“I want your word that you will never defile my name again,” Devon said. Then he shook the publisher a few times like a ferret for good measure.
“Upon my humble life, I swear I won’t, my lord. And I don’t know who the source was, but if I find out, I shall tell you, or may Satan smite me with sore boils.”
Devon released him in disgust. The young apprentice who witnessed the encounter swayed against the wall with his hand pressed to his temple. “I will smite you myself if I discover that you have lied.”
“I haven’t.”
Devon leaned over the counter and stared down in cold dispassion at the floor where the publisher had collapsed prostate upon a heap of scattered news sheets. “Good. Have a pleasant day.”
The shaken man remained in his humiliating position until he was convinced the Boscastle devil had disappeared back into the inferno that had spawned him. “Well, don’t just stand there like the village idiot,” he shouted to his petrified assistant. “Go through the papers and find any reference to the damn, impudent fiend and remove them.”
Unreasonably enough, Devon would have punched out any man who pointed out that this high-handed valor indicated he might be falling in love with his unchosen wife. He would have retorted that in the past he’d done as much to defend his own sisters.
He would have vehemently denied that there was reason to read any significance into his behavior. Or that he secretly viewed his wife as a budding goddess of sexual delight, a thorn in the side of his vanishing decadence.
He would have defended any damsel whose distress happened to catch his eye. He’d done so in the past and would continue into his dotage. Boscastle men were notoriously protective of the weaker sex.
Jocelyn belonged to him, didn’t she? She was his wife. But had he taken her affection for granted? He’d practically warned her at the wedding altar that what he wanted was a marriage in name only. He’d never really given her a chance to express her wishes to him.
Well, except to let him know that she wouldn’t put up with infidelity. As if he could look at another woman. As if he could spend every night of his life in her bed and not die a perfectly contented man.
What did he want from their marriage?
Her.
He wanted her.
They did not speak of the scandal sheet again, but to Devon’s relief, Jocelyn was his warm, loving wife during the night. Perhaps it would take him forever to make her forget the hurt she had been dealt by her father. Perhaps it would take a lifetime. Late the next morning he took her to a breakfast party on the outskirts of town. He knew that several of his old friends were attending, and that he would be expected to explain how and why he had gotten married. Upon spending only a few minutes with them, however, he soon realized that their company bored him. He had lost sight of his wife, a fact that irritated him because he’d actually made an effort to keep her in his sight.
He wasn’t about to let her think he was neglecting her today, not after what had happened in the park. Not after the papers made his private life sound lurid.
He strolled across the lawn and discovered her beneath a blue silk awning with several other young ladies and a rather snobbish French emigré, the Comte de Vauban, and his beautiful if unprincipled sister Solange. He could have picked better company for Jocelyn. He’d come to appreciate her wholesomeness in comparison to his world-weary friends.
He walked slowly toward their circle. Even from here he saw in a disconcerting flash what a subtle temptress his wife was becoming. His heart constricting, he admired the artless shrug of her graceful shoulders that she gave in response to something Solange whispered, her beguiling laugh as she turned to scold the taciturn French count, an aristocrat who was said to favor young men as his lovers, and who had been open in his criticism of English gentlewomen.
By the time Devon reached their group, Monsieur le Comte was pronouncing her charmante. “Solange and I have invited you both to the château this summer,” Vauban announced as he glanced up to watch Devon approach.
Devon glanced past the silver-haired French aristocrat to his suddenly subdued wife. Did she think he would disapprove of her venturing out of her shell? “Did she accept?”
The count sniffed disapprovingly. “She said she had to ask you first. But I’m sure you won’t be able to resist her request. The Corsican has made the roads better for travel.”
“Of course, the château was ruined by Cossacks,” Solange pointed out.
The count frowned. “At least the apple trees are still standing.”
“It seems a long distance to travel for apple trees,” Jocelyn murmured, casting Devon a sidelong glance.
His heart stopped for a moment. The flirtatious gleam in her eye made him feel like pulling her to her feet and dragging her home for himself. Was she thinking about last night? Why had he brought her to this picnic, anyway? Couldn’t he have paid attention to her at home?
The count let his quizzing-glass drop. “The trees of my family orchards yield forbidden fruit. There’s nothing sweeter in my view.”
Devon stared at his wife’s face, awaiting her reaction. To his relief she merely laughed and rose. She was the sweetest thing he had ever seen, and he did not need another man to make him aware of the fact. Perhaps he had been neglectful of his duties as a husband, but he would change.
He and Jocelyn did not discuss the party on their way home. But it provoked Devon to no end. Was it possible she had always been possessed of this seductive charm but that he had not been willing to admit it?
He knew full well that she had been willing to love him on their wedding night. She’d worn her heart on her sleeve, and he’d resisted, refused to feel anything for as long as he could.
The benefits of his birthright had made him take amorous conquests for granted. But how did a man go about making a conquest of his wife? Because that was what he wanted. He meant to win her over, seduce her spirit, earn her trust.
“I saw little of you at the party today,” she remarked, handing her gloves to Thistle as soon as she and Devon entered the town house. “Did you enjoy yourself with your friends?”
