Marrying a duke would kill that joy. Even if that duke was him.
“You don’t refuse to marry her because she is no one, from nowhere.” Waters sounded bemused. “You refuse to marry her to take care of her.”
“A coronet is a heavy burden,” Harry replied, not knowing that else to say.
“It would kill her,” Waters said, “to live among the English for the rest of her life.” He said it, and it cut Harry to the quick, but it seemed to cut Waters more.
The man sat down heavily then, as if he had received a hard blow. Harry was not sure what to do for him, for he had only one friend, and that friend he had had from childhood. He was not sure how men went about offering each other comfort. So he crossed to his father’s decanters, which Billings still kept filled, and poured the man a whisky, neat.
Waters downed it in one swallow, then winced.
“Where in God’s glorious name do you find this swill?”
Harry blinked, for, as he did not drink spirits, he had no idea. “Scotland,” he said at last.
Waters grimaced. “We’ll be sending you three barrels of decent Islay whisky from Glenderrin.”
Harry did not know what Islay was, but he knew that Glenderrin was the Waterses’ seat, somewhere North, in the back of beyond. “Thank you.”
Waters nodded and stood, setting the cut crystal glass down where the housemaids might find it later.
“I thank you for your honesty, belated though it is.”
Waters was about to leave the room, but Harry stepped in front of him. “I ask that you don’t tell her who I am. I’ll tell her myself.”
Waters stared him down, his dark-brown eyes boring into his skull as if to unearth his true thoughts and motives. Harry stood his ground and thought of how refreshing it was to find a man who was not afraid to look him in the eye and treat him like a man and an equal.
He had not realized how the fawning of others burdened him until he stood with another who simply wouldn’t do it. Harry would have said it was impossible to find people who didn’t care for rank, but his last days with the Waterses proved that he was wrong.
“My wife and I will hold our peace,” Alex said, “but only until after the fancy dance your mother is throwing for Mary.”
His mother was giving the ball so that Harry might look over the possible candidates for his duchess without him having to leave the comforts of Northumberland, but he did not belabor the point. He simply nodded, since he was getting what he wanted. With a houseful of London ton, there was no way he could continue this charade longer than that.
“Thank you,” Harry said.
Waters did not leave then, as Harry expected him to, but stared him down again. “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you, duke or no.”
Harry felt the cold whisper of his death on the back of his neck and smiled. If circumstances were different, if the Waterses were people he might know for the rest of his life and not simply strange wayfarers passing through his mother’s house, he would have been pleased to call this man friend.
“Fair enough.”
Waters smiled at him then, but it was a tired smile, full of defeat. Harry watched the man walk away and was left alone, as he always was, with only his own thoughts for company.
Ten
That evening, Mary Elizabeth was sorry she had worn the insipid white-and-pink gown Mrs. Prudence had forced her to buy in London, for Harry made an appearance at dinner. He was looking morose, which was not like him, and Mary wondered if he hid himself in the gardens and in the stables because he simply didn’t like company.
Food for thought.
She did little thinking that night, for the dinner laid out on the duchess’s table was as grand as any she’d eaten, with fine sides of beef, carrots braised in butter, and wine to go with each course. With Robbie mooning over Mrs. Pru and with Alex glowering at her all the way from the other end of the table, Mary Elizabeth got to sample each wine as the footman poured it for her.
It seemed that not only did she like her whisky, but she also liked some of the racy French stuff as well. Wonders might never cease.
But no matter how much good food she ate or how she enjoyed talking with the duchess—whose given name was Amelia—Harry still scowled beside her, his food almost untouched. She elbowed him at one point and teased him openly, telling him to eat his greens, and he did not even crack a smile, as if he would soon be going to his own funeral.
The gentlemen did not stay back at table as they often did in English houses, but trooped into the parlor with the ladies for tea and cake. Mary Elizabeth found herself hoping that there might be chocolate cream in that cake when she stopped in the doorway to the ducal sitting room, Harry’s hand on her arm.
“Might I speak with you?” he asked.
Mary Elizabeth frowned to hear him sound as strange as he looked, but before she could answer, Catherine said. “Yes, why don’t we three take a turn around the picture gallery upstairs?”
“But there’s cake,” Mary answered.
Harry smiled then and she saw a little of himself behind whatever shadow was in his eyes. “I give you my word of honor that, after we talk, you can have all the cake you want.”
“Chocolate cream?” Mary Elizabeth asked.
His lips twitched as if he was suppressing a bit of laughter. “Yes.”
“All right, then,” she said, leading the way up the stairs. “But I only want one piece.”
Harry, who was suddenly acting the gentleman and leading Catherine on his arm behind her said, “Fair enough.”
Mary Elizabeth did not know why Harry suddenly acted as if squiring her off to talk was such a necessity. They talked all the time and might easily have talked tomorrow during their ride, when she intended to take Sampson out again. But since she had decided that cake could wait, she entered the picture gallery ahead of Harry and Catherine, surveying Cumberland and the new holes she and Catherine had put in him earlier that day with a sense of satisfied accomplishment. The holes were plentiful especially in the most deadly spots on his person. She would need Alex or Robbie to get her a new board before the week was out, so that she might christen Cumberland II.
