She gave him a meaningful look. Given he was widely known to eschew dancing, his participation would set the whole room atwitter. His choice of partner would no doubt be scrutinized like tea leaves for some sign of his intentions. There was one clear choice for whom he should ask, and she was standing next to him, fluttering her eyelashes in expectation of being made the envy of the room.
“Excuse me,” he said, nevertheless, to Miss Bastian.
He turned and walked toward Poppy. The gentlemen surrounding her greeted him with the grudging respect that marked his relations with London’s grandees. He rather enjoyed their incredulous expressions when he interrupted them to address the nurserywoman.
“Good evening, Miss Cavendish.”
She arranged her face into a polite, if chilly, smile. “Your Grace.”
“It’s a triumph, what you’ve done here,” he said. “I can’t fathom how you’ve managed it.”
“You’re kind. I’m glad I was able to help your sister make her mark.”
He felt the other men watching him with interest. “I trust,” he drawled, grasping for a neutral topic, “that you are satisfied with the work at Greenwoods House? Constance tells me that her steward finished transporting the last of your plants.”
“Indeed.”
“What will you do next?” he asked.
“I shall use your sister’s influence to expand my custom and attempt to launch a subscription scheme for my nursery.” She paused and lowered her voice. “And endeavor to do so without falling off my horse.”
He laughed, wishing he could hug her for that acknowledgment of their brief friendship. He’d missed the rueful way she had with words.
“I must make my farewells, Your Grace,” she said, moving as if to turn away. “And I can see Miss Bastian has grown anxious for your company.”
He glanced back at the young lady, who was regarding them with an expression of profound distaste.
“I don’t suppose, Miss Cavendish, that you remember how to dance?”
She looked up in surprise, her eyes guarded.
“I am not certain I do, Your Grace. If you recall, I had a terrible teacher.”
“You deserved better,” he said in a low voice. “Would you do me the honor anyway?”
She accepted his hand.
He felt hundreds of curious eyes following them as he led her through the open terrace doors and down the candlelit path to a dance floor lit by torches at the edge of the lake.
As the first strains of the music began, he bowed and took her hand. She held herself crisply, on edge.
He focused on the pleasure of her hand in his, in watching her swirl about the floor. When the movement concluded, and other dancers joined them, she stepped away.
“I must bid you farewell,” she said with a curtsy. “I am to leave early in the morning. I wish you well, Your Grace.”
“I beg you, sit with me for a moment?” He indicated a bench overlooking the lake a few paces away.
She glanced skeptically at the bench.
“Please. There’s something I owe it to you to say, and I am weeks remiss in saying it.”
She relented and followed him to the bench. She settled her skirts around her, careful not to allow them to brush against his person, and looked at him expectantly.
“Poppy, I want to apologize to you. Properly. For what happened in my study.”
She looked out at the lake beyond him, avoiding his eyes. “Let’s not speak of that unpleasantness. We have both made mistakes. We part amicably.”
He shook his head, hating this polite, circumspect dismissal.
“Cavendish, the mistake was mine. I should not have put you in that position. It was dishonorable of me. I flatter myself a better man than that.”
“Put me in that position,” she repeated, narrowing her eyes. “Is that what you thought you were doing? And here I thought I put myself there. If you wish to apologize, do so accurately. The way I recall it, your injury to me was not in bestowing your attentions, but in withdrawing them. And in so doing, informing me that I was the wrong kind of woman on whom to bestow them at all.”
He winced. “What I said was nonsense. My words were rude and ungracious and I have spent the last week at a loss for how to tell you how deeply I regret them.”
She was silent for a moment. “Nevertheless, you were not wrong when you reminded me of the order of the world. You are a duke and I am the proprietress of a modest nursery. I shan’t forget myself again.”
She made as if to rise once more. And so to stop her, he let the first words that came to him pour forth.
“I did not mean to imply you are the wrong kind of woman, Poppy. I meant that I am the wrong kind of man. And not in the way you might think. I don’t customarily conduct myself that way. I don’t … bestow my attentions in that fashion. On anyone. I haven’t for years, and for good reason. But I simply wanted you too badly to stop myself. And when I came to my senses, I fled. That’s the truth. It was cowardly. I regret it. And I’m sorry.”
He fully expected that these would be the last words he ever said to her.
That she would turn on her heel and walk away from his admission.
Instead she looked at him with an expression that was half-amused and half-intrigued.
“Really?”
The expression in the Duke of Westmead’s eyes was so astoundingly, resignedly unguarded that for one moment she could have mistaken him for a different man. Not the one who held himself with such intense control. Someone else. Someone who held a hidden depth of feeling he chose not to reveal.
She had misjudged him.
These past weeks she had assumed his listlessness was the pouting of a bored aristocrat, deprived of his clubs and women. That his unkindness to her was the inborn arrogance of Norman bloodlines. That she was one of many women who found themselves disrobing in his study, and he had found her lacking.
One could not reside in Grove Vale without hearing the rumors about his father. The women he’d kept here, despite the presence of his suffering wife. The unsettling conditions in which they’d lived until, inevitably, he’d tired of them.
