by Tessa Dare
Yet, when a duke spoke, the world listened, just as the rapidly departing ladies before them did.
And a moment later, Crispin found himself alone with Elizabeth.
“Hello, Duchess.”
She spun about. “Stop calling me that, Your Grace,” she hissed, jerking her head back toward the open doorway.
Yes, no doubt, the headmistress listened from the other side.
Elizabeth ducked her head outside.
“My apologies,” the headmistress squawked, her footsteps growing distant as she retreated.
Elizabeth yanked the door closed and then spun back to face him. “You need to leave. Now.” She continued speaking in a rush, not allowing him to get a word in. “You should have never come. Why did you come?”
And that brought them to the reason he was here.
Crispin straightened from his negligent repose. “Do you know you’re the only woman in the whole of England who’d turn away the life of a duchess to live a life of drudgery?”
Several furrows creased the space between her eyebrows. “I don’t live a life of drudgery,” she declared, a defensive edge creeping into her tone, belied by the liar her eyes and miserable gray skirts made her out to be.
“Indeed?” he drawled, drifting over. “Nine years may have passed since we last saw one another, but we were friends far longer than that.” He stopped so only a handbreadth separated them. “This is your reveal, love.” He dusted the tip of his index finger between her eyebrows.
Gasping, Elizabeth tripped over herself in a bid to escape his touch.
Which was also a ducal first for one who’d had every woman from maids to maidens and matrons hurling themselves into his path.
“What do you want?” she demanded, all fire and fury.
Elizabeth Terry—nay, Elizabeth Brightly hadn’t changed a jot. She was still the small, slender imp with outrageously curled hair and cream-white cheeks. No, that wasn’t altogether true. Her eyes had changed. They were more wary than the fresh innocence of her then seven and ten years.
Was it a product of life’s natural progression? Or the effects of their failed marriage?
For the first time since he’d stepped inside this establishment and found that the woman he’d spent years looking for was here the whole time, regret needled around his chest. For what might have been. For their lost friendship. For a marriage that could have been.
Unnerved by that maudlin musing, Crispin clasped his hands behind him. “My father is dead.”
“My apologies,” she said softly. “I loved His Grace very much.”
Yes, everyone had adored his father. As cold and ruthless as the dowager duchess was and always had been, her late husband had been jovial and warm.
“He always liked you a great deal, too, Elizabeth,” he said quietly.
Something passed in her eyes, but she dipped her gaze, and he was left to wonder at that brief flash of emotion.
Her family had lived on a parcel of land in the Fergusons’ Oxfordshire properties. Despite the station divide between her father, a struggling merchant, and Crispin’s, the duke, the men had been friends, and their children—Elizabeth and Crispin—had become even greater ones. Until the day her parents had taken ill, within a couple of weeks of each other, and in that short time, she’d found herself orphaned. When Crispin had proposed marriage to a friend to provide her security, his father had proven a duke would always be a duke where matters such as marriages were concerned.
“I haven’t come to speak about the past,” Crispin finally said. The scholar in him, who’d spent years as a fellow delivering lectures in Oxford, knew that logic and reason said no good could come from any such talks. They wouldn’t erase anything that had passed between them.
“The thing about the past, Crispin…” she said in governess tones, stealing the use of his Christian name when no one had done so… since her. To the world—his mother included—he’d only ever been a title. “One cannot divorce oneself of one’s past when it is responsible for one’s present and future.” She started for the door.
Why…why… she was dismissing him? Just like that?
He rocked back on his heels.
“You are my wife,” he called, halting her in her tracks and bringing her back around. God, how he hated to put any favors to her, the traitorous friend who’d accepted his offer of marriage and then abandoned him. He curled his lips up into a slightly mocking, indifferent grin. “And, you see, I am in need of one.” A pretty blush splashed her cheeks with pink color. “A wife, that is,” he purred.
A strangled, choking sound escaped her.
Despite the gravity of their reunion, Crispin’s grin deepened. “Not for… those reasons.” Eventually, there would be the need for an heir. “That is not why I’m here.”
That assurance did nothing to ease the tension from her small frame. Rather, she narrowed her gaze on his face, sizing him up the way she might a London footpad who stepped too close. “Wipe that false rogue’s smile from your lips, Crispin Ferguson.”
That grin she took as fake, however, was the first real expression of mirth he’d formed with his lips in… longer than he could remember. And this person who’d once known him better than anyone couldn’t even tell. She didn’t know the difference.
This, their meeting, was spiraling out of his control, the control he had on his emotions. In a bid to restore a semblance of calm, Crispin grabbed a pair of mahogany rope-twist armchairs and positioned them so they faced each other.
“Perhaps we should sit, Your Grace.”
Elizabeth remained planted to her spot close to the doorway. He set his jaw. God, she was as stubborn as she’d always been. Crispin settled his frame into the small, mustard velvet chair. He looped an ankle across his opposite knee, and the delicate wood groaned under that slight movement. “I’ve no intention of leaving, Duchess.”
She elevated her chin. “I asked that you stop calling me that, Your Grace.”
