Say No to the Duke

by James, Eloisa

  The brewmaster’s mustache flared up almost to the top of his ruddy cheeks. “I had fine hops to work with.”

  “Lady Knowe asked if you would be kind enough to share the first taste with her,” Betsy said. “She would have joined me, but she’s not quite herself today. Perhaps hoppy ale will be healing.”

  Lady Knowe seemed perfectly hearty when Jeremy saw her a half hour ago, but mischief hung in the air about Betsy, the reckless pleasure with which she donned boy’s breeches.

  “We’re none of us getting any younger,” Mr. Horn acknowledged, hustling over to refill his pitcher from a hogshead to the side. “I’ll bring it to her myself. Will you accompany me, Lady Boadicea?”

  “I’ll finish this marvelous brew,” she said. And then, with a private twinkle, “Lord Jeremy will escort me to the castle.”

  As the door shut behind Mr. Horn, they leaned forward at the same moment, as if choreographed. Jeremy groaned as Betsy’s tongue met his. She tasted like sweet beer and Bess, a potent combination that made his head swim.

  He stood up so fast that his stool fell over. Betsy laughed as he placed their glasses to the side.

  “I want you.” His voice was raw and deep. He rounded the table and crouched before her, taking in the way her breasts swelled above her bodice, the flush in her cheeks, the bright gleam in her eyes. Her collarbones were as exquisite as the rest of her, edging her breasts like the delicate framework of a cathedral window. “You’re so damned beautiful,” he breathed.

  Her eyes searched his face. “As are you.”

  Raw lust bit at him, and he grabbed her fur cape, throwing it down on the table. “A bed fit for a lady.”

  She began giggling, a sound like pure joy turned to song. “We can’t do that here.”

  “Ah, but we can.” He picked her up with a kiss, and put her down on the fur, shifting his hands just in time to trap her panniers before they flipped into the air.

  “Most men can’t manage that,” she said, grinning at him.

  “I’ve been watching you maneuver into chairs for months now,” he admitted. He pulled up her skirts, but found another under it, and another under that. “How many layers are you wearing?”

  Her eyes had darkened from sky blue to something more tempestuous. “At least bar the door,” she said.

  He pulled up the last layer, a thin chemise, and then turned to cross the room and slam the bar in place. He returned to find her propped on her elbows, her legs dangling over the side of the table, emerging from a froth of pale blue and snowy white petticoats. She wore pale blue stockings, and above the ribbons that held them up, her thighs were plump and creamy.

  “Come,” she said, holding out a hand.

  He was there in a rush, crouching and pushing her legs apart.

  She gave a little scream and tried to sit up. “Angelic behavior,” he reminded her. Simple hunger roughened his voice. “You taste wonderful.”

  “You’re looking at me in the daylight,” Betsy exclaimed, “and we aren’t even in a bed.”

  “You are exquisite.” He leaned forward to lick the delicate, fluted petals between her legs. His hands were clasped on her knees so he knew when she began trembling, with small, surprised cries.

  He licked with patient intensity, building her pleasure until she was begging. Each word soaked into his soul. He was learning his lady’s ways, what made her cry out, writhe, draw up one knee in ecstasy. He knew it to be one of the most important lessons of his lifetime.

  All the time, desire mounted ferocious demands in his own body, until he was shaking as much as she was. When he finally let go of one of her knees and pushed two thick fingers inside, she exploded with a scream.

  He stayed with her through it, lapping her gently, turning his head to kiss the inside of her knee and, when she quieted but for small gasps, her upper thigh. Then he straightened and drew her forward, just enough to meet his cock.

  He paused long enough to catch a smile from languorous eyes before he leaned over to kiss her, taking her mouth at the moment he took her body. Her arms wound around him, clinging to him, holding him to this world. Their hearts beat the same frantic rhythm as he sank into her.

  “Does it hurt?” he whispered into her mouth, ready to withdraw.

  Her eyes opened and he saw sharp joy there along with hunger. “No,” she whispered back. She wriggled and he bit out a groan at the sensation. “It feels uncomfortable but at the same time . . . won’t you please move, Jeremy? The way you did last night?”

