“As I made clear before, I cannot accept your offer. Please, I would like for you to leave.”
“Oh, enough with the coy talk. You’ll not find better than me, being compromised.”
She stared at him. His face was a portrait not of anger but of certainty. He thought he had her.
Rage sparked in her toes and fingertips and shot up her arms and legs until it tingled behind her eyes, hot as a beam of light.
This would be the life that she had to look forward to if she returned Archer’s contract to him unsigned. Men who thought they could do what they wished to her because her name had once been printed in a gazette. Men who smelled the stink of vulnerability and chased it.
She came to a decision.
“I’m promised to be married to the Duke of Westmead.”
“Wot?” Tom’s eyes flashed from disbelief to wounded pride to something more like hatred.
“I am pledged elsewhere. And the duke will be displeased to find you lingering here. Go.” She pointed out the door with her spade.
Tom turned and stalked toward the door. He stopped at the shelf holding the delicate shoots of her magnolia plants. He snatched the most promising of the cuttings, which just this morning she’d carefully planted in damp soil in a pretty painted pot. He took the time to meet her eye before he hurled it at her feet.
Shattered glass and soil erupted around her shoes.
“Cunt.”
He kicked the pile of dirt and glass toward the hem of her dress as he walked out the door.
She waited until she was sure he was gone before she moved. Shaking, she bolted the door and shut the windows. She got on her knees and swept up the shards of glass. She found another pot and carefully transferred the plant into fresh soil.
And then she returned to her desk and crumpled up the letter begging off. She dipped her quill in ink and wrote Poplar, after the tree, Elizabeth, after her mother, Cavendish, the last of her father’s line, and signed the last contract she would ever conduct in her own name. The name of a girl who had fought and fought, but who had lost the battle.
It was a gamble, to retire Poppy Cavendish.
But the fine fight wasn’t over yet. She would simply have to wage a war.
And she would do so under the banner of the Duchess of Westmead.
Chapter 18
The Westhaven chapel being one of the few ancient buildings that had yet been spared Constance’s zest for renovation, the air that greeted Archer as he entered the nave was damp and musty.
Outside, a crack of lightning rent the charcoal sky in shades of jaundice. The old stone building shook with thunder. A bead of water dripped from an eave above his head, hitting him on the forehead with a smack.
“How auspicious,” he muttered to the vicar.
He had slept badly. He had had to see to business in London and consequently had not set eyes on Poppy since the day he had cajoled her into marrying him. And though she had signed the marriage contracts and consented to his sister’s rush to outfit her in nuptial finery, he could not shake the feeling that she would not show up this morning. Nor the feeling that if she didn’t, he would be rather more crushed than was proportionate to the kind of marriage he had meant to arrange for himself. The kind one did not stand at the altar fretting over when the bride was three minutes late.
He refrained from checking his watch, refusing to make a public spectacle of his nerves, but he keenly wished he knew the precise hour, minute, and second of this day, the better to recalculate the odds he would conclude it still unmarried.
The guests shifted, no doubt making the same grim calculations.
But no. They were only looking toward the door, where Poppy dashed inside flanked by Constance and Valeria, who held cloaks above her head to shield her from the rain.
She was stunning.
She wore a simple ivory bodice with a low neckline and long sleeves. Below it delicate skirts swirled around her over airy petticoats, like one of her gardening dresses had been respun from magic and fine silk.
This was how she should look always.
This was how she should look, at least, until he took it off her.
A sedate march played as she walked toward him down the aisle. It tugged at him that she made the walk alone—that there was no one to whom she was precious enough that her hand must be given away to her husband in marriage.
He would be that person, he decided.
If he could give her nothing else, he would be the person to whom she was precious. He was not capable of love. But he had a gift for recognizing value.
She walked toward him with such confidence that it was only when he took her hand, and felt that it was damp, that he realized she was nervous. He locked her in his gaze.
“Cavendish. You came,” he murmured, only for her ears. “I woke up convinced you wouldn’t.”
She shook her head. “Of course I came.”
He turned to the vicar, determined that she would not live to regret it.
As the storm raged on through the wedding breakfast, Archer turned grim with growing certainty that the houseful of guests due to depart in the afternoon would decide to stay on, pleading impassable roads.
He wanted them out.
Apthorp stood to make yet another toast to the happy couple. Archer groaned. Beside him, Poppy listened politely, raising her glass, smiling, laughing as required. She looked exquisite in her dress, her long neck rising swanlike from the low bodice, her hair frilling sweetly around her face below her crown of flowers, even curlier from the rain.
The godforsaken fucking rain. Would it never bloody end?
As yet another round of glasses drizzled champagne on the table, a ray of sunlight crept in through a window. Archer smiled for the first time in hours. The storm had finally exhausted itself. He abruptly rose from his chair and thanked the guests, concluding the meal. A flicker of amusement passed between several of the men at his eagerness to have his bride alone. Well, let them have their chuckle. But let them have it privately, in their coaches bound speedily away from this house.
