With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “Hungan John Kallaloo cook You Grace the best. No mon, no womon, cook better. You see.” He swelled his chest out a bit, which was something to see, considering its size to begin with.

  She thought him perfect for Belmore House. He had as much pride and self-assurance as her husband.

  “I’d like to hire you. Would you like to cook for Belmore House?”

  Polly let out a wee squeak of protest, but nothing changed on Henson’s face, ever the loyal and imperturbable servant.

  “You’ll have to excuse my maid,” Joy said. She leaned closer and whispered behind one gloved hand,

  “She thinks you look like a pirate.”

  He pinned poor wee Polly with his black-eyed stare and slowly bent his head closer and closer to the maid, who was frozen in fear. He closed in until he was but a few feet from her horrified face. “Boo!”

  Polly screeched, her panicked fingers digging into the arms of both Henson and her mistress.

  Hungan John’s laughter, as deep and thundering as the fabled Scottish battle drums, echoed in the hall— a wonderful sound. Still grinning, he looked right at Polly, who was still clutching Joy’s arm, then took a circlet of white chicken feathers from his thick belt. He hung it around Polly’s neck. “Fetish necklace. Keep away the pirates, little girl.” Then he patted Polly’s head. He turned his gray gaze back to Joy, and the grin faded from his dark face. Very quietly, he said, “Magic.”

  He knew. Joy’s breath caught in her throat. Somehow, some way, this man knew what she was. She returned his look.

  He smiled then. “Good magic, You Grace.”

  They stood there exchanging knowing looks, judging and liking what was there.

  “Mr. Kallaloo will be perfect,” she said to Henson.

  “There’s a wagon outside behind Her Grace’s conveyance,” Henson told the new cook. “Gather your things and load them into the wagon. We’ll leave shortly.”

  Hungan John paused. “You Grace need more servants?”

  Joy nodded.

  “You need a butler?”

  “Why, yes we do. Do you know someone?”

  “Old mon called Forbes. He was a butler for fifty year. Master die. Old mon tossed out.”

  “There now, Henson. Hungan John has found our butler for us.”

  Henson straightened his wig and eyed the platform. “They all appear ready to slice our throats, Your Grace. Which one is Forbes?”

  Hungan John pointed behind him.

  Standing near a dingy curtain was a small white-haired man with bright red cheeks and thin lips. His blue satin coat was tattered and dusty, and his breeches looked to be as ancient as he was. His dingy white silk stockings were ripped and snagged, and one sagged around his ankles like elephant skin. He wore unmatched shoes—one black satin with a tarnished buckle, the other brown kid with a slightly higher heel—and they appeared to be on the wrong feet. His wire-rimmed spectacles were as thick as thumbs and magnified his pale blue eyes.

  The poor wee man had no home. It didn’t matter to Joy that he looked as old as the Tower of London. He seemed to need them even more than they needed a butler. Doing her best imitation of a duchess, Joy threw back her shoulders, raised her chin, and looked at the agent. In a voice she hoped was as commanding as Alec’s she said, “We’ll take Forbes, too.”

  Alec strode up the front steps of Belmore House, only to find the door locked. He pounded on the door. Nothing. He pounded again. Nothing. His face a mask of aggravation, he turned back around, but his carriage had just disappeared around the corner of the house.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered, pacing back and forth on the steps. “Blasted weather. No servants, no footmen, no butler. Forced to eat cabbage for supper last night—cabbage!” He shivered at the memory of the vile stuff. He stepped back and looked upward, searching for some sign of life inside. Nothing.

  Frost edged the windows, and the London air was freezing cold and damp and seeped right through even the many capes of his greatcoat.

  “Damn, it’s cold.” He knocked again. “Where the hell is everyone?” He slammed his fist against the door.

  The bolts clicked and the door cracked open. One ancient, wrinkled, and suspicious blue eye peered out at him from behind thick spectacles. “Who be ye?” came a shout as loud as a battle cry.

  “I am—”

  “Eh?”

  “I said I am—”

  “Speak up, there!” the old man shouted. “Can’t hear ye when ye mutter!”