  His mind went blank and he couldn’t think of the proper response: “My pleasure” would be absurd.

  But it was his pleasure: not just the act of it, but the way her soft mouth clung to his, and the way her hands wandered, bolder than they had been the night before. She managed to free his shirt and ran her hands over his nipples, jolting his senses.

  He loved every joyful syllable of her laughter, and he loved it when she fell silent but for small sounds that transformed to aching moans.

  A fierce male satisfaction grew inside him when she wound her legs around his hips, sobbing out demands with raw erotic fever. His cock deep inside her, he cupped her face in his hands and said, “I love you, and you’re mine.”

  His heart squeezed, meeting her shining eyes.

  “I love you too,” she whispered.

  Afterward, he carried her home, wrapped in her white cloak. “She fell,” he told Prism, who looked mildly alarmed.

  “I’m fine,” Betsy said, raising her head from his chest.

  “I’ll take her upstairs,” Jeremy told the butler. “She may have twisted her ankle. She may have to rest in bed for the day.”

  She managed to muffle her giggle against his coat.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  When Betsy called Winnie and asked for supper in her room hours later, Jeremy didn’t bother to hide behind the curtains or whatever it was that gentlemen did in melodramas.

  She was his, and that was the end of it.

  She had fallen asleep, her hair a midnight cloud tangled around her shoulders—he’d washed out the powder, but they made love rather than comb out her curls—when a gentle knock on the door brought a note.

  It was from Grégoire: I am in the library. I wish to say goodbye, as I shall return to London early in the morning.

  Jeremy frowned at the note. He hadn’t liked the look on Grégoire’s face when he talked of Bedlam. Nor that his cousin detailed the print that depicted Jeremy hiding behind a tree with a familiarity that suggested he sketched it. Grégoire’s anger seemed to hide a different emotion, a suggestive and disturbing thought.

  He pulled the covers up to Betsy’s chin and dropped a kiss on her hair.

  When he reached the library, Grégoire was seated, reading a book. Jeremy frowned. The scene was staged: but to what end? His cousin had always been a pain in the arse, but Grégoire’s instinct for drama was moving past annoying to something else.

  “Cousin,” Grégoire said, rising, putting his book to the side, and sweeping into a bow. “I have a grave matter that I wish to raise with you before I leave for London.”

  Jeremy dropped into the chair opposite him without returning his bow. “What is it?”

  “I accept that you have formed an understanding with Lady Boadicea.”

  “You could call it that.”

  Grégoire’s eyes darkened.

  “Since you sent that note to her bedchamber, you know that it is far more than an ‘understanding,’” Jeremy supplied.

  “It would be morally wrong to marry her.”

  Jeremy didn’t roll his eyes, but only because he had decided to limit insults to words. “Your reasoning?”

  “You were damaged in the war,” Grégoire said, leaning forward. His eyes were so earnest that Jeremy almost missed the calculation in their depths. “You are not the man you used to be.”

  He paused, presumably to allow Jeremy to absorb this terrible news.

  “True,” Jeremy said. He leaned back in hi
s chair, examining Grégoire as carefully as he might a colonial soldier. He’d always known that his cousin wanted to inherit the title, but now ambition seemed to have gone further than wistfulness.

  It was remarkably annoying. Betsy lay in a bed upstairs, and he could be there, running a hand around her breasts, tasting her again, making her ache until her eyes softened and she began to beg him.

  “Go on,” he ordered, irritation lacing his voice.

  Grégoire arranged his features into an expression of deep concern, but something about his eyes looked feral. Jeremy didn’t move a muscle, but he abruptly realized that the room was a battlefield, albeit without cannon fire.

  “You were in Bedlam for over a week,” Grégoire said, putting his cards on the table. “While there, you were violent and had to be restrained. I spoke to the attendants myself. They brought in three men to subdue you.”

  “That was surprisingly solicitous of you,” Jeremy drawled.