Within the hour the good-byes had been said, the happy tears shed, and the guests departed. Only Constance and the Rosecrofts remained to say their last good-byes. They were off to Paris, where Constance and Hilary intended to spend the autumn buying jewels, gowns, and furs for the coming season.
“How happy I am to call you sister,” Constance said, wrapping her arms around Poppy. “We are so fortunate to have you as our own.”
She moved to Archer next. As she hugged him, she whispered something in his ear that sounded like you’re welcome.
At last, the door closed behind them. He turned to Poppy. Save for the footman, they were alone.
“It’s sweet, how much you’ll miss them,” she quipped. He laughed, surprised that she could read him.
“I missed you,” he said, drawing her close to him and inhaling the rosy smell of her hair and realizing it was true.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the footman sweep silently away. His new favorite. He didn’t want to be watched doing what he wanted to do to her. Which was to press her back against the mighty wooden door and bury his face exuberantly in her neck.
It was just a marriage of convenience, he reminded himself for the fourth time in as many hours. It wouldn’t do to get carried away. He must keep his head. He had talked her into this, against her better judgment. He had a responsibility to ensure this day went well for her.
And yet the smell of her skin was like a balm, soothing the tension that had been mounting in him for days. Here, with her in his arms in the entry of this house in which he’d always felt unwelcome, he had never felt more extraordinarily the relief of home.
When Poppy looked back on her wedding day, she knew she would never forget how Archer had smiled that morning when he first saw her. One of his lazy, glimmering smiles, like a light opening behind his eyes. There were no words for what it felt like to have his powerful attention trained on her. She h
ad been well and truly frightened in that moment. She could not afford to lose sight of the fact that the vows they were making were a pretext. She could not let herself look into his face and mistake it for what it plainly looked like.
She had to guard her heart.
But it was difficult, when his undisguised relief to be with her, the pleasure he took in touching her, even smelling her, was making something well up deep inside her stomach.
Difficult, when his lips had migrated somewhere beneath her hairline, and seemed to be nibbling at her neck.
“Shall we go for a stroll?” she asked on sudden impulse, her voice brittle with artificial cheer.
“A stroll,” his lips repeated from their vantage point beneath her ear, his voice dripping with amused dismay. He tore his mouth away from her and laced his fingers inside hers. “Yes, my dear wife. Just what I was thinking.”
“I must change first, of course. My gown will be ruined in the muck.”
“Were you planning on needing your wedding dress a second time?” he asked airily, steering her directly out the doors to the terrace.
“Archer,” she protested, gesturing at the impossibly delicate fabric of her skirts. “I refuse to ruin this. I could never look Valeria in the eyes again.”
He twitched his lips, considering, and then whirled her around, his fingers deftly finding the tapes that attached the skirt to her bodice and releasing them. The fabric fell to the ground around her, leaving her standing in her many layers of fine petticoats.
“Much better.” He nodded, squinting at her. “Just the ensemble for a stroll.”
She laughed helplessly as he led her down the terrace and to the path around the lake. The unfriendly pair of swans for once ignored the human interlopers, floating picturesquely near the Pantheon at the end of the gardens. For a while they walked in silence, she unsure of what to say, but happy just to enjoy the sensation of his fingertips brushing against her own.
Oh good heavens, what had she done?
Without conversation to distract her, the intimate event that must take place to ratify the oath they’d made loomed large ahead.
She had spent the last three weeks worrying over just this moment. Oscillating between excitement and dread until she lived in a permanent state of queasiness and couldn’t eat. On a visit to Constance, she had slipped back to his study and retrieved his secret book. It was wrong, and no doubt shameful, but at night, alone, she looked at it. Pondered the possibilities. Thought of what he’d think if he knew she was picturing them inhabiting those poses. She’d lingered over the ones in which the lady seemed imperious. She imagined them that way until she was flush and impatient for his hands on her, for hers on him, for the way he had made her feel the last time he had touched her.
Until, inevitably, her thoughts turned to the teeth-clenching way that evening had ended, and her stomach turned sour and she wanted to beg off entirely.
I suppose you will simply have to trust me.
Oh God, what had she done?
She’d resolved that she would not touch him. She would submit to the act, but no more, unless he specifically instructed her. That was how it was properly done, was it not? The way men expected women to conduct themselves?
“What is it?” Archer asked, the fine playful gentleman having retreated as he noticed her becoming lost in worry. “Do you regret it?”
“Regret marrying you?” She looked up at him, at the magnificent hair that fell over one eye, which her fingers had itched to sweep aside all day. His remarkable jaw, where a faint hint of dark stubble was beginning to appear. His eyes, which were constantly tricking her into feeling things that she shouldn’t.
“I don’t know yet, Your Grace.”
“I appreciate your honesty, Cavendish,” he said, the corners of his mouth rising up in a smile. Oh, how she liked it when he smiled. She wanted to make him smile again, and so she stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his mouth.
Bollocks.
