Slightly Dangerous

by Mary Balogh

  There was a crowd down in the hall.

  “Oh, there you are, Christine,” Melanie said.

  She was caught up in handshakes and hugs then. They were the first to leave, though everyone else was also going today. Hermione was actually crying, and that threatened to start Christine off too. She stretched her smile wider.

  Melanie and Bertie hurried out to the carriage.

  “Mrs. Derrick.” It was the duke’s cool, haughty voice. “Allow me to hold an umbrella over your head so that you will not get wet.”

  She added a sparkle to her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She put her head down as they stepped out through the front doors and he hoisted a large black umbrella over her. She tried to hurry. But he took her arm in a firm grasp.

  She turned and smiled at him.

  “How unmannerly the rain has made me,” she said. “I did not say thank you for your hospitality, your grace. It really has been a splendid stay.”

  “But your mother is not here, Mrs. Derrick,” he said, “and neither are your sisters or your brother-in-law. There is a question I wish to ask you, but courtesy dictates that I speak at least to your mother first. It is something I did not do last summer. May I speak to her? And may I ask my question afterward? I will not trouble either her or you if you would rather I did not.”

  The umbrella gave the illusion of seclusion and privacy. Christine could hear the rain drumming lightly on its fabric. She looked into his eyes, and suddenly depression fled and a blazing happiness took its place.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice breathless. “You may call on my mother. She will be honored. And you may call upon me. I will be . . .”

  “Christine?” he prompted softly.

  “Pleased,” she said, and whisked herself out from under the umbrella and up the steps into the carriage without waiting for him to hand her in.

  And now the stupid tears came, filling her eyes and blurring her vision, and threatening to spill down over her cheeks.

  Melanie patted her hand as the door shut with a firm click and the carriage bounced and lurched into almost instant motion.

  “I am so sorry, Christine,” she said. “I expected some announcement during the ball. Everyone did. But no matter. He is a haughty, disagreeable man anyway, is he not, and we will find someone else for you. It will not be difficult, you know. You are amazingly attractive to men.”

  There had been no announcement at the ball, Christine thought, because her mother had not been there, or Eleanor or Hazel and Charles. And he had felt—so different from last year!—that it would be discourteous to proceed without the formality of consulting them first.

  She was not in love, she thought. Not at all.

  She loved!

  IT WAS WULFRIC’S guess that Christine Derrick had not told her family that he was to be expected. He was seated in the sitting room at Hyacinth Cottage making labored conversation with them, and it was perfectly clear to him that they were terrified. At least, Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Lofter were—the latter had come to call just after Wulfric and looked, after she had entered the sitting room, as if she would have withdrawn again if only she decently could. Miss Thompson looked at him over the tops of her spectacles, which she had not removed even though she had closed the book she had been reading when he arrived. There was a faint look of amusement on her face, somewhat reminiscent of her youngest sister.

  It was eight days since Christine had left Lindsey Hall with the Renables. And of course he had had to arrive on an afternoon when she was not at home, though she was expected home at any moment for tea. Mrs. Thompson kept glancing nervously at the window as if she could thus precipitate the arrival of her youngest daughter.

  Actually it was a good thing she was not at home, Wulfric decided. And he had made enough small talk.

  “There is a matter I wish to discuss with you, ma’am,” he said, addressing Mrs. Thompson, “before I speak with Mrs. Derrick. And it is, perhaps, as well that your other daughters are present too. I wonder if you would have any objection to my making Mrs. Derrick the Duchess of Bewcastle?”

  Mrs. Thompson gaped at him. Mrs. Lofter slapped both hands to her cheeks. It was Miss Thompson who answered him after a short silence.

  “Is Christine expecting you, your grace?” she asked.

  “I believe,” he said, “she is.”

  “Then if it is the prospect of that that has put an extra spring in her step and an even warmer smile than usual on her lips since she returned from Hampshire last week,” she said, “I believe we would be delighted, your grace. Not because she will be the Duchess of Bewcastle, but because she will be happy again.”

  “But Eleanor,” Mrs. Lofter said, “Christine is always happy.”

  “Is she?” Miss Thompson asked, though she did not pursue the question.

  “Oh, bless my soul,” Mrs. Thompson said, “Christine a duchess. It is remarkably civil of you to ask us, your grace. You do not need to do so, I am sure, you being a duke and all and Christine being quite old enough to decide for herself. If her father could only have lived to see this day.”

  But there was the sound of voices from the hallway beyond the sitting room.

  “I am late for tea, Mrs. Skinner,” Christine Derrick was saying. “I was reading to Mr. Potts and he fell asleep as he usually does by the time I reach the third paragraph, the poor lamb. But as I got up to tiptoe out and home, he woke up and entertained me for half an hour without stopping with all his old stories. I wish someone would give me a shilling for every time I have listened to them. But it gives him so much pleasure to hear me exclaim and laugh in all the right places.”

  She was laughing at the memory as she opened the sitting room door and came tripping inside, the old, floppy-brimmed straw bonnet on her head, and wearing the green-and-white-striped poplin dress Wulfric remembered from last year, and looking quite as pretty as she had looked in all her new finery in London and at Lindsey Hall.