It was said the son had sought out the injured women and made what reparations he was able. But were sons not made in the image of their fathers? Was the man who’d invited her to call him Archer not still Westmead?
And yet tonight she had seen the way that the men and women of his rank looked at him. The way powerful men went quiet when he came near, and ladies ceased to laugh and flirt, growing sober and uncertain in his presence. He was clearly a legend in this world. And yet, just as clearly, he was not a member of it.
He was something more intriguing: an impostor.
Now that she had seen a glimpse of the man that he was hiding, she wanted to see more.
“I wish you had simply told me this before,” she said.
“It’s not something I relish discussing.”
“Nevertheless I should have liked to have your friendship.”
He sighed and looked away. When he looked back, his eyes were once more strangely luminous. “Poppy. You have it.”
“Westmead?” a voice behind them said. They both turned to find the silhouette of Lady Rosecroft.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need your help,” she said. “Georgie has gone missing.”
Chapter 13
Archer stared at his cousin, stricken.
And then he was off the bench and leading Hilary back to the terrace, where a small crowd of family and servants had gathered discreetly.
Poppy took a moment to collect herself. Had Lady Hilary not appeared at that exact moment, she would have leaned in and touched his face and kissed him.
Why was it that he made her do exactly what she knew she shouldn’t?
How many times did she need to learn this lesson?
She stood and smoothed her gown, letting the cool nighttime air do the work of coaxing the blood out of her heart and into her head. A child was missing. S
he knew these grounds as well as anyone. She should offer her help in finding him.
On the terrace, Lady Hilary was speaking to the small crowd in an anxious murmur. “Sometimes he wakes up in the night and wanders from his cot. At home his nurse sleeps with the nursery door locked, but here there is no bolt.” Her voice broke. “I fear he may have slipped outside.”
Archer put a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “We will find him. I promise you.” He turned to the nurse, an older, kind-faced woman hovering nervously at her mistress’s side. “Where has he gone in the past, when he wanders?”
The old woman gathered herself with a shaking breath. “In London he often heads for the mews. He’s fond of horses. But he doesn’t know his way around these grounds.” She glanced with dread at the lake. “And he doesn’t know how to swim.”
“Miles,” Archer commanded the underbutler, “gather the footmen and see that they surround the perimeter of the lake with torches at once. And send another group out to search the pleasure gardens. He couldn’t have gone far.”
Poppy took a torch from a footman. “I will check the garden outbuildings. Maxwell keeps animals there. Perhaps he saw them from his window.”
“Miss Cavendish,” Lady Rosecroft objected, “thank you, but you mustn’t walk out alone.”
“Don’t think of it. I have been over every inch of these grounds. I daresay I am as equipped as anyone to find the boy quickly.”
“I’ll accompany Miss Cavendish,” Archer said. “In the meantime, Hilary, stay here in case he returns.”
He took his own torch from a footman and together they walked briskly away from the lights and music, following the path to the outbuildings west of the house. A single mule stood loose before the stall, munching on grass. The door to its pen was ajar.
“Christ,” Archer swore, and broke into a run. She jogged along behind him, fearful of what they would find inside. If the tiny boy had indeed made his way in and managed to open the pens, he would be in danger of being kicked or bitten.
“Georgie?” Archer called, ducking under the low roof.
Inside the dim building she could hear the breathing of sleeping animals. It made her uneasy. The calm rhythm of their breath in the moonlit pen brought back memories of her own childhood, when she’d crawl up into the loft of her uncle’s stables when she was terrified and missed her mother.
“He’s not here,” Archer said, shining the light across the stalls.
She leaned up on her tiptoes, looking for the smallest, darkest spaces.
She could still feel that child’s fear, that primal urge to burrow into the darkest, smallest nooks. Hiding in the shadows, listening to the breath of animals the way she’d once listened to her parents sleep when they had lived, had been the only way to outrun the nightmares. She had sorely tried the patience of several relatives before her uncle had taken her in, for no one knew what to make of a lonely little girl as liable to be found at dawn trembling in a manger as asleep in the nursery. No one knew what to do with a child who screamed through the night, stricken by terrors no one could account for. Her parents’ deaths, after all, had been so ordinary—weak lungs, a fever following the loss of a child. The visions that had tormented her—her father’s coffin, the tiny, wizened baby, the deluge of maternal blood, the soiled sheets—had struck her aunts as ghoulish and unnerving, out of all proportion to her loss.
Only Bernadette had understood. Bernadette, the nurse her uncle had hired at Bantham Park, had lost her own parents. She’d sensed innately what Poppy had really wanted when she’d hidden herself away.
To be found.
For to be found was the only way of knowing you were wanted.
In the farthest corners, she saw a recess under the roof, just low enough that a child might clamber up the stall beside it and tuck himself inside.
“Georgie?” she called out. “Georgie, darling, are you about? You mustn’t be scared. We’re here to bring you home. Your mama misses you very much.”
A small voice laden with tears whispered from a corner stall. “I’m frightened.”