  “I said,” Alec shouted back, “I am His Grace—”

  “What’s wrong with yer face?”

  “Not my face, you idiot! His Grace!”

  “He’s not here!”

  The door slammed shut.

  The Belmore crest on the door stared back at Alec. He waited, counting, for the door to reopen.

  Nothing. He pounded on the door again. It opened a couple of inches.

  “I . . . am . . . the Duke . . . of Belmore, and—”

  “The duke don’t need yer ham!”

  The door slammed shut.

  Alec stared at the door, then took great pleasure in making a tight fist and clouting it. After the fifth bang the lock clicked. The door cracked again.

  “Be gone with ye or ye’ll have to face the duke himself!”

  “I am the bloody duke!” Alec bellowed, his fists so tightly knotted his whole body shook.

  A gasp sounded from behind him, and he spun around to see the horrified faces of his neighbors, Lord and Lady Hamersley, staring up at him. Taking a deep breath, he collected his wits and tipped his hat.

  “Good evening, Lady Jane. Hamersley.”

  They nodded, whispered something to each other, and hurried toward their home across the square as if running from a raving lunatic.

  Seething, Alec turned around and took a step toward the entrance.

  The door slammed closed again.

  He saw nothing but a red haze. He spun around and strode down the stairs and along the carriage path toward the back of the house. His boots crunched in the snow with every sharp, angry step. He jerked the kitchen door open and ground to a halt.

  Blackbeard was in his kitchen. Blackbeard.

  He stepped back outside, took two deep breaths, and tried again.

  “Put the lime in the coconut.” The man’s long black braid swung from side to side as he sang in a voice as deep as if it came from a cannon.

  Alec’s stunned gaze moved from the man’s shiny black head, past the earring—he needed a brandy—to the hammy black hands poised over bowls. First he squeezed the lime, then a lemon.

  Speechless, Alec moved through the wide space that separated the kitchen from the larder and ascended the stairs toward the person responsible—his wife, the bloody witch.

  “Oh, Alec!” Joy spun around in the foyer when she spotted her husband. Relief in her voice, she ran to him, her hands patting his chest and arms. “Are you injured? Forbes said—”

  “Forbes?”

  “The new butler. He said someone came to the door looking for idiots, and then he said you were bloody.” She searched for wounds. “Where are you hurt?”

  He removed her hands from his chest and threw off his greatcoat. “Follow me,” he ordered in a voice as icy as the London air and strode into the drawing room. “You went to the hiring fair.”

  She followed him inside. “Yes, but—”

  He slammed the doors and spun around. “I told you you could not go.”

  “But Carstairs is ill and—”

  “I don’t care if he’s dead! And he might be when I get through with him.”

  “He has the measles,” she whispered and watched him pace.

  “You disobeyed me.”

  “But we needed servants, and you were gone, so I thought as the Duchess of Belmore I should hire them.”

  “Do not disobey me again.”

  “I’m sorry.” She searched, but the only blood she could see was the blood red color of his angry face.


  “Are you all right?”

  “No! I’m bloody mad, or going mad!”

  “I thought something terrible had happened,” she said.

  He spun around, his face cold with rage. “Something terrible did happen. I married you.”

  She stood frozen; her hand flew to her mouth. His words were so cruel they robbed her of breath. She stared into his face, then escaped his coldness by closing her eyes. When she opened them, the room was nothing more than a mist of tears, the dark blurry shape of her husband the only thing visible.

  She found her breath, but it labored in her chest where her heart had died a sudden death, where her shame had begun. She turned, pulled open the doors, and ran out of the room and up the stairs, the sound of her small feet and one broken sob echoing in the cold marble hall as, outside, fresh snowflakes fell on the windows of Belmore House.

  Brandy glass clutched in his hand, Alec opened the door to his bedchamber just as the clock struck one. He checked his pocket watch, a habit he’d acquired since his marriage. It was indeed one in the morning. He raised the glass to his lips, but stopped in mid-motion.