“But that is what you are now.” He flashed another smile meant to rile, meant to infuriate, meant to shake some of the bloody calm out of her. “What was it we pledged? Hmm?” He lifted an eyebrow. “Until death do us part?”
“Funny you should remember that part,” she noted in droll tones, completely unaffected. “There was the whole ‘to live together,’ love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her in sickness and in health.” Elizabeth shot him an arch look. “Forsaking all others.”
He sat back, celebrating the first real triumph since he’d stepped into this schoolroom and faced her. Despite her seeming indifference, she’d revealed her hand for a second time now. “You kept up with gossip on me,” he noted huskily. Those gossip rags were forever speculating about which widow or actress he was linked to at any given point.
The hard, tense set of her lips strained her cheek muscles and was going to give the minx a deuced megrim. “Hardly,” she said too quickly.
She’d always been rubbish at lying. It was an inadequate skill set that continued to this day.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t point out, Duchess”—she winced—“that you were the one who left me.” The memory of that night slipped in. He’d been informed she’d been feeling unwell, but when he’d visited the guest rooms she’d been given as his bride—they were empty. She was gone. All that had remained had been three curly strands of her red hair upon a blindingly bright white coverlet.
“Is that why you are here, Your Grace? Did I wound your pride?”
God, the chit could drive the patience from a saint. As it became increasingly clear that the lady had no intention of taking the seat across from him, Crispin stood. “I’ll get ’round to why I’m here. Since my father’s death and my ascension to the dukedom, there have been…” He searched for the words.
Elizabeth crossed her arms. A study in annoyance at his presence? His telling? All of it? “I’ve been the recipient of attention from many ladies.”
“How dreadful for you,” she declared, her e
xpression deadpan. Just then, her glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose.
Crispin stilled. They were the wire rims she’d donned when last he’d seen her nearly ten years ago. The fact that she still wore the same pair was an inconsequential detail. Or it should have been.
He frowned. And yet it was not. It was a material telling about Elizabeth and the state of her affairs these past years.
Noting his attention, Elizabeth pushed her glasses back into place and jutted her chin at a defiant angle.
As for the first time since he’d entered the room, Crispin took in those details, which had escaped him until now: the heinous gray skirts that hung, shapeless, on her slender frame. The painfully severe chignon that could never tame those crimped red curls. She should be attired in garments fit for one of near royalty, as she, in fact, was. The idea that she’d gone all these years without, choosing a life of work over a life with him, stuck odd in his chest.
They, after all, had been friends, and this was the life she’d sought instead. She’d always been prouder than most—including him. Including anyone he’d ever known in his thirty years.
He cleared his throat. “As I was saying—”
“Your bride problem.”
“I only ever had one bride problem,” he muttered. And it had been this fearless minx before him.
Understanding lit Elizabeth’s eyes. “I see.”
Crispin puzzled his brow. “You do?” Of course. With her head in a book for as long as he’d known her, she’d always been clever enough to see everything.
The first eagerness he’d caught in her expressive moss-green gaze flared to life. She sailed over in a whir of loud, rustling skirts. “You require an annulment.” A smile, one that still dimpled her cheeks and lit her eyes and turned her lips up, transformed her from the ordinary girl of his past to someone… quite… enthralling. He stared back, transfixed by the sparkle in the glittering green depths of her eyes. “Do you have papers for me to sign?”
Reality seeped back in. “What?” He raced through his mind for whatever last words had been spoken before he’d noted the entrancing color of her intelligent eyes.
“Papers.” Her smile slipped, and he mourned that fleeting light. “For the annulment?” Hope threaded those three words and stuck in a pride he hadn’t realized he had.
“You think I want an annulment?”
“You don’t?” She answered another of his questions with one of her own.
“I don’t.”
She looked so crestfallen that, if he weren’t so offended, he would have laughed outright. “But then you can marry whomever you wish,” she persisted.
“I understand the implications of a church-granted annulment,” he said with false drollness. Crispin made a show of studying her. “You’ll do just fine.”
Splotches of color tinged her cheekbones again.
Her mouth moved.
Before she found the right words and skewered him, Crispin hurried on with his reason for being here.
“I’ll need you to return to London… as my wife.”
Chapter 3
He’d found her.
How, after all these years?
Or perhaps he knew long, long ago and was content to let you live here?
Something in that pinched at Elizabeth’s heart. A silly, nonsensical hurt.
As a creature of reason and logic, she’d recognized the power afforded him. As heir to one of the oldest titles in the kingdom, he possessed both the resources and capabilities to find her in whatever corner of England she chose to hide.
But now, after all this time apart, he’d actually wanted to find her.
A marriage conceived by him had, in the moment, seemed like a solution to each of their individual problems. But that was the folly of youth. They’d thought of the immediacy of their circumstances and the benefits in that very instant… but hadn’t truly considered… the after.
Until it had been too late.
“It was a mistake marrying her. I know that.”
Hating the hurt of that echoed in her memory all these years later, Elizabeth fought it back and adopted the same veneer of aloofness she’d mastered at Mrs. Belden’s.
