My Last Duchess

by James, Eloisa

  She couldn’t think what to say to that.

  “Except I’d probably spend in your bedsheets,” he added, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable.

  Ophelia shook her head. “I don’t think—”

  “You’re not ready for this?”

  “Is that terrible? I’m sorry.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m supposed to be a merry widow, and I was feeling . . . But this is just all so new.”

  He brushed his lips over hers. “Absolutely fine. Deliciously fine. You allowed me to kiss your breasts. Bloody hell, the man who wasn’t grateful for that would be dead. Why do you look so worried?”

  “It’s like . . . It feels as if the maid has served tea but no biscuits,” she said, trying to explain.

  “I don’t want biscuits,” Hugo said. He leaned toward her again, face intent, and kissed her precisely on the nose, on each eye. “Tea, glorious tea, is every Englishman’s delight. I never touch biscuits. Wouldn’t, even if you begged me.”

  A smile curved on Ophelia’s lips despite herself. “Not even if I begged you?”

  “Never.” His expression took on the stoic heroism of a British officer facing a French battalion. “Tea is enough to sustain me forever.”

  “Huh.” Ophelia’s mind slipped away again, into a memory of her marriage—but she pushed that away. No thinking of Peter here, in bed.

  Instead she pushed herself up against the headboard. She was still quivering, aware of a disturbing throbbing sensation between her legs, sweat behind her knees, a fast heartbeat. Evidence that—

  Hugo shifted and moved to sit beside her. His legs were very hairy, his skin a darker color than hers. Obeying impulse, she leaned over and trailed her fingers over his knee and up his leg. She avoided the . . . avoided the private part of him, which was standing up in a very public fashion.

  Her caress had an effect on it, and she heard a muffled sound in Hugo’s throat.

  “Aren’t you going to put it to rest?” she asked, feeling her ears grow hot with embarrassment.

  “To rest?” He turned, his face alive with pure delight. “Darling!”

  “What?” she asked. “I’m sorry if I used the wrong terminology.”

  “I rather like the idea that I have control over my privates.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not around you.”

  Ophelia shook her head. The night was getting odder and odder, so odd that she could scarcely remember how it began. “I’m not that sort of woman.”

  “I do not think you are a loose woman, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I mean that I’m not the sort of woman a man loses his head over.” She took a shuddering breath. “In fact, we should be honest with each other.” She looked at him. “I don’t know why you’re in my bed, but it hasn’t much to do with me, has it?”

  He looked at her, every inch of his expression conveying a stubborn belief that it did, in fact, have a great deal to do with her.

  “I’m not the sort of woman who drives a man to desperation,” she said, trying again. “I’m short and fairly round.”

  His eyes shifted to her breasts, and from the corner of her eye she saw his tool jerk forward, as if it was volunteering an opinion on her roundness.

  “You seem not to mind that,” she added.

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, my point is that there are many roundish women in London.”

  “They aren’t you.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I’m getting to,” Hugo said. “I like everything I’ve found so far.” He grinned, just in case she missed the innuendo. “I see your point, though.”

  “You do?” The news wasn’t entirely welcome.

  “We need to get to know each other better. May I spend the day with you?”

  “Here? Why would you stay here?”

  “To get to know you better,” he said promptly. His smile had a fiendish kind of pleasure to it, a ridiculously boyish stubbornness for a grown man.

  “You’re a duke,” she said. “You have better things to do.”

  He paused just long enough to give a semblance of having thought it over. “Can’t think of anything.”

  “What do you mean by ‘getting to know you’?” she asked. Suspicions crowded into her head. After all, she was sitting in bed with him.

  “Go riding together?”

  “In the snow?”

  “I’m trying to remember how people become friends,” he said. “It’s been years since I’ve had much to do with society, and all I remember of Marie, my first wife, was dancing, flirting, and kissing her in dark corridors.”

  She elbowed him. “Remember the rule?”