  “I do care for this family, unlike you,” Grégoire retorted. “If you marry Lady Boadicea, you will injure her the next time you fall into a fit. You will damage your wife, and quite possibly your children as well. You might kill them.”

  Jeremy clenched his teeth together. It wasn’t a solution to kill his cousin, though it felt like a necessity. “Just to clarify, you didn’t know I was in Bedlam until Parth rescued me?”

  “Certainly not. I dislike interfering in matters of the heart,” Grégoire said with a pious smirk, “but I feel that the duke ought to be informed of the particulars of your stay amongst the madmen. Any father would wish to know of it.”

  “‘Amongst the madmen,’” Jeremy echoed. “Nice phrase.” He gave Grégoire a flat look, a soldier’s warning.

  His cousin paled slightly. “I could bring the attendants to Lindow Castle to talk to His Grace,” he said shrilly. “No man would allow his daughter to marry a man with a tendency toward violent fits. You don’t remember what happened, do you?”

  Jeremy didn’t. It bothered him, the gap in his memory that stretched from the sound of exploding fireworks to waking in Parth’s house.

  “You can’t risk it,” Grégoire said, ladling compassion into his voice, as if he thought Jeremy was agonizing over the experience. “You would be destroyed, cousin, if you injured your wife or children. Yet the damage caused by war is irredeemable.” He reached out to the book he had been reading. “This doctor attributes such effects to cardiac damage. Soldiers can be suddenly stricken with visions of warriors attacking them. They do the same to their loved ones, unbeknownst to themselves.”

  Grégoire decided to demonstrate his ability to read. “They raise a wild cry as if their throats were being cut even then and there. They fight as bitterly as if they were gnawed by the fangs of panthers or of fierce lions.”

  It was a valid concern so Jeremy thought about it while Grégoire amused himself by reading aloud more depictions of soldiers in extremis.

  Jeremy had no doubt but that some men did experience illusions and respond to them violently. Yet he had been surprised by the charge that he had been violent to the point of needing a straitjacket. On the other hand, he hadn’t bothered to investigate. Likely all patients were restrained, and complaints about violence made things easier for the attendants.

  He didn’t believe it, in his case: not because he was incapable of violence, but because no one had reported dead attendants.

  If his experience at war had taught him anything, it was how to kill in hand-to-hand combat. It was a skill he wished he didn’t have, but too late. If he had truly believed he was facing enemy combatants, at least one attendant would have died and most likely three to four.

  Grégoire’s artful disclosure that attendants had actually described fighting with him suggested that the truth was different from what he’d been told. Jeremy held up his hand, and his cousin stopped reading mid-sentence.

  Then he leaned forward and smiled, showing his teeth. Grégoire actually flinched, which showed some sense. “What do you want?”

  “I want to preserve the Thurrock line!” Grégoire shrilled. “You—you are not fit. You have never been fit. A future marquess shouldn’t go to war, risking everything. You could have died when your colonel deserted—”

  He stopped.

  “How did you know that?” Jeremy asked, his voice grating. “The general buried the question of desertion. The official story is that conflicting orders left my platoon alone on the battlefield, and I told no one but my father.”

  Grégoire shrugged. “You really think that secrets remain secrets?”

  It was a good answer. Grégoire could have bribed someone, which would have been easy enough.

  The issue was irrelevant.

  “I did not fight the attendants, and I will never injure my wife,” Jeremy said, pacing the words so that Grégoire could not miss the import. “Nor my children. I don’t know what happened in Bedlam, but I don’t believe I was violent.”

  “Your confidence in yourself is touching but meaningless, since you have no memory of the episode,” Grégoire scoffed. “You are not a reliable witness and I am quite certain the duke will agree with me.”

  Jeremy was certain that the duke would consider the lack of dead bodies a clue—besides, a bribed attendant could be bribed again to tell the truth.

  “What’s more,” Grégoire said, “it wasn’t the only time, was it? You lost consciousness during that episode with Lady Diana’s mother. After you were shot, you showed little sign of knowing where you were. The grooms felt you might have attacked the entire party if a well-placed order from Lord Northbridge had not jolted you back to yourself.”