  A small table sat in the sitting room near the smoldering remains of the fire, a chair on either side. He crossed over to it, doing his best to ignore the apprehensive tightening of his stomach. He looked down at the table.

  It was set with the Belmore crystal, china, and silver— two places little more than three feet apart. Two small silver candleholders stood on either side of a bud vase filled with pink roses.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. As if drawn by a chain, he faced the door to the adjoining room. He continued to stand there, looking at the door, his eyes hard and unseeing, his mind a jumble of thoughts and something else . . . some emotion. Alec didn’t like this emotion. One could temper anger, hide grief and fear and jealousy. He’d been trained to do so from a young age.

  But guilt was too hard to control.

  All evening and into the night he had tried to summon up some anger. Anger would have been justifiable, considering what he had gone through recently. But all he saw was the image of his wife’s stricken face the moment those cutting words were out of his mouth. He had made cutting remarks before and never felt a moment of remorse. But those he cut had deserved it.

  Something deep inside him knew that Scottish didn’t. Whatever she had done, feeble-brained as it might have been, there was no malice, no mean intent in her actions. Most everything she did was done with the innocence of good intentions.

  But all the good intentions in the world wouldn’t change the fact that she was a witch and had the power to ruin both of them and the Belmore name as well.

  He sat heavily in a nearby chair and stared unseeing at that damnable table.

  Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. The word became a litany in his mind with each tick of the clock. His harsh words had crushed her, hurt her so cruelly that he cursed the tongue that had spat them. His anger had been real, but he wasn’t sure whether he was angry about the servants she had foolishly hired or angry because she had gone out and, worse yet, gone out without him to keep a watchful eye on her.

  His jaw tightened as he faced another sharp and foreign pang of guilt. Worse than the odious words he had said was the knowledge of what her reaction would be if she knew he was hiding her.

  The Duke of Belmore was hiding his wife.

  What an ironic twist of fate. He had hired the best solicitors in England to find him a bride, and then he’d married in haste after Juliet damaged his pride. He ran an impatient hand over his brow. And now the Duke of Belmore was hiding his duchess.

  How noble.

  His anger came back, but it was self-anger. Then, as if drawn by some obscure need to do so, his gaze drifted back to the small supper table, then to the connecting door.

  He set his drink down, rose, and walked toward the door, even got so far as to grasp the handle, but then he stopped.

  What would he say to her? I’m sorry I said those things? I’m sorry you’re a witch? I’m sorry I married you? I’m sorry I’m hiding you? I’m sorry I’m an ass?

  An apology was not something that readily formed on the Duke of Belmore’s lips, especially when he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for.

  He turned away, saw the table, and turned away from it, too. He crossed to the leather chair and sat down, his hands clasped behind his head, his boots crossed at the ankles atop the matching leather ottoman, and his hard eyes glaring up at the luxuriously painted scene on the gilt-molded dome ceiling.

  Wealth provided many things: painted ceilings, expensive town homes, imported silk dresses. Wealth provided sparkling jewels that would buy forgiveness, but somehow a gift of jewelry seemed as cold as his words. Money, clothes, and expensive trinkets might appease other women, but not Scottish.

  He glanced at the table, thinking of his wife, of the stunned and shy look on her face when she sat atop his chest in a foggy English forest. He remembered her frozen and half-dead and the aching frustration he’d felt as he looked down and saw the deadly shroud of ice on that odd yet beautiful face—the same face that could emit the sensual glow of a woman he had satisfied, the only face in which he ever saw innocent love.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair. It was there again—the guilt. The air went stale with it.

  He stood up, his gaze locking on the brandy glass he’d left on the table. He moved toward it and as he did so, his damned traitorous mind flashed with the image of a pair of misty green eyes, eyes that held the innocence of the world. He looked at his brandy glass and reached for it, but his hand moved past it, choosing instead to finger the softness of a pink rose.

  Joy awoke to the darkness of her bedchamber, her eyes burning and sticky from spent tears. Her throat was dry from the sobs that had robbed her mouth of moisture. His words echoed in her mind and heart. Sickness threatened, a thick wave of it rising from her belly like Satan from hell. Her breath caught in her throat.