  “No spouses in bed,” he said obediently. “I won’t tell you how Yvette and I got to know each other.”

  His voice cooled, just enough so that she noticed. She hadn’t known his second duchess, but she had heard gossip, after Yvette had fled England. The interesting thing was that Hugo had apparently thought his wife had been a virgin when they married.

  Fairness intervened. Rumors were no more than rumors.

  “We often read aloud to each other,” she said, avoiding Peter’s name.

  “Ah.”

  “Are you a reader?”

  “I am reading a book of reflections,” he said. “Translated from the French.”

  “Reflections on what?”

  “Ridicule.”

  She glanced at him and miraculously managed not to roll her eyes. “You’re jesting.”

  “Unfortunately not,” Hugo said amiably. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested.”

  A flare of temper went up Ophelia’s spine. She hated that men made assumptions about what would and wouldn’t interest a woman.

  She glanced at him; he had picked up her left hand and appeared to be examining her fingers. She drew her hand away. “Why wouldn’t I be interested?”

  She kept her tone sweet, but Hugo’s eyes shot to hers. Perhaps being married twice had taught him something about women.

  “The full title is something like this: Reflections upon Ridicule, or What It Is That Makes a Man Ridiculous, and the Means to Avoid It.”

  “Are you learning from the author’s reflections?” She studiously kept her tone from implying that it was too late for whatever lessons he garnered.

  Hugo sighed. “No, it’s hopelessly foolish. I lost a bet and my twin sister demanded I read it, by way of punishment.”

  “You’re so lucky to have a sister.” Ophelia was aware there was a thread of wistfulness in her voice.

  “Are you an only child?”

  She nodded. “Much beloved and cosseted, but the only one.”

  “My twin sister, Louisa, Lady Knowe, does not care for cities, so she resides in the country.” He paused. “Are you greatly enamored of London?”

  “I am not,” Ophelia replied. “Peter loved the Season, though. In particular, he loved to dance.”

  Hugo winced. “I’m not a very good dancer. My sister says that I resemble a tree forced to bend in a high wind.”

  “Do you creak?” Ophelia asked, laughing.

  “I clomp around the ballroom, looking faintly horrified.” Hugo propped himself up on his elbow. “Do you float about like thistledown?”

  Ophelia moved her shoulders uncomfortably. “I’m a good dancer.” Then she added, in a rush, “I think that’s why Peter asked for my hand in marriage. Besides the fact that our parents approved, I mean.”

  Hugo raised an eyebrow. “An odd qualifier.” His eyes drifted down her body. “There are so many reasons that a man would want to marry you, Phee. Do you mind if I call you that?”

  “I suppose not. How did you learn it?”

  “Your cousin.”

  “Maddie? Oh, is that how you knew to climb into my carriage?” Ophelia would have frowned at the idea her cousin shared her name and sent the duke out of the ballroom to find her . . . except a small clear voice in the back of her head informed her that M
addie had done her a great favor.

  “No,” Hugo said. “Maddie refused to tell me your last name; she merely referred to you as Phee and informed me that you were not a governess, and I should not pursue you. I deduced that the beautiful, mysterious lady I was determined to meet was called Phoebe.”

  “Ophelia didn’t occur to you?”

  “A somewhat lachrymose name,” Hugo pointed out. “Perhaps I shall call you Phoebe . . . such a cheerful name.”

  “I like Ophelia,” she said.

  She felt a flood of relief that she had been right to turn down the duke’s offer of marriage. He was such a dukelike man, renaming her because he didn’t like the literary connotations of her name. “I think it’s unlikely that I would take my own life, the way Shakespeare’s Ophelia did, based on my name. If my parents had named me after Lady Macbeth, would you expect me to turn to murder?”

  “What was Lady Macbeth’s name?”

  She frowned. “I don’t think anyone knows.”

  “Names are important,” Hugo said, toying with a lock of her hair. “I’d bet you anything that her name wasn’t Beth.”