  “Oh,” she said, the smile arrested on her face.

  Wulfric had risen to his feet and was making his bow to her.

  “Mrs. Derrick,” he said.

  “Your grace.” She curtsied.

  Mrs. Thompson got to her feet too.

  “His grace wishes to speak with you in private, Christine,” she said. “Come along, Eleanor. Come along, Hazel. We will go elsewhere.”

  “I would far prefer to take Mrs. Derrick into the side garden, ma’am,” Wulfric said. That was where he had gone most terribly wrong last year. It seemed important to him that it be there he try to made amends.

  And so no more than a minute or two later they had stepped out through the front door and climbed the shallow steps to the trellis arch, and walked beneath it into the quiet, square garden that he had seen in his nightmares for some weeks after the last time he was here.

  “Mrs. Skinner ought to have said something before I went into the sitting room,” she said. “I could have made myself more presentable.”

  “For one thing,” he told her, “I do not believe you allowed your housekeeper to get a word in edgewise. And, for another, you look adorable as you are.”

  “Oh.” She had scurried around behind the wooden seat again, as she had done last time. She gripped the back with both hands.

  “First,” he said, setting his hands behind his back, “I must tell you that I can never be the man you dream of—”

  “Yes, you can,” she said quickly, interrupting him. “You can and you are. I am not sure what was on that list I gave you last year, but it does not signify. You are everything I could ever dream of and more.”

  There went the speech he had so carefully prepared.

  “You will have me, then?” he asked her.

  “No.” She shook her head, and he closed his eyes.

  “I cannot possibly be the sort of woman you need as your duchess,” she said.

  He opened his eyes.

  “You are not planning to spout nonsense at me, are y
ou?” he asked her. “I have it on the highest authority—Freyja’s—that none of my brothers and sisters or their spouses or their children will ever speak to me again if I do not offer you just that position and persuade you to accept. And no members of the ton are higher sticklers than the Bedwyns.”

  “The Marchioness of Rochester is,” she said.

  “My aunt,” he told her, “is like the rest of us—she likes to have her own way. She had the silly notion that my uncle’s niece and I would suit. But she will get over her disappointment. She adores me. I am her favorite. None of my siblings, by the way, have ever been jealous of that fact.”

  She laughed, as he had intended. She came around and sat on the seat.

  “Your grace,” she said, “I—”

  “Must you your grace me?” he asked her. “Must you, Christine?”

  “It seems presumptuous to call you Wulfric,” she said.

  “You did not think so when you were in bed with me at the dovecote,” he said.

  She blushed quite rosily, though she would not look away from him. It was amazing to think that it was that very fact that had first caused him to notice her at Schofield Park.

  “Wulfric,” she said, “I am thirty years old. I had my thirtieth birthday three days ago.”

  “Ah,” he said. “For a few weeks, then, I can pretend that I am only five years older than you. I am not yet quite thirty-six.”

  “Oh, you must know what I mean,” she said. “Even if I were not barren I would be approaching the end of my fertile years. But I am barren. I ought to have said no when you asked if you could come here. But I was not thinking straight. I was thinking only of how wonderful those days at Lindsey Hall had been and of—”

  “Christine,” he said, “do stop talking nonsense. I have told you before that I have three brothers, any of whom I would be happy to have succeed me. You have met them for yourself. And, if Aidan produces no sons, I could happily think of young William eventually taking over the title. I did not really expect to marry. After trying and failing to make a dynastic marriage when I was twenty-four, I knew that I could never marry unless I met the woman who could be soul of my soul. Frankly, I did not expect ever to meet her. I am not a man who has inspired much love.”

  “Your brothers and sisters love you dearly,” she said.

  “Christine,” he said, “you are light and joy and the embodiment of love. If you were to agree to be my wife, I would not expect you to shape yourself into your image of what a duchess should be—or into anyone else’s image either. Aunt Rochester would have a good try. I would expect—I would demand—only that you be you. If anyone does not like your style of duchess, then to hell with that person. But I would not expect it to happen. You have a gift for attracting love and laughter, even from people who have no intention of loving you or laughing with you.”

  She looked down then at the hands in her lap, and her face was hidden beneath the brim of her bonnet.

  “I will always be the stern, aloof, rather cold aristocrat you so despise,” he said. “I have to be. I—”

  “I know,” she said, looking up quickly. “I would neither expect nor want you to change. I love the Duke of Bewcastle as he is. He is formidable and magnificent and dangerous—especially when he hauls villains to their feet with one hand and dangles them above the floor and throws terror into them with a few soft words.”

  The familiar laughter lurked in her eyes.

  “But I will always be Wulfric Bedwyn too,” he said. “And he has discovered that it can occasionally be fun to dive into lakes out of forbidden trees.”

  The laughter spread to the rest of her face.

  “I love Wulfric Bedwyn,” she said, and there was a wicked inflection in her voice.

  “Do you?” He closed the distance between them and took both her hands in his. He raised them one at a time to his lips. “Do you, my love? Enough to take a chance on me? I had better warn you. There is a Bedwyn tradition that we do not necessarily marry early in life but that when we do marry we give our whole devotion and fidelity to our spouse. If you marry me, you must expect to be adored for the rest of your life.”