She was lost in thought over this, and over whether or not she had remembered to sharpen her blades before putting them away that day, when she noticed Harry was standing close beside her. He was not looking at Cumberland, however, as she was. He was looking at her.
“Hello, then,” she said, smiling at him. She took in the lovely scent of sandalwood on his skin, grateful that the mystery of where a stable boy would acquire such a perfume had been solved.
Harry did not say anything, but continued to stare at her so long that she wondered if she had a bit of carrot on the edge of her lip. She ran her tongue over it, but found nothing. Harry’s gaze became more pronounced as his eyes fastened on her lower lip, as if he might like to bite her. Still, he said nothing.
“Well,” she said, making another attempt at communication. “Here we are in the picture gallery. Did you wish to show me some ancestor or other?”
“No,” he answered. His eyes seemed especially blue that night, perhaps because of the sapphire cravat pin he wore, which she only just now noticed. Mary Elizabeth had to admit that he looked handsome in his dinner dress, but she found that she preferred the Harry she had met so often in the stables—a more relaxed, less remote Harry.
She frowned and began to ask him what the matter was when she heard a shuffling from down the way. Catherine cleared her throat delicately and said, “I will step down the gallery to view the Elizabethan portraits.”
Harry nodded to her, and Catherine moved down the long room until she was about fifteen feet away from them, almost hidden in shadow.
Why Catherine felt the need to make such an announcement, Mary Elizabeth did not know. She wondered if her friend made Harry nervous for some stran
ge reason, but before she could ask him, he finally spoke of his own accord.
“I have brought you here to tell you that I cannot kiss you again.” Harry said this with deadly seriousness, as if the fate of worlds rested on his words.
Mary Elizabeth knew by now that beneath his often-gruff exterior, Harry was a man with a soft heart. So she did not laugh at him as she wanted to. Indeed, when her lips twitched, she did not even let them rise into a smile. He was serious, as he so often was, but he was also in pain. He was her friend, and she would help him. But first, she would set him straight.
“Harry, if I want to kiss you, I will kiss you. So do not trouble yourself about that.”
He stood even more upright than he had before, his back like an iron fire poker. “I will not allow it.”
A light of challenge lit her heart. She tried to fight it down and failed. “Oh, won’t you? What else won’t you allow?”
Before he could answer her with some other bit of English nonsense, Mary pressed herself against him, raising herself on her toes, and laid her lips against his.
She was not skilled at kissing by any means, but he had taught her a little since they had first tried canoodling the night before. Though he stood rigid against her, his arms not even coming up to wrap around her, she ignored his lack of enthusiasm and simply enjoyed herself.
His lips were soft beneath hers, softer than any man’s had a right to be. His chest was as hard as granite beneath her fingertips, even more so than usual because he was resisting her. She trailed her lips along his jaw and up toward his ear when she finally began to feel a bit of movement beneath her questing hands. Through the layers of his clothes and through her cotton gloves, she could feel the escalated beating of his heart.
She slipped her tongue along the seam of his lips then, and his mouth opened over hers and his arms came around her, clamping her to him like a vise. She felt a moment of triumph that he had been so easily conquered, but then his tongue slipped over hers, and she forgot everything else.
The lovely warm sense of well-being that came from kissing Harry crept over her a little at a time, until she was swimming in it, as in a deep, uncharted sea. When he pulled back, she sighed against him and laid her head over his heart. It was still thundering, but she felt as peaceful as a lamb on Easter morning.
“What else did you want to tell me?” Mary Elizabeth asked, a little drowsily.
Catherine, her supposed chaperone, stayed away from them, for Mary Elizabeth did not even hear the rustle of her gown. Harry, too, was still, and for one blessed moment, all was right with the world.
And then he spoke.
“I won’t marry you.”
Those harsh words were an icy ocean wave breaking over her head. Mary tried to hang on to her warm sense of well-being, but it was fading, as the long gloaming must finally fade to dark. She sighed and pulled back from him, so that she could look into the blue of his eyes.
He spoke again. “I can’t marry you.”
She tried not to be annoyed with him for killing her moment of peace, as such moments were few and far between. She had found more moments of peace in his arms than she had spent since she’d left home, almost six months before. But as she looked at the line of his jaw—which was clenched as if he had brought it down on something distasteful—she knew that he was still in pain and that it was not because of her.
“I can’t marry you, either,” she said. “What has that to do with a little canoodling in the dark?”
She heard a gasp from Catherine then, but she ignored her as a burden for another time and kept her eyes on Harry.
He looked at her as if she were demented, as if she had lost the last thread linking her to sanity and to the daylight world. She opened her mouth to tell him to stop being an ass when he said, “But you are a lady.”
“I am,” she answered. “But I am not the marrying kind, Harry. I told you that the day we met.”
He stared down at her as if she had grown a second head, and she wondered why it was that even the best of men never listened to a word a woman said to them, no matter how important those words might be.
