No Dukes Allowed

by Grace Burrowes, Kelly Bowen, Anna Harrington

  She wrestled her skirts—Adam helped—until she was straddling him. “Do you know how long it has been since I could stay home for three days in a row, no callers, no compulsory entertainments, no matchmaking mamas currying my favor, no fortune hunters complimenting my fair gaze?”

  Her gaze was furious and determined, much as it had been when she’d scolded Adam into modifying his construction schedule.

  “Genie, there is nobody here to tell you what to do. There’s only me. Tell me what you want.”

  The ire went out of her like a balloon losing loft. “Hold me, Adam.”

  He rather was. He tucked her against his chest, wallowing in soft linen and softer curves. “What would make it better?”

  “I can’t think about that at the moment, though I shall think about it, now that I’ve engaged in strong hysterics.”

  Her hair remained in a neat bun despite miles and miles of driving. He set about freeing her braid.

  “You merely expressed your frustration and shared a few delightful kisses with me.”

  She was sharing her weight as well, settling agreeably close to a part of Adam that was feeling interest and frustration.

  “I can’t even dress myself,” she muttered against his throat, “without two maids interfering with my attempts to put a button through a buttonhole. I’d like to undress myself now.”

  Holy cavorting cherubs. Adam and his duchess were on a blanket on the outskirts of Lesser Cowclap, Sussex, and she wanted to undress.

  But why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t Genie… Adam didn’t even know her family name, though duchesses all but lost a family name… Why shouldn’t she take a little joy for herself?

  “Nobody is stopping you, Genie. If you want to dance naked under the rising moon, you’re free to do that.”

  Her fingers went to the top button of her bodice. “You’ll think me daft.”

  “I think you desirable.” Also dear, and in the grip of some thorny issue Adam couldn’t parse at the moment when every particle of him was longing to see the duchess unbuttoned.

  He’d apparently said the right words, because Genie smiled at him with all the lovely mischief any man had ever longed to behold in a lover. She was still smiling eleven buttons later, and he was smiling too.

  * * *

  Genie hadn’t admitted to herself that morning that she’d set out to tryst with Adam Morecambe, but she had chosen front-lacing jumps instead of stays and a carriage dress that unbuttoned down the front. She wasn’t wearing drawers—not all ladies did in warm weather—and in an astonishingly short time, she was sitting on a blanket under a darkening sky in her shift, boots, and stockings.

  “These…” Adam said, scowling at her boots. “I can’t nibble your toes if you’re intent on keeping these on.”

  Nibble my toes. She shivered, not from cold. “Far be it from me to frustrate your appetite in any regard.”

  He started on her boot laces. “When you talk like that, all prim and tidy, I want to muss you.”

  “I want to be mussed.” The desire—the need—to be wild and wicked had erupted of a sudden, driven by frustration and discontent Genie had been ignoring for most of her widowhood, if not most of her adulthood.

  “I want to be naked,” Adam said, setting her boots on the edge of the blanket. “I haven’t the patience.”

  He undid his cravat, sleeve buttons, and watch, then peeled both shirt and waistcoat straight over his head. They joined the heap of linen Genie had started on one corner of the blanket.

  His hands went to his falls, and Genie put her palm on his chest. “Might you pause for a moment? I’d like to admire the Creator’s craftsmanship.” He was no pale, pampered duke. He was closer to the heroic marble on such abundant display in the Petworth staterooms.

  “I like manual labor,” he said. “I like wrestling with stone and brick, I like digging foundations so I know they’re level. I like…. I like that a lot.”

  She’d traced the muscles of his chest, then down the midline of his torso. Dark hair dusted the terrain, and he was everywhere warm. He watched her in the gathering gloom, watched her gently cup him through his clothes.

  “Genie…”

  “So serious.” And so ready to indulge her on this adventure. Desire blended with something more complicated, not quite anxiety, but a sense of leaving the familiar forever behind.

  “For a moment,” he said, “I must be serious. Consequences can follow from what we’re contemplating.”