  She sighed. “I think I could bear it,” she said, “if I try very hard. But only if I can do the same to you.”

  She laughed at him, and he smiled slowly back at her.

  “Well.” He gripped her hands more tightly. “Well.”

  He knelt on the grass before the bench and kissed her hands in her lap again.

  “You will marry me, Christine?”

  She leaned over him and kissed his cheek.

  “Yes, I will,” she said. “Oh, yes, I will, Wulfric, if you please.”

  He turned his head and their lips met.

  SITTING IN A pew in St. George’s, Hanover Square, when the church had been half full for Audrey’s wedding to Sir Lewis Wiseman at the end of February had inspired Christine with awe.

  Viewing it from the end of the nave when it was full to capacity with almost every member of the ton who was still drawing breath for her own wedding in the middle of June filled her with such terror that she was afraid that her knees would forget how to lock themselves in place and her legs would forget how to move one at a time and she would collapse in an ignominious heap as soon as the organ started to play—which it was doing now—and Basil would have to drag her down to the altar so that she would not lose her chance of becoming a duchess.

  Charles was helping at the altar, and so there had been no conflict about which brother-in-law would give her away.

  “Oh, dear,” she murmured, in deep distress.

  “Steady.” Basil patted her hand. “Everyone is waiting to see you, Christine.”

  That, she thought, was the whole point.

  Wulfric had given her the choice of where she wanted their nuptials to be solemnized. She would have been very happy with the church in the village, with Charles officiating. She would have been equally happy with the church at Lindsey Hall. And he would have been too. He had said so. But no, she had had to be noble about the whole thing. He was the Duke of Bewcastle, after all, one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the land. Surely, then, it was important for him that their wedding be solemnized with all the pomp and ceremony due to his position. And so she had settled on St. George’s, where all the fashionable weddings of the beau monde took place during the Season.

  So there was really no one to blame for this terrifying moment but herself.

  And then Basil patted her hand once more and they began to walk toward the altar—and she discovered that her legs and her knees did remember how to function. But it was not her legs or her knees that she had to thank for that fact.

  She had looked ahead—down the long aisle to the altar rail.

  He was wearing cream and brown and gold and looked quite astonishingly gorgeous. There was one moment—perhaps even two—of unreality and disbelief. He could not possibly be waiting for her. She must have stumbled into someone else’s dream and would wake up any moment in the schoolroom or in Hyacinth Cottage.

  But then his face came into focus. It was handsome in a cold, austere way, with stern jaw, thin lips, high cheekbones, and a prominent, slightly hooked, finely chiseled nose. The face of the Duke of Bewcastle.

  The face of the man she loved with all her heart.

  Wulfric’s face.

  Through the veil of her moss green bonnet, she smiled at him.

  But finally, as she drew closer on Basil’s arm, it was only his eyes she saw—his silver eyes, glowing with an intense light as he watched her come, oblivious, it seemed, to Lord Aidan at his side and everyone else in the church.

  And then he smiled slowly at her in that way he had of transforming himself into surely the most handsome man who had ever lived.

  She was at his side then, and it no longer occurred to her to be nervous. There was no one else in the world except Wulfric and herself—and the clergyman who would make them into man and wife for the rest of their lives.

&
nbsp; “Dearly beloved,” he began in the sonorous tones peculiar to the clergy on all solemn occasions.

  WULFRIC HAD HIS first taste of what was to come for the rest of his married days when the service was over and the register signed and the organ playing for the solemn procession out of the church, past all their guests, who sat with quiet dignity in their pews.

  Christine clung to his arm and he looked down at her with warm sympathy. He knew she had chosen St. George’s and a large, very public wedding for his sake. He guessed that she was very nervous, facing their guests for the first time.

  She was smiling sunnily and happily, the veil thrown back over the brim of her bonnet. She was smiling right and left, at her family, at those few of his who were in evidence, at other acquaintances.

  Ah, he need not have been concerned.

  And then, when they were halfway out and the organ had reached a crescendo of the stately anthem, she pointed with one outstretched arm to the far corner of the church.

  “Oh, look, Wulfric,” she said aloud, “the children are here.”

  They were too—all the younger ones, with their nurses, close enough to the back that they might have been taken out if they had proved troublesome.

  “That’s Aunt Christine,” William said quite distinctly.

  “And Uncle Wulf,” said Jacques.

  And Christine raised her arm and waved gaily at them—with all the ton looking on.

  Wulfric paused and waited until she was ready to resume the solemn procession. And since there was nothing much else to do while he waited, he raised a hand and waved too. And grinned.

  Life, he guessed, was going to be an adventure now that he was thirty-six. This was, in fact, his birthday.

  “I had better warn you,” he murmured as they reached the outer doors. “I am not sure if you noticed a few empty pews at the front of the church on the way out. The people who ought to have been occupying them are waiting for us outside.”

  And, sure enough, there were all the Bedwyns and their spouses and their older children lined up between the doors and the waiting carriage, armed with rose petals.