  Yet he remembered everything of that afternoon, from the shot, to the rushing noise in his ears, to his own violent—verbal—reaction.

  “They’d never heard such blasphemy,” Grégoire said. “Like a beast, they said. In front of ladies too! Your eyes were blank, and you only came to yourself when Lord Northbridge barked an order.”

  It was true. Luckily he had the strong feeling that no language would startle Betsy, if that part of the episode recurred.

  “Men have killed their wives, even strangled their babes in similar fits. They find themselves back in the heat of battle. They smell the smoke of gunpowder, when there is none. They think they are in a field strewn with dead bodies and hostile soldiers. I can show you a book if you wish.”

  “No, thanks,” Jeremy said. “I regret the pain those men experience, but my reactions are not as extreme.”

  “If you’re so certain, you should demonstrate it,” Grégoire spat.

  They’d reached the crux of the matter, the reason Grégoire asked for this meeting.

  “How would I do that?”

  “I can prove that you pose a risk to your wife and even your unborn children,” Grégoire said. He reached down to a case by his chair and pulled out a pistol. Before he was conscious of moving, Jeremy had the pistol in his right hand and Grégoire’s wrist in his left.

  “What are you doing?” his cousin cried.

  Jeremy moved back a step, dropping Grégoire’s wrist. Grégoire began shaking it as if his bones had been crushed. “I’m looking at a man who wants my title; why would I allow you to wield a weapon in my presence?”

  “I’m trying to help!” Grégoire squealed. “I don’t need your money. I never have. I speak this truth for the good of the family. You’re a menace to those you love, and all I want to do is demonstrate it.”

  “By shooting me.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Of course not!” Grégoire’s eyes bulged with indignation.

  Jeremy actually believed him. Grégoire was a monster, but a sneaky one. Probably not a murderer. At least, not face-to-face. Murder left a mark on a man that he recognized, even if the death happened on a battlefield.

  He looked down at the pistol. “What the hell are you thinking, keeping a loaded gun in the castle?”

  “This book says that men lose their senses when they hear a shot,”
Grégoire said, pointing. “If I shoot that pistol, you’ll fall into a state. I’ll prove to you that it would be immoral to marry.”

  Jeremy almost scoffed at him, but there was just enough of a question in his own mind . . . “If I became violent, I could injure you,” he pointed out.

  Kill him, more likely.

  “I’ll duck behind the screen,” Grégoire said, pointing to a tall screen just by the window, designed to hide a chamber pot. “You won’t know I’m here. Remember, you won’t be yourself.”

  “Then how will I know what happened?”

  “We could summon a witness.”

  “We’ll have a hundred. You’re talking about shooting a pistol in the middle of the night.”

  “Obviously I would shoot out the window,” Grégoire said. “You can shoot the weapon yourself, if you prefer.”

  “I do prefer,” Jeremy said. An “accidental” death might be within Grégoire’s capabilities.

  “If others hear the shot and join us, it will simply prove my point, won’t it?” Grégoire moved over to the sideboard. “I need something to steady my nerves. Whisky?”

  The man was hoping to befuddle him. Jeremy was growing more curious about this demonstration by the second. Men had committed murder for the title of squire, let alone marquess.

  Grégoire handed him a glass of whisky.

  Jeremy tossed it back with a silent apology to Lady Knowe. Grégoire obviously didn’t know that he was unaffected by whisky, whereas Grégoire had been notorious at Oxford for his inability to hold his liquor.

  He poured himself another glass and refilled Grégoire’s as well. “Shall we drink to my marriage?” And, meeting Grégoire’s stony gaze, “No?”

  “To the gods of war,” Grégoire said, drinking.

  Jeremy didn’t join him, as those particular gods were no friends of his. “You surprise me,” he observed. “Those gods surely failed you when I returned safe and sound.”

  “You may be safe, but sound?” Grégoire’s smile flickered like a serpent’s tongue. “Let’s drink to the exquisite Lady Boadicea.” The ghost of a French accent hung around Grégoire’s vowels; the whisky was already affecting him.