His Duchess for a Day

by Christi Caldwell

  She registered his silence and looked over. At the frosty set to his features, a chill scraped her spine.

  “Did someone… harm you in any way?” There was a lethal edge to his query that promised death to any person who had.

  And then the implications of what he’d asked registered. “No,” she said quickly. Her cheeks warmed. Of all the worries she’d faced over the years as a woman living on her own, fending off unwanted advances had fortunately never been one of them.

  Some of the tension eased from Crispin’s broad shoulders.

  They reached the gated fence, and Elizabeth stopped. “You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out, staying his hand.

  Crispin let his arm fall back to his side. “Sometimes, a person requires some help. It’s important to offer that when one can and to accept that when one needs it.”

  She’d have to be deaf as the post before them to fail to hear the recrimination there. Elizabeth frowned. “I’ve never been too proud to accept assistance.” Their marriage was proof enough of that.

  A smile ghosted his lips. “I didn’t refer to you, Elizabeth.” He unlatched the gate and waited for her before falling once again into step beside her. As they walked the remaining length to the carriage, he kept his gaze trained on the gleaming black conveyance. “My years at Eton weren’t kind ones.” He spoke the way a skilled lecturer imparted essential facts to his charges, rather than the way a man would speak about an experience that had so shaped him. “I was regularly mocked, pummeled, and spoken about because of my singular interests in pursuits.”

  Of their own volition, Elizabeth’s feet drew to a slow stop. “What?” she whispered as he continued on toward the carriage.

  Moments ago, he’d not disparaged her, but rather—himself. He’d been speaking about his own experiences.

  Crispin continued walking and then turned back. Reaching into his jacket, he drew out brown leather gloves and proceeded to draw them on. “My father had such hopes for my time at Eton and then Oxford. Above all, I didn’t wish to disappoint him.” Because he’d always striven to please everyone. It had been an impossible feat that, to this date, he likely could not realize, still. “One of my instructors took the liberty of writing the duke to share about my”—his lips pulled—“experience. He arrived himself and escorted me off.” And Crispin had never returned.

  All these years, she’d built him up as one who was larger than life in every way. The sun had risen and set to the mere thought of Crispin Ferguson. As such, she could have never contemplated a world in which he wasn’t revered for the brilliant mind and kind friend he was. “Oh, Crispin,” she managed, her heart aching.

  He held her gaze. “My father was wrong in failing to accept our marriage, but he wasn’t a complete failure as a father.” The incident also highlighted a greater reason for his devotion to the late duke.

  No, any other lord would have left his son to suffer through the horror of his schooling, a rite of passage of sorts for all future noblemen. After all, how many young ladies had been sent to Mrs. Belden’s and had their spirits and souls crushed, with the blessing and permission of their respective families?

  She stuffed her hands inside the pockets of her cloak to hide the faint tremble. “Why didn’t you tell me?” As a friend, she should have known.

  He quirked a black eyebrow up. “Tell you what? That I was a scared, bullied boy who ran away from Eton because I’d tired of finding myself beat up day in and day out?”

  Pain lanced through her. For all the ways in which she had known him, there were so many more ways in which she had not. “Did you believe I’d find you somehow less?”

  Crispin clasped his hands behind his back and stared out at the rolling expanse of hills in the distance. “It was enough that I found myself lacking, Elizabeth,” he murmured.

  She stared at him. With his back presented to her, he was an immobile, proud figure. And shame filled her. As children, she’d been the one whispered about and mocked around Oxfordshire for being an oddity. Her world had been small, and never having set foot outside of it, she’d been unaware that life for Crispin, revered in the village as the ducal heir, could have been different from what she’d assumed. She could never have foreseen that he too would have been ridiculed for that which set him apart.

  “I didn’t know.” She spoke the sad truth aloud.

  “No.” He sighed. “And you wouldn’t have. I didn’t want you to see that.”

  Elizabeth took a lurching step toward him. “But I wanted to. You were my best friend.”

  He’d remained a mystery. And I want all his stories. I want his secrets and the pain he knew, and…

  The ground lurched under her feet.

  I love him.

  She’d loved him first as a friend and now, all these years later, as the intellective boy who’d grown into a man. A man who wanted her to pursue her studies as she once had, and still, even though he’d been named a duke, didn’t give a jot about balls or soirees and found them as tedious as she did.

  Crispin lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “It is of no matter.” A door slammed in the near distance, and they looked over at the boy sprinting down the cobbled path. “And if I can help prevent someone from feeling that same shame that I myself did, then I’ll do so.” The boy skidded to a stop. His gaunt chest heaved from his run. “Neville,” Crispin said. “May I present Her Grace, the Duchess of Huntington.”

  Neville bowed. “Your Grace,” he panted.

  She smiled gently at the bespectacled boy with curly red hair. “I am so very happy you are accompanying us to London.”

  Us.

  How right that felt. And yet, with the past at last laid open and their secrets spread out, there’d never been mention of anything… more.

  Her smile froze on her lips, straining the muscles of her cheeks.

  And as Neville scrambled onto the box to sit alongside the driver, Elizabeth entered the carriage. Crispin reached up to shut the door.

