”
He had spoken the word aloud.
“An ultimatum.” She looked over her shoulder as she walked from the room, giving him an impish—sweetly feminine—smile. Which he didn’t entirely understand until he realized that she was swaying her hips.
Her bottom in breeches was enough to drive a man to madness. Or to marriage.
“You are the most erotic turnip I’ve ever seen,” he called.
She just laughed.
Chapter Nineteen
Say No to the Duke Page 20