At the Duke's Wedding (A romance anthology)

by Caroline Linden

  Miss Cowdrey smelled like newly fallen snow—fresh and clean and cool. But when he’d allowed his fingertips to stray from the buttons to her back, she’d been hot.

  He studied her garments he’d brought from the boathouse to his bedchamber. He’d never seen anything like them, especially the little lace garment. It could be a garter of some sort, but it was shaped entirely like another part of a woman’s anatomy. He certainly hadn’t seen anything like these clothes on a lady of quality. Perhaps Miss Cowdrey was not a lady. Perhaps he had invited a common thief into his friend’s house, made her acquainted with his innocent sister, and within days all the duke’s guests would be missing watches and jewels and purses.

  He went to her coat hanging on his clotheshorse, still damp despite a night dripping lake water onto the floor.

  Tempting.

  He mustn’t.

  He dipped his hand in a pocket. Empty. From the other he withdrew a heavy, flat rectangular box that fit in his palm. Too flat for a snuff box. Perhaps it was for calling cards. He pried at the dark glass lid. It remained fast shut.

  He slid it into his pocket. He should find Wessex or the duchess and ask about Miss Cowdrey’s family. Then he would be obliged to tell them about the incident at the lake.

  He could not do that. His honor must defend her virtue.

  But he did need to return her clothing. He was borrowing his father’s valet during this visit, and if old Cooper found a lady’s garments in his bedchamber, he’d tell the earl. Then their sojourn in the boathouse would be revealed.

  That couldn’t happen. Unless he wanted his father to stand trial for treason and fraud, he was marrying Sir Richard’s daughter. Every feeling rebelled at the notion. But Miss Howell was an innocent party. He would at least begin married life without shaming her from the start.

  But then how to return these clothes? He couldn’t very well go around asking the footmen and maids the location of Miss Cowdrey’s bedchamber.

  So he went where any bemused man would when faced with a mysterious woman whom he’d rescued from drowning and then helped to dress, and whose soft brown eyes glimmered with desire when trained upon him.

  He went to the stables to drink.

  Even after all these years, it made his gut ache to look at a vehicle like Jack Willoughby’s phaeton. Averting his gaze, he greeted his friends and headed for the whiskey.

  A glass later, he wasn’t any less confounded. Leaving the stable, he headed for the gardens where nuncheon was set out near a lawn set up for battledore and shuttlecock.

  Passing through a covered portico in the Italian style, he saw her. A hundred yards away, she was crossing the lawn toward tents erected by a stately oak. She wore a white gown—his sister’s again?—and her stride was purposeful and broad. She barely seemed to notice the game of battledore and shuttlecock as she crossed between the players, her shoulders thrust back and her arms and head bare.

  He’d forgotten to borrow a bonnet for her. And a shawl.

  He started forward.

  “Lord Everett! Do wait for us!” Girlish giggles tripped down the portico toward him, followed by the giggling girls themselves—at least five of them, all dressed in maidenly white, none over the age of seventeen by the looks of it. His sister, her face a portrait of irritation, brought up the rear. Behind her, their fourteen-year-old brother darted around columns, stalking like a cat in pursuit of a herd of mice.

  Trent squared his shoulders. He needed a bonnet and shawl, and who knew when he’d find Charlotte again soon? Also, if he were with the girls, Henry wouldn’t dare bother them.

  He turned to the girls and smiled.

  o0o

  “I come from the Cowdreys of Charleston.” Angela scooped up another poppy seed cookie and dropped it into her mouth. She was starving. And sore from sleeping on a stiff little sofa in an unused parlor. And desperately in need of a shower.

  “Charleston,” the woman she’d been chatting with said thoughtfully. “Where is Charleston, Frederick?”

  “It’s that fine little town we visited near Boston. Isn’t it, Miss Cowdrey?”

  “Yes, indeed.” She didn’t have a southern accent, but if someone called her out on being from South Carolina, she could fake it. She’d lived in Atlanta for two years in middle school. It was astounding how little these people knew about America. She could stay here for days faking her origins and her reasons for being at the party.