  She shot a hand out. “You are not… riding with me?” she asked, regret pulling the question out. Her cheeks flamed. “That is…” She cleared her throat and finished lamely, “Your mount? I trust the journey would still be arduous for him.”

  “Indeed.” Crispin touched his gaze on every corner of her face. “I have several horses stabled along the route.”

  Belatedly, she took in the servant standing off to the side, the reins of an unfamiliar mount in his fingers.

  Of course Crispin would have horses stabled along the traveled roadways. It had been too easy to forget over the years that he was wealthier than Croesus and a future duke atop it.

  “Oh,” she said as she settled onto the bench.

  He paused, and her body arched forward, waiting for whatever words were on his lips.

  “Elizabeth.”

  With that parting, nothing more than her name, Crispin closed the door behind her, stealing the sunlight that had bathed the carriage.

  She sat back against the comfortable squabs, and her eyes snagged a pile of books on the opposite bench.

  Wetting her lips, she leaned forward.

  Her heart quickened.

  Elizabeth gently reached for the pile, neatly tied with a long velvet ribbon. Loosening the tie, she freed the article, until the leather tomes stared back.

  Emotion threatened to overwhelm her.

  Essay on the Vedas, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, Conversations on Chemistry, an Anonymous Work.

  Tears blurred her eyes.

  He’d left the books here for her.

  The carriage lurched into motion, and she hurriedly caught the pile close, cradling it lovingly against her chest.

  She’d been so determined to forget Crispin Ferguson, the Duke of Huntington. She had set up barriers to keep herself from hurting again, but with every exchange, he made it impossible.

  It was easy to keep walls up against the rogue who’d left scores of broken hearts about London. But this Crispin? The te
nder, considerate gentleman who’d hand over treasured texts to her?

  Elizabeth closed her eyes.

  She loved him.

  And she always would.

  Chapter 12

  In the dead of night, they arrived in London.

  It marked the beginning of the end of his time with Elizabeth.

  “We’ve…arrived.”

  Neville’s awe-coated statement pulled Crispin back from his musings. Crispin glanced over at the previously slumbering boy perched alongside his driver. “We have.” And there was no place less Crispin would rather be. He forced a smile for the child’s benefit. “You’ll find the staff kindly,” he promised, as he jumped down from his mount.

  A groom hurried over to accept the reins just as the double doors of Crispin’s Mayfair residence were thrown open.

  Dutiful servants poured out of the white stucco townhouse like mice after a careless cook left out the cheese. Of course, regardless of hour, the world stood on alert, anticipating the wants and needs of a duke. It was an obsequious fawning his mother had reveled in, his late father had tolerated, and Crispin himself suffered through.

  Crispin motioned to the youngest of the footmen. The livery clad servant shifted his path, and hurried over to Crispin. “Your Grace,” he murmured, bowing.

  “We will have a guest for the evening,” he explained, squeezing Neville’s shoulder. “May I present Mr. Neville Barlow. If you can introduce the young gentleman to Mrs. Willoughby and see she shows him to guest chambers, along with a meal, and anything else he requires.

  He might as well have handed over a king’s fortune for the grateful look cast his way by the boy.

  “This way, Mr. Barlow,” the footman urged, and relieving the child of his burden, he escorted him off.

  With the pair gone, Crispin returned his attention to the servants scuttling about…young men stealing curious glances at the carriage.

  Crispin followed those stares.

  Of course, this was no ordinary return. This was the return of the Invisible Duchess, as the gossip columns had recently taken to writing of her. All the household had likely waited with bated breath for a glimpse of the mysterious lady.

  His driver reached for the carriage door, but Crispin waved him off and strode over. As he opened it, he did not know what he expected to find. Elizabeth sleeping, perhaps? Pale? Her eyes heavy from sleep after a long day of traveling?

  As clear-eyed as she was at the rooster’s first crow, she peered past his shoulder and climbed her gaze up the two-hundred-foot structure. Behind her oval lenses, her eyes formed perfect circles. Heavens to Hades, she mouthed, never taking her gaze from it as he helped her down. Transformed into one massive residence by the purchase of neighboring townhouses by his late grandfather, the Huntington London townhouse was expansive enough to rival most noblemen’s country manors.

  And she’d never before laid eyes upon it.

  They’d shared nearly everything and every part of themselves, and yet, it was a reminder that they’d also been divided by their stations.

  After she’d looked her full, Elizabeth wordlessly accepted his hand and allowed him to help her down.

  Her legs swayed slightly under her, and he shot a hand out to steady her. His fingers curved against her slender waist as he gripped her, the feel of her against him right.

  Elizabeth’s breath caught audibly, and she wet her lips, drawing his focus to her mouth.

  He ached to explore those lush contours once more. To spar with their tongues until their breaths melded into one.

  “Crispin,” she whispered.

  “Hmm?”

  And why should they not? They were husband and wife, and…

  A carriage rattled by, the rapid churning of the conveyance’s wheels snapping the fragile moment.

  He glanced up in time to catch the curious passersby peering at them until their conveyance disappeared from sight.

  Elizabeth followed his stare.

  “Come,” he said tightly and led her on.