  “Beth? Why not Beth?”

  “Because Beth is a timid name.”

  Ophelia shook her head. “That’s cracked.”

  “Names are important,” Hugo insisted again. “I named all my children after warriors.”

  “Warriors? All eight of them?”

  Hugo’s mouth twisted. “Yes, in fact. My first three are Horatius, Roland—whom we call North—and Alaric, now at school, along with Parth, who was first my ward and became my son when his parents died. He too is named after a warrior, though I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Did the naming work?”

  “In a manner of speaking. They’re ungodly naughty. Satanic imps. Especially, I have to say, Parth. He eggs on the others to worse misdeeds. Besides the older boys, Yvette and I had Leonidas, Boadicea, Alexander, and Joan.”

  “You named your daughter Boadicea?” Ophelia shook her head. “Why did your wife allow it? Do you know how often people have commented on my unfortunate name?”

  “Boadicea was a great warrior,” Hugo protested.

  “Insanity,” Ophelia muttered. Definitely she was right not to marry him, if only on the basis of crimes of nomenclature.

  “I have to admit that Boadicea has threatened to eviscerate anyone who calls her by her given name, so we call her Betsy.”

  “Are your second four as naughty as the first round?” Ophelia asked.

  “Very naughty, especially Joan.” His brows drew together. “She’s the reason I came to London to find a wife, actually.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Two years old. She likes nothing better than to throw crockery to the ground and listen to it shatter.”

  “Exactly the same age as my Viola!” Ophelia beamed at him. “Viola is not naughty in the least, though.”

  “Viola is not a warrior’s name,” the duke murmured. He leaned over and brushed a kiss on her lips.

  Oddly enough, their conversation felt more intimate than their kisses, though Ophelia didn’t shape that thought until she came back to herself enough to realize that Hugo was now lying partially on top of her. He’d returned to her breasts and was lavishing them with attention.

  “You—you look as if you might never stop,” she whispered.

  “I could die here at your breasts, and I’d be happy,” he said, raising his head.

  “That’s a very odd thing to say. A very odd thing to think.”

  “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t want to die anywhere if Viola wasn’t near me, if I couldn’t say goodbye to her.”

  Hugo dropped a last affectionate kiss on the curve of Ophelia’s breast and moved to sit beside her again. “You are a marvelous mother.”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Why you followed me, because you want a mother for your children, for Joan in particular.”

  “No.”

  She gave him a faint smile. “All evidence, including your own statements, is against you. But I don’t want to mother anyone other than Viola. I am not the wife for you.”

  The duke nodded, and something in Ophelia eased. He accepted her decision.

  “I might have an affaire with you,” she said. “But only if you understand that there is but one outcome, when we separate and return to our lives. Since you need to find a mother—and I agree that a two-year-old girl is a good reason—we should part now. Or at least, in the morning.”

  “I gather that the strongest relationship you’ve had in your life is with Viola?”

  Ophelia pushed herself up against the headboard. “Viola means more to me than anything or anyone on earth. In general, I believe a mother’s love is commonly referred to as the strongest attachment a person can feel.”

  He was silent a moment. “Not having been a mother, I cannot dispute your feeling. My strongest bond has been with Marie. She was mine, and I was hers.”

  “That’s a lovely sentiment.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t a sentiment. It was a rock-hard fact that was the most important thing in the world to me while she lived. In some ways, it still is.”

  Another good reason not to become his duchess. Ophelia barely stopped herself from patting his hand. “I’m happy that you had such a passionate bond with your wife, your first wife.”

  “I was very lucky. I walked into a room and saw Marie; I instantly knew that I would love her for the rest of my life.”

  Ophelia leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Does anyone know what a romantic spirit lurks behind the Duke of Lindow’s aristocratic countenance?”

  “I don’t give a damn if they do.” He said it simply, without shame.