  She shook her head. “In five years of marriage, I never bore a child, and Charles was diligent in exercising his marital rights.”

  They were kneeling on the blanket, face-to-face. Adam gathered her in his arms and lay back so she was tucked against his side.

  “I’m sorry. Sorry you were denied the motherhood you sought, sorry your husband offered you mere diligence.”

  Adam had put his finger on some of Genie’s frustration. Charles was the only man with whom she’d been intimate, but she’d heard enough frank talk among the ladies, caught enough muttered asides, to know that his efforts as a lover had been minimal.

  “He’d come to my room after the candles were out, climb under the covers, lift my nightclothes, and fumble between my legs. He’d poke and heave and make odd noises, then flop upon me like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Sometimes he’d kiss my cheek.”

  This was not disloyalty to a deceased spouse, but rather, grief for a marriage mired in silence and duty.

  “He was probably trying to be considerate.”

  “Do you think so?” Genie pondered that hypothesis, though pondering anything except the bulge in Adam’s trousers was hard—difficult, rather. “I never felt so empty as when he was inside me.”

  Adam swore softly, while Genie undid the buttons of his falls. Then she was on her back, a blanket of warm lover over her.

  He was in the mood to dawdle, while Genie was frantic, and that was a wonderful combination. Adam’s deliberate caresses left her free to be wild. When he cupped her breast, she could arch and writhe into his hand. When he settled his weight on her, she could move against him with blatant yearning.

  As desire escalated to craving, pity wended through all the other feelings Genie wrestled—pity for the late duke who’d owned assets beyond imagining, but had been impoverished for cash, and for courage and imagination regarding his marriage.

  As Genie had also been impoverished.

  Chasing that pity was a determination that she never again make the same mistake. She’d learn from this interlude with Adam, learn to take hold of courage and imagination with the hands of a skilled whip, and send her life in the directions she chose, on her terms.

  She wedged a hand between her body and her lover’s, got him in a firm grip, and showed him exactly where she wanted him.

  Adam went still, dropping his forehead to her shoulder. “If you deny me some patience now, the pleasure will be too soon over.”

  His voice had acquired a growl, and his embrace enveloped her with the immutable strength of a masculine edifice.

  “If you deny me the full measure of passion now—”

  He moved, and words failed. Genie got one hand wrapped around his biceps, the other on his backside. She locked her ankles around his waist and endured such a thorough, relentless joining that the pleasure bordered on unbearable. She caught a glimpse of the night sky over Adam’s shoulder, the stars emerging from their velvet darkness into a diamond-sharp illumination.

  Then he gathered her impossibly close, and all the beauty and tenderness of the night sky filled her from within.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  Genie lay on her side, her cheek pillowed against Adam’s belly. Her braid had come undone—not merely unpinned from its coronet—and a hairpin poked him in the ribs.

  He was too well pleasured to care. Withdrawing had been a near thing, but he wasn’t about to take unnecessary chances with the lady’s future. His mind was like Caliban, munching on t
his grassy patch, then wandering to a clump of clover—all was lovely and delectable, in no particular order.

  Genie’s thighs were wonderfully muscular. She must enjoy frequent vigorous walks and good long gallops.

  Her scent up close was like the jasmine of her bedroom. Subtle and spicy. Adam took a whiff of a lock of her hair and brushed it across his lips.

  He wanted to taste her intimately, and she’d probably let him.

  She patted his cock, then held his balls in a loose grip, which sent a buzz of anticipation in all directions.

  “If you start that conversation,” Adam said, “we’ll be here until dawn.” And what a night that would be.

  “My friends would worry.”

  Being a fundamentally considerate woman, she would not give her friends cause to worry.

  “And your reputation might suffer.” Adam’s too, though among the titled set, he had only the merest beginnings of good standing, and then mostly among the younger men whom Seymouth did not know well.

  Genie let go of him and sat up. “My friends should be having adventures of their own. Moonlight does you credit, Mr. Morecambe.”