“Harry, I am for Glenderrin. I cannot marry. I will not marry. I am going home, to live free in the Highlands. My family has not accepted this yet, but they will. In the end, my da will back me and fight them off, because he loves me. I could no more marry you than I might marry a bird in the sky.”
Mary Elizabeth said all this gently, keeping her voice soft in an effort to soothe him, but his color only rose higher and his jaw only got more clenched.
“You don’t want to marry me,” Harry said. He sounded suddenly as if he were accusing her of something.
“I’ve only known you three days, lad,” Mary said, trying to jolly him out of his funk with the God’s honest truth. When he did not smile, she softened her voice again. “Harry, I don’t want to marry anyone.”
He turned from her, his arms crossed over his chest as if to protect his heart, and failing. Mary Elizabeth pressed her hand to his forearm, and held it there, even though he ignored her touch, even though his arm was rock-hard beneath her hand.
“Harry, I won’t kiss you again if you don’t want me to.”
“I do want you to.” His eyes met hers, and their blue was like a flame. Mary Elizabeth almost stepped back from the passion in them, but she was a strong woman for all her innocence, and she held her ground. “I want to kiss you,” he said. “But I cannot.”
This complete lack of reason did not make Mary Elizabeth blink. All men, even her brothers, took odd notions into their heads from time to time, and nothing save the Second Coming of Christ would force those notions out. She knew that to fight against a man’s ideas at such a time was to fight the tide that was turning. So for once in her life, she did not fight. She patted her friend’s arm instead.
“All right,” she said. “That’s as it may be. I will back you in this if you wish, even though it’s daft.”
He smiled a little then, and she saw his jaw soften a bit as he let loose of whatever it was he was biting down on.
“Why would you back me if you think I’m being daft?” His eyes no longer held the passion they had a few minutes before, but they were open, and more vulnerable than she had ever seen them. She knew that she must tread with care, for as lonely she was, even with her family around her, this man was lonelier.
“Because I’m your friend.”
Harry stood as still as a hare, looking as if she had struck him between the eyes. She waited a long moment, but when he said nothing more, she patted his arm again in consolation, then collected Catherine and went to find a slice of cake with chocolate cream in it.
Eleven
Harry did not sleep that night. Instead, he looked at the stars from his balcony and felt the noose of his future closing around his neck.
That day, his mother’s guests would arrive. The fathers, brothers, and mothers of Society would flock to his door, bringing with them their marriageable girls for him to look over, so that he might choose one at his leisure and marry her.
He knew that he must do so. He knew that he must align himself with some family or other and take a wife, so that he might have a woman to run his home, to be his duchess, to produce his heir. He knew this as he knew that the sun must rise, but instead of a beginning of things to come, such a prospect seemed like an end.
He did not change into his riding clothes once dawn had broken, but went to the stables as the sun rose up over the sea, wearing the same clothes he had gone to dinner in the night before. If the grooms thought his rumpled evening dress overly formal, they did not comment, but saddled Sampson when he asked them to.
He had just risen into the saddle from the mounting block, afraid he was too bleary-eyed to mount without one, when Mary Elizabeth strolled in, looking as fresh as a late-summer morning.
“Hello, Harry!�
� she said, waving to him, startling Sampson. The horse did not rear under him or try to buck him off, but docilely stepped over to his lady and accepted the sugar from the palm of her hand.
“And how is this great beastie this morning? No more biting the grooms, I trust?” she asked the horse, for all the world as if he might answer her.
Charlie stepped up, sketching a bit of a jaunty bow, cap in hand. From the glow in his eyes, the boy clearly worshipped her. Harry shifted in the saddle.
“He’s not bit a one of us since you spoke with him, miss.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Mary Elizabeth rubbed the stallion’s nose and gave him another bite of sugar. “I see you’ve gotten here before me and taken Sampson for yourself,” Mary Elizabeth said, smiling up at Harry.
He smiled back at her despite the fact that she was the reason he had not slept. He corrected himself. His future and its long, unturning road was what kept him awake, not this girl. But the thought of her beside him in that bed, and beneath him and—once he had tutored her in the ways of love—over him had been fantasies that he had indulged in the wee hours of the morning in an effort to forget all the rest. And now she stood in front of him in breeches, the sweet curve of her derriere begging for a man’s hand to caress it. Namely his.
“Shall we ride out together?” Mary Elizabeth asked, oblivious to the way his thoughts were tending. She swung up onto Merry, who had been saddled for her without her even having to ask. His grooms responded to her better than they did to him. So much for being lord of all he surveyed.
“If we bring a groom,” Harry responded, his eyes now traveling along the line of her thigh.
She smiled at him as if he were a bit addlepated. “Do you feel the need of protection from me, Harry? I promised you that I won’t kiss you again, and I won’t.” He felt his heart seize at her words, and then sink, until she said, “Not until you ask me to.”
The grooms close enough to hear her choked on what sounded like suppressed laughter. Harry waited for his anger to rise up, but it did not come. Instead, he found himself looking into the maple eyes of his Scottish friend, watching for the hint of green along the irises. When she turned her head toward him, he caught sight of that green, and it made him smile.
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