Poppy raised her torch.
The boy was tucked up in a pile of straw, his frilled nightdress and cap covered in bits of hay. Archer handed her his torch and lurched for him. “Come here, my boy,” he murmured. “It’s all right. You’re safe.” Georgie snuggled against him with a frightened sob, his blond ringlets crushed against Archer’s neck.
She watched as Archer rocked the child back and forth and whispered soothing words to him. His face was poetry, haggard with quiet devastation. She stared at it. That face was one she knew. She knew.
That fierce slash of a nose, the tousle of dark hair. The torchlight in the near blackness of the stables, the grassy smell of manure, a whispered voice amidst the murmuring of sleeping animals.
The wind fell out of her.
She knew exactly who he was.
Why she had recognized him that first evening when he’d driven her to Greenwoods House.
Why, in the grips of laudanum, the man in her bed had seemed no more real than the figure in her nightmares.
Why lately her thoughts had turned so frequently to that night when no one had found Poppy hidden in the stables, because Bernadette had disappeared.
She had sensed Westmead had a secret. But never, ever, had she imagined it was something like this.
He was indeed his father’s son.
She’d been a fool.
It had grown late. The last of the guests were making the sleepy walk to their chambers or carriages. Outside, footmen tiptoed across the shadowy lawn, removing abandoned flutes of champagne.
Archer had meant to use this night to find a wife, and instead he’d spent it on the floor of the nursery, watching his godson build and destroy towers of blocks until the dying notes of the orchestra had faded.
Not that he minded. He felt curiously aloft. He had forgotten the way that children of that age smiled and laughed at the slightest provocation. How their large eyes looked at you with the purest kind of trust, the darkness the world could bring not yet impressed upon their minds. The clean and milky smell of them as they drifted off to sleep.
He grabbed a bottle of chilled wine from a silver ice chest and snatched two crystal glasses from the tray of a passing footman. Now that the ball had concluded, festivities were in order. And he knew just the person he wanted to toast.
He strolled to his wing of the house and glanced down the hall. Firelight flickered beneath the door. He gave it a light tap. “Cavendish?” he said quietly, through a smile. “A word, if you’re awake?”
There was no answer. Perhaps she had gone to his study.
But that room, too, was empty. The fire was nearly dead in the grate and her things were no longer on the table. All that was left of her pile of drawings and chalk was a single slip of paper and the crown of plumeria he’d had made for her—torn now, as if she had ripped it from her head without removing the pins.
He picked up the note.
I once asked you how it was I seemed to know you. I now understand why you lied.
Stay away.
He stared at it blankly. When she’d inquired if he’d known her late uncle, he had answered truthfully. Of course, he had been to Bantham Park once or twice, if furtively, during the years when she would have been a child. But certainly never as a guest of the house. Certainly not in any circumstance in which he would have been introduced to a little girl.
He strode back to her door and knocked on it firmly, not much caring who heard. When still she didn’t answer, he tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. He poked his head inside, averting his eyes in case she was indecent.
“Poppy, what is the meaning of this?” he said, holding out the offending slip of paper.
Silence. He scanned the room.
She wasn’t in it.
Her fire was lit. Her gown was laid out on the bed. Her shoes, cleaned of mud, were drying on the windowsill.
But she was gone. On her dres
sing table she had left a note to his sister. Furiously, he scanned it— Summoned suddenly … Have my things sent to me in the morning … Most affectionate regards.
Lies. There was no one to summon Poppy Cavendish. She was as utterly alone in the world as a young woman could be.
Which meant that she had run away.
From him.
In the middle of the poxing goddamned night.
Chapter 14
It was madness to walk through the forest alone in the dark.
She had been overwrought.
She had made the wrong calculation.
And now she was trapped. Too far to go back to Westhaven. Miles yet from the safety of Greenwoods House.
She crept through the woods in her boots and breeches, cursing herself for the decision to flee with every heart-stopping snap of a twig. Breathe. Now would be a very bad time to fall apart. She need only locate the stream that bordered the edge of the Westhaven lands. From there she could extinguish her lamp and follow the water by moonlight. She would be safer without the glow of the candle alerting passersby to her presence.
She crept onward through the fine mist. Clouds shuttered the moon and trees rose up around her in every direction, tall and menacing. She paused again, disoriented. It would not do to walk in circles.
Her heart sank when she heard it. The distant clip clop clop of an approaching horse. She had only a moment to make a decision: she could leave her lamp burning and be certain to be spotted by whoever approached, or extinguish it and attempt to hide, which would leave her in complete darkness once the rider passed.
She chose the occlusion of darkness. The pale flame of her lamp died just as the rider’s own came into view. She darted under the cover of a thicket but chose her berth badly—thorns sank into the thin fabric of her breeches. Pain shot through her knees, so sharp she had to bite her hand to keep from gasping.
The rider slowed within a few yards of her hiding place. He must have seen her lamp.
“Poppy,” Westmead’s voice called from a few feet away. “Come out.”
The Duke I Tempted Page 11