  But she didn’t want to keep pretending she was somebody’s distant cousin, and she was pretty sure sharp-as-a-tack Sophronia had seen through that lie immediately. She didn’t have any idea why the eccentric old lady hadn’t told on her to the duke and his mother yet. But maybe that’s where she’d gone after breakfast.

  She had to find Trenton Ascot again. Earlier she’d discreetly asked a footman where the younger gentlemen at the house party might be. He’d pokered up and said he couldn’t say. Fat chance. Servants knew everything that went on in an English great house. But the very fact that she was thinking in these terms meant that she was beginning to believe this carnival was real.

  It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.

  It had to be.

  Beyond the badminton game—correction, battledore and shuttlecock—a man was walking across the lawn surrounded by half a dozen girls in white dresses.

  Trenton Ascot.

  He was looking straight at her. Her moment of reckoning was nigh. Her knees felt mushy. Nothing in graduate school had prepared her for this. Nothing in life had prepared her for him.

  As he paused, disengaged his arm from the girl clinging to it, and bowed to the giggling group, a man at the luncheon buffet near Angela said, “I say, isn’t that Sir Richard Howell coming this way?”

  “At Wessex’s wedding?” the woman beside him said. “Well, he’s certainly come up in the world, hasn’t he?”

  “Come now, m’dear. He’s one of Gentleman Jackson’s favorites, and he’s in Parliament now, don’t you know.”

  His wife sniffed. “He attended Mrs. Portman’s ball a fortnight ago and I daresay I could smell the shop on him.” She whispered to Angela, “Trade.”

  Angela pivoted and stared at the man approaching with a young woman on his arm. His jowls hung thick and loose like a bulldog’s and his eyes bulged out a little under bushy brows. He had a round belly crossed with a garish gold watch chain that hung from his pocket, and his lapels were extra wide. She’d never seen a picture of Howell, but this was exactly as she’d pictured him. Exactly.

  Sir Richard Howell.

  She couldn’t breathe. Blindly, she reached for the edge of the refreshment table.

  “Miss Cowdrey,” Trenton Ascot’s melty voice said at her shoulder. “You appear flushed. Shall we find you a cool place in the shade to rest? Then I might restore to you your bonnet and shawl, which I have retrieved just now from my sister.” Brandishing a straw hat and fringy lace shawl, he took her hand, tucked it into the crook of his arm and led her away from the tent.

  “I—” Her tongue stalled. “I can’t rest right now.” She tried to pull away, but he held her fast. “Is that man really Sir Richard Howell?”

  “Don’t point, Miss Cowdrey.” He drew her away from the tents toward a path. “It marks you as a foreigner.”

  “I am a foreigner.” More foreign than he knew.

  Oh God oh God oh God.

  It was real. She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t anymore. Not in any little way. She was in Regency-era England. She knew this because the subject of the paper about wartime maritime trade that she was currently revising for the American Historical Review and that, along with her dissertation, would get her a decent job was standing thirty feet away, accepting a glass of lemonade from a footman.

  She yanked free of the viscount’s hold and pivoted. “I have to go speak with him.”

  He grabbed her hand, trapped it firmly against his side, and dragged her along. “Don’t fight me, Miss Cowdrey. I have several pressing questions for yo
u, and at present I am not inclined to patience.” Even demanding, his voice was like melted chocolate. And the muscles in his arm were just as good to feel as they’d looked through wet linen. She glanced up. His chiseled jaw was tight.

  “I have some questions for you too,” she said.

  “Then clearly we must both assuage our burning curiosity. What good fortune, then, that I managed to find you.” He slanted her a narrow look with his smoky gray eyes.

  “Were you looking for me?”

  “I suspect that you know I was.” He guided her into the shade of a path bordered with trees that led down the long lawn away from the house.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Do you not wish your clothing returned to you, then, Miss Cowdrey?” he said and drew her along the gravel walk. “If that is indeed your name.”

  She pulled away and backed up.