He stared slowly at her receding figure as she ascended the stairs. He noticed that she hadn’t really waited for his answer. It might have been the polite inquiry one made to an acquaintance, not a husband. She was fashionably poised, aloof…alluring. “Bloody wonderful. The best.”
“Oh, good,” she said airily. “I had quite a lovely time myself. The French have such an appreciation for life.”
He followed her to the bottom of the stairs, realizing that what he had at the moment was an appreciation for his wife and little else. “The count does not like women, you know.”
She glanced back, her smile taunting and mischievous. “So I’ve heard.”
“He doesn’t. It’s true. A fact.”
“Whatever you say, Devon.”
Whatever you say, Devon?
He stood motionless as she disappeared into the hallway above.
He didn’t give a damn what she said, Vauban took male lovers. Unless…He rubbed his hand over his face, grinning wryly. He refused to think about the “unless.” If his wife was teasing him, he couldn’t take it.
That same night he escorted her to a quiet supper party hosted by an old family friend, the Duke of Dunhill. His grace had been widowed for eleven years and showed no signs of replacing his beloved country-bred spouse with either a wife or mistress. Politics and social causes, primarily antislavery campaigns and prison reform, dominated his time.
He was a surly sixty-two-year-old aristocrat who grew a little ruder and more reclusive every time Devon saw him, which fortunately was not often. Devon admired his politics, but usually avoided his company.
Dunhill would predictably offend everyone invited to his house; Devon was afraid that Jocelyn would not know how to take his abrasive manner.
“The duke,” he warned her as they awaited entrance to the house, “likes neither men nor women.”
“What does he like, then?” she wondered.
“To be disagreeable.”
“But he’s invited us to supper.”
“Only to disagree.”
“So you’ve finally gotten caught, you young scoundrel,” Dunhill said with malicious glee by way of a greeting to Devon and Jocelyn in his drafty drawing room. He was a pinchpenny who did not waste a candle nor a lump of coal. He snagged Jocelyn by the arm as the other guests filed out into the hall for supper.
“What do you know of dogs, madame?” he demanded, stooping to arrest the pug who came bounding across the room to sniff at her slippers.
The pug performed an acrobatic twist of its compact body in order to snuffle Jocelyn’s dangling fingers as she sat down to pet it. “I know that I prefer a good deal of them to certain people.”
“How did you trap young Boscastle?”
She looked up as if an arrow had pierced her heart. Mean old bastard. “Perhaps he trapped me.”
“No, he didn’t. I know the whole story. Does he treat you well?”
“He walks me regularly and doles out the occasional treat.”
He snorted. “Throws you a juicy bone now and then?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“The papers mentioned he spent an evening with that pretty procuress on Bruton Street. Audrey Watson.”
Jocelyn’s cheeks flamed, but through sheer will she did not avert her gaze. “The papers also said that you empty your chamberpot on passing carriages for entertainment.”
“It’s the truth. I hate the aristocracy. Always have. The most ill-behaved people in the world.”
She glanced down into the pug’s soulful eyes and smiled a little ruefully. “I imagine,” she said, before she could stop the impulse, “that you’re not exactly perpetuating the notion of a grand aristocracy by emptying your waste products upon the unsuspecting heads of the populace.”
“You should see the expressions on their faces when the first volley is launched.”
She allowed the dog to snuffle her hair before rising to her feet. “Silly little dog,” she murmured. “Snorting little piglet. I do believe I could fall in love with your homely face.”
The duke wrenched off his shoe and tossed it over the dog’s head. The pug darted forth to retrieve the costly leather and dropped it promptly at Jocelyn’s feet like a love offering, cocking its head appealingly. “Has nobody ever told you that it is unbecoming for a woman to be straightforward? Have you not been schooled to give no offense when you answer someone?”
She sighed. “More times than I can count.”
He stared hard at her. “I detest straightforward females.”
“Your grace, I can only apologize—”
“They remind me of my wife.”
She met his gaze. “Your wife?”
“The only person on this wretched earth brave enough to tell me the truth. I miss her, you see. I ought to have gone before her.”
“I am sorry.”
“Oh, bugger it. How can you be sorry about a woman you’ve never even met?”
Jocelyn shook her head and turned to the door to find herself standing before Devon, who had separated himself from the other supper guests to fetch her. He gave her a curious glance before he looked back at his host, now sprawled on the sofa.
“Thank you for keeping my wife company, your grace,” he said in a voice that even Jocelyn recognized as more thoughtful than his usual deep-pitched tone.
“I’ll be damned until a sennight from Sunday,” the duke remarked, “how you managed to get yourself a wife of her quality.”
“Perhaps I’m damned lucky,” Devon replied, firmly placing Jocelyn behind him.
“Guard her well,” Dunhill said with a sigh. “Your wife is a woman of some wit.”
Devon paused. “Yes.”
“You notice I said wit, and not beauty. Beauty does not endure.”
“I believe she is beautiful as well,” Devon said without any hesitation.