  She had failed. The blinding hope that drove her on in the best and worst of times had shattered like a broken mirror under the cruelty of her husband’s words.

  “Something terrible did happen,” he had said. “I married you.”

  No muddled spell, no dwindling magic, no failed witchcraft, could crush the soul with more potency than rejection by the one you love. That was a lesson hard and painfully learned this evening. No magic could make the hurt go away.

  So this was the dark side of love. This was the ache that could consume like a gargantuan beast, devouring every hope, every dream, every star-wish a girl could have. She turned over, staring sightlessly at the canopy above her lonely bed. Her eyes flooded, and she just let the tears flow in rivers of the pain of broken dreams and the hurt of hope gone dead, damp streaks that symbolized the fact that all of her wishes on all the twinkling stars in the universe would not make love grow where there was none.

  The fresh snow that had fallen on the cobbled streets and icy lanes of Town stopped by midmorning, about an hour before Polly burst into Joy’s bedchamber, saying she needed to get her mistress dressed and ready, for the duke himself had ordered it.

  Eyes still burning from the sharp sting that bespoke a night of tears, Joy sat up in the plump bed and tried to summon up the energy to rise. She could hear Polly rummaging through the adjoining dressing room, hear the creak of trunks opening, the thud of them closing, the muttering of her maid as she searched for whatever it was she sought.

  Donning a lovely gown would not lighten her mood. She wondered if Polly had packed any sackcloth and ashes. Sometime in the middle of the night, when awakened for the fifth time, she had thought about what her dismal future held. As surely as he who buys land gets stones, she knew Alec would send her away.

  So an hour later, dressed in a heavy cream pelisse and a fur hat and muff, she descended the stairs with all the anticipation of the condemned. The heels of her leather half boots tapped, dirge like, to the front doors where Henson and Forbes stood waiting.<
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  “Good morning, Your Grace.” Henson made a bow.

  Forbes rammed a bony elbow into him, then shouted, “There’s nothing wrong with her face.” He made his bow, still scowling at Henson.

  “Good morning, Henson, Forbes. Where is His Grace?”

  “What’s a disgrace?” Forbes adjusted his spectacles and scowled down at his livery, straightening his gold waistcoat, which was on backwards, and tugged at the waistband of his knee-length velvet pants.

  “These clothes fit me fine.” He glowered at the footman. “Ye said so yerself, Benson.”

  “He’s awaiting you outside, Your Grace.”

  Joy moved toward the front door.

  Henson cleared his throat. “Out the back, I believe.” Henson crossed over to a narrow doorway near the stairs.

  “What’s on my back?” Forbes, who had followed Henson, craned his white head over an aged shoulder, trying to see the back of his coat.

  Henson opened the door, effectively pushing Forbes back into a corner where he could yank at his clothes with less noise. “If you’ll follow me, Your Grace.”

  Still uneasy, Joy followed Henson down the stairs into the almost stifling warmth of the kitchen. Hungan John moved around the kitchen with practiced ease for someone whose head almost reached the ceiling beams.

  “Chop those apples, little girl,” he said, grinning at a small maid. “Make Them Graces the best apple chutney this night.” Then he began to sing a lively song about apples in the Garden of Eden.

  The maid smiled and began chopping to the beat. Hungan John’s long black braid swung from side to side as he crossed to where a jack slowly turned a leg of lamb on the spit.

  Joy followed Henson down the last step. A flash of white sped past her. An instant later Beezle hung by his teeth from Hungan John’s braid. “Beezle!”

  Henson grabbed his wig.

  Joy rushed over to the cook, who spun around, sending both his braid and the weasel clinging to it in a free-swinging circle. Joy caught Beezle just as the braid swept past her.

  Lying on his back in her arms, Beezle glared up at her through narrowed brown eyes and hissed. “You were locked in my room. How’d you get loose?” His brown eyes turned innocent, but were soon eyeing the cook’s braid again. His wee pink tongue slipped out and licked his snout.