  Her steps, however, were unhurried. Her alert stare took in everything, touching on the lit grounds of Mayfair.

  Crispin followed her stare. Clouds hung heavy across the London sky, blotting out the fingernail moon and smattering of stars that could find space among the London fog and dirt.

  Elizabeth stopped and stared at the lamplighter at work, a young child assisting in his efforts.

  Crispin had always despised Town. As a boy and then young man who’d been forced to visit, he’d silently envied Elizabeth staying in Oxfordshire and counted the days until they were reunited. “It is miserable, isn’t it?” Artificial light doused the streets.

  He turned to go, but Elizabeth remained fixed to the pavement, watching the portly lamplighter as he lifted his brass-tipped staff to the crystal box. “On the contrary.” Crispin slowed his steps. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Awe coated Elizabeth’s words with such reverence, he squinted, attempting to see what it was that held her so fascinated.

  “What is the hour?” she demanded, her voice animated. She whipped her gaze briefly from the pair working across the street.

  Crispin fumbled for his watch fob and consulted the timepiece. “Nearly five minutes past one o’clock.” And his wife was as alert as if she’d just arisen, fresh and ready to face a new day.

  “Remarkable,” she murmured and then spread her arms wide as the lamplighter descended the ladder and walked a handful of paces to the next post. “They’ve managed to turn night into day.” She stared at Crispin, clearly expecting something. Tossing her hands up in exasperation, Elizabeth quit his side and rushed off, all but sprinting to the nearest lamppost.

  The hovering servants exchanged glances, shifting on their feet.

  Crispin dismissed them with a slight nod, wholly riveted by Elizabeth’s palpable excitement. She brushed her gloveless palm over the metal post. “Do you know, gas lighting first appeared in Pall Mall in 1812, but they used wooden gas pipes?”

  “Did they?”

  She sighed. “Crispin.”

  He shook his head.

  “Wooden gas pipes,” she repeated. “There were numerous explosions and a few deaths.”

  He removed his hat and beat it against his leg. “Hence the perils of metropolitan living.”

  Elizabeth scoffed. “Nonsense. How many times did we sit with only the benefit of a single candle to light our books? Why, if we’d had this…” She spread her arms wide. Her eyes twinkled with her excitement, and at the sight of her in such an unfettered state of joy, he felt something shift in his chest. “The day is longer, and there is so much to see, and…” Her chattering drew to a stop. “What is it?”

  Drawn like a moth to the flame, he drifted over. “It is you.”

  “Me?”

  He dusted his knuckles down her satin-soft cheek. “I’d never considered it in that way.” London had always represented a cage, a hated place he was expected to spend time because of his station and role in Parliament. What would it have been like sharing this place with her?

  Elizabeth smiled, dimpling her cheeks. “Well, you should. There is good to be found in everything. If you simply look.”

  Another carriage rattled by. “It is late,” he murmured.

  “Yes.” Yet, they stood there anyway.

  For when tomorrow came, so would the ball, the one night he’d requested of her before he set her free, and there would be her eventual return to Mrs. Belden’s.

  Hollow at the thought, Crispin returned his hat atop his head. Taking the unspoken cue, Elizabeth fell into step beside him. This time, as they drew before the handful of limestone steps leading to the black double doors, only Aldis, the recently hired butler, stood in wait.

  “Your Graces,” he greeted, dropping a deferential bow as they entered.

  With it, reality intruded, as it invariably did in this rotted place. “Aldis.” He did a sweep of the foyer.

  The blessedly empty foyer.
<
br />   He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached. His faithless, single-minded mother, was nowhere in sight.

  “Her Grace has not yet returned for the evening, Your Grace,” the butler murmured.

  Some of the tension went out of him. That meeting would come later.

  Crispin looked up the stairwell where Mrs. Willoughby, made her descent.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Willoughby,” he greeted the plump, white-haired older woman. “Mr. Barlow—?”

  “Has been shown to his rooms,” she supplied, with a curtsy and a wide smile. She turned her focus to Elizabeth.

  Crispin performed introductions between the two. “Will you show Her Grace to her chambers?” he asked, feeling Elizabeth’s stare on him.

  “Of course, Your Grace,” Mrs. Willoughby said with her usual cheer. “If you will follow me, Your Grace.”

  Elizabeth lingered her gaze on him. Looking as though she wished to say something. Did she want him to follow her? Did she wish to continue their discourse on London? What was it?

  In the end, silent in ways she’d never been, Elizabeth followed the housekeeper.

  Crispin stared after the departing pair as they climbed abovestairs and then continued down the intersecting hall at the entrance of the landing.

  When they’d gone, he turned to Aldis. “I require one of my mounts readied.”

  If he’d asked the man to fetch the king’s crown, he couldn’t have appeared more shocked. Aldis, wide-eyed, took in Crispin’s rumpled garments, and he sniffed the air momentarily before mastering his perfect composure. “As you wish, Your Grace.”

  He shook his head. Yes, because Crispin was nothing if not predictable. No one would dare expect him, immaculately attired and not steeped in scandal, to venture out at this ungodly hour with his garments in their currently sorry state.