“Of course she is,” the duke snapped, nudging the dog away from his instep. “You are fortunate to have found her, and a blasted jinglebrains if you do not realize it. It would serve you right if she became a wanton.”
“Your grace,” Jocelyn said in dismay.
“I’ll thank you not to refer to my wife in such a way,” Devon exclaimed, not caring if he severed any old family tie or not.
“I didn’t say she was one.” The duke scowled at Devon. “Yet.”
Devon studied Jocelyn in contemplative silence in the shifting darkness of the carriage. When the lantern light captured her face, she appeared as what he had always assumed her to be, a comely country miss with a subtle appeal. But when the wheels hit a rut and the shadows danced, she became an elusive beauty whose company he could not resist and whom he did not deserve.
A sharp, unrecognizable pain gripped him. It felt something like yearning, except that this was worse, and it had been building inside him with an intensity that he found intolerable ever since…
Ever since he had met Jocelyn again at the house party.
“You made another ally tonight,” he said, to break the tension of his own thoughts. “I was afraid I’d left you alone and defenseless, and yet when I returned…”
She caught her underlip between her teeth. The unconscious gesture beguiled him, and yet her voice was completely guileless when she replied. “I cannot guess why. I only remarked on his habit of emptying his privy contents on pedestrians.”
His eyebrows rose. One moment she was a temptress, the next she was simply his uncomplicated Jocelyn. “He admitted to that?”
“With unnatural pride,” she said with a frown.
“Ah.” He rested his head back on the seat.
He wasn’t going to let himself touch her until they arrived home. No matter how much he wanted to. No matter that he had stared at her all night, that he couldn’t remember what he’d eaten for supper, or if he had eaten anything at all.
He felt as if he could live on her company alone, her voice, her smile. And the realization shook him to the core.
Undoubtedly it would have helped his cause if he could have proven these feelings to her in some tangible way over the next few days. One could hardly make a conquest in absentia. As luck would have it, however, he saw little of his wife the following week, although not of his own volition.
When he and Jocelyn returned home from supper that same night, he found a message awaiting him that one of the officers in his old regiment had died; Devon’s presence was respectfully requested to pay tribute.
The funeral was to be held in Brighton, which meant two days coming and going. As much as Devon would have welcomed Jocelyn’s company in the carriage, the officer had died a bachelor. No other women were invited to the memorial service by the sea.
The few days apart from his wife only sharpened what he felt or what feelings he had denied. It was as if when apart from her the warmth slowly vanished from his life. His old friends seemed to be mere ghosts of his past existence.
He laughed with them. He mourned the death of one who had fought with him. But mostly he had longed to fulfill this sad obligation so that he could return home to hold his wife throughout the night and, well, to merely be himself.
When he returned to London, having traveled during the night, he was disappointed that she was not home to welcome him. The entire journey back he’d pictured her waiting at the door for his return. He imagined chasing her up into their room. Instead, he walked into a quiet house and sat down alone at the breakfast table where a fresh pot of coffee and the morning paper awaited his pleasure. “Where is my wife?” he asked of the housekeeper who flitted past the table.
Mrs. Hadley hesitated. “I believe she went to the academy early this morning, my lord. At least that’s what she said.”
“Well, if that’s what she said, I suppose that’s where she is, isn’t she?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Then what—”
/> “Excuse me, my lord,” Mrs. Hadley murmured, backing away from the table. “I think that’s your toast I smell burning.”
Her eagerness to escape should have put him on the alert that something was off.
The manner in which his footman tiptoed around the table a minute later to bring him his burnt toast was the second clue.
The ominous appearance of his butler, Thistle, brother to Weed, intimidating, senior footman to the marquess, provided the third and final clue. “Why does everyone in this house appear to be so morbidly inclined this morning? Has someone else died during my absence?”
Thistle straightened his spine with such precision that it pained Devon to watch him. “Someone dies every day, my lord.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
Thistle murmured an incoherent reply and drifted from the room.
When Devon read the morning paper, he found the question answered, and not at all to his liking.
The wife of “Lord D” had been accused of conducting an adulterous affair under his very nose. Devon read the charge three times before he realized that Jocelyn was the unfaithful spouse alluded to in the article and that his was the unknowing nose. The unnamed reporter went on to write that the country bride of “Lord D” had not only captured the interest of a widowed duke but was secretly conducting afternoon liaisons with a Welsh Latin instructor at the home of her unknowing husband’s sister.
The offensive article was not printed by the obnoxious Grub Street publisher Devon had recently threatened. This unpalatable tidbit had been published by a rival gossipmonger in Whitefriars, a fact that led Devon to another troublesome conclusion.
Either he did indeed have an anonymous enemy who meant to ruin him, or, God forbid, Jocelyn was having an affair.
“She can’t be,” he thought aloud.
“Of course she isn’t,” Mrs. Hadley murmured, removing his plate of untouched toast from the table. “Vicious lies, that’s what it is.”
And even though he did not believe Jocelyn capable of betraying him, even though he had scolded her to ignore what was written in the scandal sheets, it still hurt.
The Sinful Nights of a Nobleman Page 18