  An arc of shadowy gold had just crested the Downs to the east. Adam drew Genie into his lap, and together, they watched the moonrise.

  “I’ve never done this before,” he said, though he hadn’t planned on saying anything. Genie’s hair tickled his chin. Her weight on his lap tickled his desire.

  “Watched the moon come up?”

  That either. “Not with a lover.” Certainly not with a duchess. “Navigating the way back to town will be easy with all that moonshine.”

  Leaving their blankets would be difficult. Adam’s peace was perfect—the grazing horse, the whisper of water over stones, and the lovely sense of having stumbled upon a lady in whom intimate trust could be safely reposed.

  Genie kissed him, as if she sensed his thoughts, and then she climbed off his lap. She made dressing a cooperative undertaking, doing up Adam’s sleeve buttons and allowing him to lace her jumps. She saw to her own buttons, and Adam tended to his, but she allowed him to assist her with her boots.

  He did not trust himself to put her hair to rights, so he instead fetched the horse while Genie managed a swift braid and a tidy bun. They folded the blankets together—an excuse to share a few kisses—and then they were back on the road.

  As Caliban trotted toward Brighton, the silence went from comfortable, to thoughtful, to… strained.

  “You offered an invitation to tour the Pavilion,” Adam said. “Were you merely being polite?”

  “I’m through with merely being polite. I’d like to see the Pavilion with you, for you doubtless will notice what others miss.”

  Her tone was brusque rather than complimentary. “Are you cold?”

  “I am quite comfortable.”

  Genie was also back to being the duchess. The proper, polite, unremarkable woman easily overlooked when among others of her rank. Adam missed his companion, missed the demanding lover.

  The lights of Brighton glimmered on the horizon, and the air changed subtly, growing more humid and cooler with a tang of the sea.

  “I won’t soon forget this day, Genie.”

  She tied her bonnet down with a silk scarf, and thus her face was obscured by her hat brim. Adam had envisioned putting that scarf to other purposes, though perhaps his ambitions in that regard weren’t shared by the lady.

  “Petworth is impressive,” she said.

  What in the name of every marble saint was amiss with her? “Were we at Petworth? I must have missed it, so much did I enjoy our picnic.”

  She fussed with her skirts. “Truly, you did? You don’t think me forward?”

  Adam mentally whacked himself with a carpenter’s mallet. He’d not given her the words, the flirtation, the reassurances, more fool he.

  “Genie, I find you lovely, passionate, brave, and infernally distracting when I’m trying to think only decent thoughts and comport myself as a gentleman. How to be both lover and proper escort is a new challenge, though one I relish.”

  She edged closer on the bench, adding a hint of jasmine to the soft summer night. “Precisely. A new challenge. How to be a duchess and daring. I must think on this.”

  Adam was a builder, little more than an ambitious mason in good tailoring. Genie was a duchess. Of course, she’d regard him as only a partner for a dalliance, and he ought to be flattered to have that much of her consideration.

  And yet, he was disappointed too. She was happy to build a folly with him, while he’d been dreaming of a permanent structure, complete with furniture, carvings, and clever vents—also a fine big bed in the master apartment. His disappointment grew when, instead of offering him a peck on the cheek at her door, Genie was content to let him bow over her hand before she slipped into the house.

  What had he expected? She was gracious and lovely and all that other, but she was still, above all, a duchess.

  * * *

  Genie went about her days with two objectives in mind: First, to avoid the Marquess of Dunstable, and second, to cross paths with Mr. Morecambe. In all the hours she’d spent with Adam on the outing to Petworth, she had failed to get his direction.

  And he had not offered it to her.

  Brighton boasted rooming houses and hotels by the score, and even Mr. Morecambe doubtless had friends with whom he could bide. Subtle questions to Genie’s callers yielded no word of a large, taciturn architect down from Town. Diana and Belinda both made inquiries, but Mr. Morecambe had little use for the idle and titled, and his whereabouts weren’t likely to interest them either.