  “That is my name,” she said. In the dappled sunlight falling between tree branches, he looked less than sanguine and completely gorgeous, especially with a woman’s hat and shawl hanging from his hand. He had an athlete’s hands: strong, the veins prominent under tanned skin. God, he was really handsome. She’d never known men like him. Her friends and the men she occasionally dated were all skinny, pale intellectual types. She’d only ever come close to masculine beauty once: during the summer between junior and senior year at Harvard, she’d kissed a Spanish exchange student in the Place de la Concorde on a dare from one of her friends. He’d been good looking in a dark, Latin way.

  Viscount Everett’s gorgeousness was all about golden boy virility. He was a classic jock, as the comic book had narrated and Lady Sophronia’s comments the night before had confirmed.

  Angela didn’t know how to talk to jocks. The only ones she ever spoke with sat at desks in the classes she TAed, and there weren’t many; early British history tended to attract girls enamored of Tudor England. Anyway, the teacher–student relationship was a whole other power dynamic and she was completely comfortable with it.

  She wasn’t comfortable now.

  “My name really is Angela Cowdrey. I live in the United States, and I’m—” She just had to say it. She had to tell him the truth and hope he’d do the same in return. “I’m not actually supposed to be here,” she chickened out.

  “I did get that impression. You are not in fact on the duchess’s guest list?”

  “No, I mean I’m not supposed to be here in England. And I don’t know why I am.”

  “You do not know why you traveled across an ocean to visit another country?”

  “No. Yes. I’m doing research on Sir Richard Howell, so I think it must have something to do with him. I really do need to talk with him.”

  “I’m afraid I cannot allow that, Miss Cowdrey.” A muscle in his jaw flexed. “Sir Richard is not a man of good character.”

  “I know!”

  His brow shot up.

  “I—I mean,” she stammered. “I’d heard that.” Tell him the truth. He was in the comic book. He knows you. He just doesn’t know he knows you. He might be able to help. Why else would he have been the one to fish her out of the lake?

  “Miss Cowdrey, do you have malicious intentions toward the duke, the duchess, or any of their guests?”

  “No!” Fear zigzagged through her. Apparently he did not know her. “No, absolutely not.”

  “Why were you in that lake yesterday? Why do you lack family, companion, or maid here? Why do you go about without a bonnet or shawl?” He reached into his pocket. “And what is this?”

  “My phone!” She darted forward and grabbed it. She pressed the power button. Nothing. But even if the battery was dead, the phone wouldn’t pick up a signal in the nineteenth century.

  The. Nineteenth. Century.

  Why was she here? To discover why Arnaud Chappelle had revealed Sir Richard’s crimes? But that was ridiculous. As intriguing a mystery as it was to her fellow scholars of the British Empire, in the real world nobody cared.

  “Phone?” His voice was rough. Their fingers had brushed. He flexed his hand.

  She looked up and her breaths stuttered. Up close he didn’t look threatening or angry or even suspicious. Up close he looked a little befuddled and ... edible.

  Chapter Four

  Trent watched the color rise in her cheeks and her delectably full lips part and thought perhaps he should step away from her. The path was secluded, sunlight touched her skin and shone in her warm, intelligent eyes, and he was a bit muddle-headed. From the whiskey, no doubt. He was also aroused, which unfortunately he couldn’t blame on the whiskey.

  “Lady Sophronia said they call you ‘Crash,’” she said, not moving away as a modest lady would but staring directly into his eyes. Her breasts lifted on a deep breath. They were barely concealed by the gown; she had more to fill the bodice than his seventeen-year-old sister. He imagined brushing a kiss across the swell of one of Miss Cowdrey’s breasts, then the other. “Did you—” she said upon another tantalizing breath, “—crash into—” Another breath. “—a tree? Or something?”

  He dragged his attention up. “It was a stone wall, if you must know. And I did not precisely crash of my own will. That blackguard Abernathy locked wheels with me and forced me into the ditch.”

  “Locked wheels?”

  “Curricle race.”

  “Ah.” Her lashes flickered and her gaze retreated into pensive shadow. “Of course,” she said quietly.

  Trent couldn’t seem to draw full breaths. “When you do that ...”

  “Do what?”