Now, he required her to return to London with him, on a matter that by his accounts had nothing to do with an… heir. Of its own volition, her gaze went to the towering, figure. One broad shoulder propped negligently against the wall did nothing to diminish the power of his frame. Nearly six inches taller and two stone in muscle greater when they’d last met, he bore only the faintest trace of the lanky, wiry friend of her youth.
From her place at the center of the parlor, Elizabeth forced her spine straight, a futile bid to make herself taller. An impossible feat. Even more impossible around this bear of a man.
Crispin sent one dark brow slashing up over a sapphire eye that twinkled. “Nothing to say?” He flashed a dangerously enticing half-grin that dimpled his left cheek. “That’s not like you, Elizabeth.”
No, it wasn’t. She’d once been garrulous and free with her words, particularly around this man. Mrs. Belden’s Finishing School, however, watered down a woman’s temperament. “You don’t know me,” she said calmly, smoothing her palms over her skirts. The reminder effectively quashed his smile, restoring a ducal veneer of ice. Not anymore. “And my name is Mrs. Terry.” She tacked on that important afterthought.
He shoved himself from that wall and stalked forward with steps to rival the sleek panther who’d been part of his late father’s menagerie. The primitive glide of his steps sent a lone butterfly fluttering in her belly and spiraling throughout her being. “I would have never ventured you’d gone off and used that, of all names.”
Fighting for control, Elizabeth slid behind the ivory sofa, placing it between them as a weak, but necessary, barrier. “There is nothing wrong with the name Terry,” she said tautly, hating that he continued to knock her off-balance. It was why it was easier to fight him on a “name” than on his intentions for her. How dare he upend her fragile, but once stable, existence and remain so infuriatingly calm through it?
Crispin stopped at the opposite end of the sofa. He lowered his hands to the scalloped mahogany trim. “No,” he concurred. “Your mother’s previous name was Terry. You were always Brightly.”
It’s a splendid name for a girl with your wits, Elizabeth. Another whisper of a memory about a friend who’d once found a gangly, awkward girl in the country as special as she’d found him.
They, however, had together gone and destroyed that special bond. She was as much to blame as he was. “What do you want, Your Grace?” she asked quietly, calling forth the distinguished rank as a reminder about the barrier that existed between them. Except, it was a warning given too late. They’d traveled a path that could not simply be undone…
He straightened. “Tsk, tsk. As we’re husband and wife, I never took us for a couple who’d refer to each other by our titles and surnames.”
She shook her head. “We’re not husband and wife.” Elizabeth lifted a finger. “Not truly.” To him, she’d only ever been his best chum Elizabeth. Only, I yearned for something more… “A marriage is brought to completion through sexual intercourse.” A garbled choking built in his throat. His disquiet helped Elizabeth find her footing. “And given there’s never been any penetration of your peni—”
Crispin shot a hand out. His gloveless palm covered her mouth, muffling the remainder of that word. His ears an impressive shade of red, he glanced at the door then back over to Elizabeth. “Enough.”
“What?” He’d become a duke in every way, then. It was an image that didn’t fit with the rogue written about in the gossip columns that ultimately found their way to Surrey. But then, that transformation, too, had been inevitable. Dukes might be rogues with their mistresses, but invariably they became stuffy bores for the rest of the world. She and Crispin together had jested about it long ago, and through his laughter, Crispin had vowed to never follow that path to pomposity. For re
asons she couldn’t understand, she mourned that change. “It’s an opinion that goes back to Boccaccio. A marriage without consummation is no marriage. It’s a universal acceptance across all cultures.”
He snorted. “That was a story set forth in ancient Greece, hardly modern England.”
Damn him for being as clever as he’d been all those years earlier. Powerful peers weren’t supposed to know obscure writings on the sacrament of marriage. “Modern England,” she corrected, refusing to back down, “still states coitus determines the validity of a union. And the truth remains,”—she patted the back of her head in a bid at nonchalance—“we’ve not shared so much as a kiss.” But I wanted to. I wanted him to want me in all the ways a man desires a woman. Hers had been foolish, hopeless musings of a girl who’d had the misfortune of falling in love with the last person she ought.
“That’s not true, love,” he dangled, flicking the tip of her nose the way he might a younger sibling. That only sent her frustration up a notch.
“I’d hardly consider a kiss between two children anything significant.” That sloppiest of kisses had come when she was a girl embarking on a quest for knowledge about the “human kiss” with him, a like-minded scholar of six and ten.
“And yet…” He stalked around the sofa with sleek steps. “You recall it all these years later.” Crispin hooded his gaze, the long, thick, black lashes she’d envied as a girl sweeping down. Only, there had never been anything primal in the way he’d stared at her before.
I said too much. “H-hardly for any reasons that matter,” she squeaked, cursing her loose tongue. She forced her feet to remain rooted to the floor as he stopped before her.
Barely a handbreadth of space divided them, the true divide between them far greater than any physical distance. He lowered his lips close to her ear. “Have a care, Elizabeth.” The scent of him, a dry, earthy oak moss, was intoxicating and so different from the lemon and bergamot he’d once favored. It highlighted how very much they were strangers to each other now… in every way.