She froze and cringed, her eyes shut, waiting for him to recoil. Why had she done that? Mere seconds after telling herself not to? If she was to survive this, she mustn’t, mustn’t touch him.
But he did not demur at the brush of her lips. He drew her against him and deepened the kiss, threading his fingers through a lock of her hair. Noticing she had grown rigid, he froze, then broke away, looking down at her in question.
“I’m sorry. Too much?”
“I keep forgetting not to touch you.”
He cocked his head. “Not to touch me?”
She nodded. Oh, but this was miserable and embarrassing. Couldn’t they just go inside and find the bed, and he could tell her what to do and have it done with?
“Because of … before …” she muttered helplessly.
Understanding dawned and the gentle humor left his face.
“Of course. I’m an idiot, Cavendish.”
He picked up her hands and put them to his chest. “But trust that I’m an idiot who wants, very badly, for you to touch him. However much you like.”
Tentatively, she raised one of her hands to his jaw and guided his mouth back down to hers. He murmured approval, taking her lower lip in his front teeth.
Feeling bolder, she nipped back at him, eliciting a growl from his throat. She wriggled, gaining purchase on his body, and he threw back his head at the feel of her. “Very, very badly,” he said in a low voice, and she felt her skin prickle awake.
A crash of thunder sounded as a single drop of rain landed on her hand. She looked up at the sky to find it had gone sallow. With another crash, beads of hail began to pebble the ground.
Archer grabbed her hand and dashed toward the Pantheon. The lawn off the path was spongy with rain, erupting with every step to soak through her slippers and splatter her petticoats with a thick spray of mud. As they dove for cover, the sky erupted in violet threads of lightning and hail rained down harder, in bits the size of marbles that scattered on the ground and stung her ankles through her stockings.
Laughing and out of breath, she sank back against a column. And suddenly his mouth was on hers again. He took her hands in his and raised them above her head, dragging his mouth from her lips and down her neck to the tops of her breasts.
She loved the luxury of his mouth on her, his hands on her, the way his eyes went dark and far away as he touched her.
“Untie me,” she whispered, wanting freedom from the heavy silk bodice, wanting to feel his hands on her skin. He unthreaded her gown and pulled it down, drawing her breasts up from the loosened stays and pressing his mouth to her nipples. She grabbed at him impatiently to rid him of his waistcoat, running her hands up and over the impossibly perfect contours of his back and shoulders. Finally her fingers freed him of his outer garments, leaving only the linen shirt below. Inordinately pleased, she kissed him along his jaw and down his neck and grabbed the ties that held his shirt and greedily unlaced them so she could run her hands along the bare surface of his chest.
Given he had not made love to a woman in thirteen years, he had imagined he would take his time with it. Maintain some husbandly modicum of restraint. He had not imagined it happening this way, urgently, outside, in his father’s ludicrous Pantheon.
Poppy ran her hands along his bare skin and he closed his eyes and surrendered to the feeling of her warmth, her girlish satisfaction in his body. Until it filtered through his consciousness that she was taking off his shirt.
He could not let her see his naked flesh.
His hands came down on top of hers to stop her. But at the look on her face, tentative and trusting, flushed with curiosity—he couldn’t bring himself to do what his better sense demanded. He could not jump away. He would not hurt her that way again.
He let her go about her task and braced himself for what he knew she would discover.
And indeed, when she saw it, she gasped.
Scars.
Running down the tops of Archer’s shoulders and down his back like a patch of soil in h
er garden, fiercely raked.
Poppy’s hands froze. Neither of them breathed.
She took a shaky breath and caressed his damaged flesh. He cringed.
In that small gesture she saw the real reason why he had run from her that night in his study. It was this. He did not want her to see these marks.
One more of his secrets that unfurled only to reveal another mystery. For these scars had been made by human hands.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, gruff. “I meant for you not to see that.”
His voice was so subdued that she couldn’t stand to hear it. She put her head on his bare shoulder and drew him near her with everything she had, pressing her hands into the small of his back to bring him closer.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
And he was. In the rain-dimmed twilight, his shoulders were broad, his stomach taut and trim, his chest dusted with dark hair that grew darker around his navel and trailed maddeningly below. Her fingers wandered down to trace the path it led, drawing up the courage to dance below his waist. She paused, waiting to see if he would shrink from her, as he had done before, but instead he threw his head back and thrust forward at her touch.
He closed his eyes and focused on her fingers closing around his shaft, on the animal shock of it. And suddenly he didn’t have to try so hard to concentrate because she was grazing his erection with her impossibly soft cheek. She was placing her lips on the tip of him, brushing him lightly with her mouth, running her tongue experimentally around the underside. Christ, but where had she learned to do that?
He heard a noise like a growl escape from himself, and all at once he knew exactly what he wanted and it was not to put his shirt back on.
He gently broke away before he lost himself entirely and spent in his innocent young bride’s mouth.
“My turn,” he said. “May I undress you?”
In response she smiled and lifted up her arms.
The Duke I Tempted Page 15