  “When you pause to think for a moment, to consider ...” For God’s sake, his own thoughts were slow as tar. “It seems as though you are taking notes. Are you?”

  “Taking notes?” She licked her lush lips. “Sort of, I guess.”

  “Are you a lady journalist hoping to reveal scandals at Wessex’s wedding?”

  “No. What scandals?”

  “Who are you, Miss Cowdrey?”

  “I am a historian of England.” Her face was clear and fresh, her eyes completely guileless. “I wrote my dissertation on maritime trade during the period of the Napoleonic Wars. If I can manage it, it’s going to be published in 2015 with Harvard University Press.”

  He felt drugged, as though the whiskey had been spiked with laudanum. Her lips were so close, the warmth of the day everywhere, the birds and summer blooms and trees. He was in his favorite place in the world, immersed in nature, and a lovely American woman was spouting nonsense to him. “Harvard University Press?”

  She nodded. “It’s called Shipping Lanes: British Enterprise and the Making of Empire from 1778 to 1832.”

  He struggled. “You do not think you are inventing this.”

  “I’m in fact not inventing this.” Her eyes were luminous, begging him to believe her.

  “Which means you must be mad.”

  “I’m not.”

  “But if you are mad,” he said, “or perhaps if you are merely an apparition that I am seeing because in fact I am mad, then why do I want to kiss you so much?”

  Her eyes snapped wide. “You want to kiss me?”

  “Very much.” More than he’d wanted to kiss any woman.

  “I’m not insane,” she said. “And you’re not either, because I am in fact really here, to which about fifty people over at those tents as well as Lady Sophronia can attest.”

  “The year 1832 has not yet occurred, Miss Cowdrey.”

  “It has where I come from, Lord Everett.”

  “You expect me to believe this?”

  “I’m a good swimmer, but you dragged me out of a lake in England after I’d fallen into a river in America and was drowning. You have no proof of that river’s existence or that I can swim, I realize. But it’s high summer here and I was wearing a coat and gloves and boots because at home it’s the dead of winter. I don’t know anybody at this party. Not a single soul. But I am writing a paper on a slice of history in which one of the guests at this wedding plays a crucial role.” Again
she watched him as though assessing. But not calculating. Thinking. “Logically, you know the pieces don’t fit together,” she continued. “And they don’t—logically—unless you add another variable to the equation. Another time.”

  Dear God. Thoughts in her head and a pretty face. Lovely face. Beckoning eyes. Perfect breasts. Her assertions were irrational, but at present that seemed entirely immaterial to Trent.

  He couldn’t stop himself. “I’m going to kiss you,” he said.

  Her lashes flickered. “I’m pretty sure I would really like it if you did.”

  He touched her arm and a shock of energy went through him, like a ray of light straight through his chest. What in God’s name was happening to him? “I’ve never done this before,” he uttered helplessly.

  Disbelief sparked in her eyes. “You’ve never kissed a woman?”

  “I’ve never kissed a lady in a garden.” Her lips called to him, ripe and full and dusky pink that he must taste.

  “Really?” she whispered.

  “I am an honorable man, Miss Cowdrey.” He wanted those lips beneath his. He had to have them. He bent his head. “A gentleman who respects women doesn’t just—”

  She went onto her toes and pressed her lips to his for a long, soft moment of innocent pleasure. Trent hadn’t kissed a woman in this manner in so long he didn’t know what to do. So he simply accepted it and felt desire he’d never even imagined.

  “There,” she said, drawing away, her eyes sparkling. “You didn’t need to do it after all, because I did. You retain your honor, my lord.”

  “Not for long.” He reached up and curved his hand around the back of her neck and drew her mouth up against his.

  She showed no virginal hesitation. She opened her lips to him and laid her hands on his chest, and quite swiftly Trent wanted more. Much more. Her mouth was sweet and humid, her lips softly returning the pressure of his, her scent filling his senses, and he couldn’t hold himself back. Both hands at the base of her neck, he speared his fingers through her hair and with his mouth urged her lips apart. Her tongue darted into his mouth, then stroked his lower lip. He followed it with his, caressing until her fingertips pressed into his chest. Then he delved.