  Many men would have been mortified to admit to feeling so strongly. Certainly Peter would have been startled and annoyed had he been struck by such a ferocious emotion.

  “I felt exactly that way when I saw Viola,” Ophelia said, pulling up her knees and wrapping her arms around them. “She was wrinkled and her head had the oddest shape. I thought she might be deformed for life. And yet I loved her so much that my heart didn’t seem to have enough space for the emotion.”

  “When you have another child, your heart will magically find room. Horatius is a pompous boy, and yet I cannot stop myself from adoring him. Alaric is wild and curious; North is a philosopher at heart and a devil-may-care horseman; Parth is determined to be the richest man in England. The boys tease him for his mercenary goal, but he doesn’t give a damn.”

  “And your other children?”

  “I don’t know them as well yet,” Hugo said. “We fathers aren’t encouraged to spend time with very young children. Marie spent a great deal of time in the nursery, so I would go there to find her.” He frowned. “I know the boys much better than Yvette’s children, because she didn’t believe in nursery visits. She thought it disrupted children’s routine and might confuse them.”

  “A man doesn’t need permission from his wife to visit his own children,” Ophelia said, her tone rather tart.

  Hugo leaned against the headboard. “I do visit these days, but briefly, I’m afraid. I’m often very busy. I’m not offering that by way of excuse, but virtually every day brings some complication.”

  “What sort of things do you do?” Ophelia asked. “Peter—” She caught herself. “My estate is small, of course. It takes me one morning a week, at most.”

  “I am the judge for my county court, which encompasses three villages. Two hundred tenants work in and around the castle, and then I own a townhouse in London, and an estate in Scotland. And a few other concerns.”

  Ophelia nodded. “It does sound like a great deal of work.”

  “Not enough to make up for the fact that I don’t know my four younger children as well as I should.”

  “That is also true.” Ophelia kept her tone even, because Peter hated nothing more than disapproval from her. A spouse, he always said, was the bulwark against the
world’s unkindnesses and should never be critical.

  Hugo just nodded. “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Spend part of every day with them. Not just a visit to the nursery. Do things together.”

  “They are very small,” Hugo objected. “Joan cries every time she sees me.”

  “That must make you feel terrible.”

  “I would like to say yes,” he said. “I want you to think—well, to admire me. But to be honest, I always thought that at some point she would stop crying. Perhaps by the time she was able to carry on a conversation. As I told you, Joan’s nanny reports that she doesn’t speak yet.”

  “Joan has her own nanny?”

  He nodded. “The two younger children have nannies, Mrs. Banks and Mrs. Winkle. There’s a governess, Miss Trelawny, for the older children. And some nursemaids, Myrtle, Flora, and Delia.”

  “Viola doesn’t have a nanny,” Ophelia confessed. She felt even guiltier upon hearing about all the people helping the duke’s children become civilized adults. “I only have a nursemaid. Of course, I ought to acquire a proper nanny.”

  “Not if you don’t want to,” Hugo said.

  “I am a lady, and Viola must be a lady too. What if she thinks that one’s mother is no more than a playmate?” She peeked at Hugo from under her lashes. “Sometimes we play together.”

  He blinked, as if he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I cut out houses from foolscap. People too. Sometimes horses, though I’m rubbish at cutting around their legs.”

  “She plays with paper?”

  “She does crumple them,” Ophelia said with a wry smile. “But not before I tell her a story about the people who live in the house.”

  “I cannot tell stories,” Hugo said. His tone was final.

  Ophelia sighed. Peter had been given to statements like that as well. Perhaps it was a male failing.

  “I could try it,” Hugo said, surprising her.

  “You wouldn’t be embarrassed?”

  Astonishment crossed his eyes but he kept his answer simple. “No.”

  Of course he wouldn’t be. Dukes were probably never embarrassed. Why should they be? Ophelia fidgeted, thinking of the way her skin crawled with embarrassment when she thought about a nanny entering her nursery and seeing the way she played with Viola.