  “So much for embarking on a life of daring adventure,” Genie muttered to the cat.

  Rather than pause in his ablutions, he adopted a pose unbefitting of a lady’s feline.

  “I will keep to my plans nonetheless,” Genie said, “for adventure won’t find me if all I do is sit about and read Mr. Scott’s works of fiction.” Or stare at them without turning a single page.

  She put on her bonnet and cloak, found a parasol, and waved off the footman who typically escorted the ladies of the house on their shopping expeditions. A proper widow could walk the streets of Brighton in broad daylight by herself.

  Not that Genie ever had.

  She nonetheless found her solicitor’s office—her Brighton solicitor, not to be confused with her London solicitors (plural), or her Derby solicitor (only the one, but he was prodigiously long-winded), or her Paris solicitor (an outrageous old flirt).

  Her request took some time to explain, while Mr. Vernon scribbled copious notes and promised to look into the matter straightaway. Genie took her leave without answering the question Mr. Vernon was too polite to ask: The Dowager Duchess of Tindale couldn’t possibly be strolling a distance of three streets without a retinue, could she?

  In fact, she was, and Genie was equal parts pleased with herself and anxious that she might run into Dunstable.

  Derbyshire is looking better and better.

  Though she had no lover in Derbyshire. Perhaps she had no lover in Brighton. What sort of man made passionate love and stirring declarations beneath the rising moon, then sent no word for days?

  A wall of well-dressed male muscle interrupted her musing. “I do beg your—Your Grace.”

  “Mr. Morecambe. A pleasure.” Mostly. To some extent.

  Genie was blushing and trying not to smile. She offered her hand as he tipped his hat, then dropped her hand when he reached for her fingers.

  “I was on my way to pay a call on you,” Mr. Morecambe said, taking her hand in his. “Shall I walk you to your door?”

  His grip was firm and steadying, as was the look in his eyes. He wasn’t smiling, but his gaze said he was pleased to see her.

  “An escort would be appreciated. I wondered if you’d returned to London.”

  He tucked her fingers around his arm, placing himself on the street side of the walkway. “I did, in fact. My master mason and builder got into a spat,
and nothing would serve but I must mediate between them. I’ve missed you.”

  When had anybody ever missed Genie? Oh, her brothers occasionally dashed off a line or two at the bottom of a note sent by their wives.Hope you’re keeping well! Or, Come home when next you can—the children want spoiling!

  Those sentiments were casual gestures of affection from people whose lives had separated from Genie’s years ago.

  “Did I speak too boldly, Your Grace? Should I not have admitted to missing you?”

  “You honor me with your honesty. I’ve missed you too.”

  They paused at a corner. “I’d thought to write,” he said, “to send a note informing you of my travel, but does a widowed duchess receive correspondence from a single gentleman? Does this widowed duchess? Dithering is foreign to my nature, so I chose to pay a call upon my return.”

  “You’ve only just returned?” How lovely that he had come directly to see her—and told her he’d done so.

  “I want that visit to the Pavilion,” he said, leaning closer. “You did promise.”

  Was he teasing her? “I keep my word, Mr. Morecambe, but tell me, where are you biding on your visit to Brighton?”

  “With friends who won’t mind my coming and going at all hours. This time of year, many properties are to let, and others are under renovation.”

  “But you’re looking to purchase, aren’t you?”

  He expounded on the benefits of owning over renting, and Genie realized he might be making a subtle point about the difference between a courtship and a dalliance.

  “One has the security of a commitment,” he said. “The building is wholly entrusted to the owner, the owner knows he’d best treasure the asset in his keeping. Renters break leases, landlords neglect maintenance. The more permanent arrangement seems the better bargain, if one can make the initial investment.”

  They crossed the street arm in arm. “True, if one chooses wisely and is a responsible property owner. If the choice was unfortunate, the owner is stuck with an ongoing liability, or the building with a negligent caretaker.” And Genie did not care for any analogy that cast her in the role of property.