The Duke I Tempted

by Scarlett Peckham

  “What is it?” he made himself ask, despite knowing in his bones what the answer was.

  “I love you,” she sobbed.

  He let out his breath in a ragged sigh.

  That, he could handle.

  He gently gathered her into his arms. “That’s not a problem, Cavendish. I don’t know if you heard my speech this afternoon, but I’m rather fond of you myself.”

  “Oh, Archer,” she said into his neck. “I thought you weren’t coming back. When you sent me that box of letters, I thought that this was over.”

  “No, sweetheart,” he said. “I thought you would want them back.”

  “I only wanted you back,” she choked out. “You’re the only thing I wanted.”

  He took a breath to collect himself. “Walk outside with me.”

  She sniffled and shook her head. “It’s snowing. We’ll freeze.”

  He graced her with his finest leer. “Cavendish. I promise on my life that I’ll find a way to keep you warm. Come.”

  He unlocked the double doors leading out into the garden.

  A soft blanket of snow cloaked the trees and grounds. In the distance, the spires of the conservatory looked like a mountain of ice. Alone in this white canvas, it felt as if they were the last two people in the world.

  He stood behind her and held her back against him, so she was cloaked in his warmth, as they gazed up at the house.

  “When I first saw this house,” he said into her ear, “I imagined kissing you out here, in this very spot, beneath the trees.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “It was so kind of you to find this place for me. I never really thanked you. It’s perfect.”

  “It was selfish. I bought it because I could not stop imagining a family here.”

  She turned to him. There were snowflakes in her dark lashes. He used his thumbs to wipe them away.

  “You’re going to get your wish.” She picked up his hand and placed it over her belly, leaving her fingers laced between his. “By August, I suspect.”

  “Oh my God,” he whispered.

  He had received an announcement such as this once before, and had felt pleased and even rather proud of himself. He had not known then the terror and love and joy and sorrow that now suffused him. And yet you would have to snuff out the moon to mask the smile that overtook him. He could feel that smile in his chest. In his ankles.

  He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to Poppy’s lips. She kissed him lightly there, and he turned his chin up to her mouth. He found the rise of her breasts and marveled at the soft, lush curve of them—indeed, slightly fuller now—his hands could perceive what was not yet visible to the eye alone. He ran his fingers back down her waist to her stomach. It raised a fierce wave of possession in him, that nearly imperceptible swell between her hips, where a month before there had been a concavity. He heard himself growl as he kissed her more deeply.

  “Not here,” she laughed. “Inside.”

  They made it only to the threshold of the open door. He wanted to see the changes in her body without her heavy dress and the warm winter petticoats, and his fingers searched for the strings and began to unravel them, dexterity arising from sheer force of will. He unlaced her bodice and she wriggled out from under it, and he was so grateful, he heard himself say “good girl,” and heard her laugh at the undisguised lust of his words.

  He led her to a divan in the dimmest corner of the room—a corner that had a view of the snowy gardens. He settled her down and pulled her shift over her head and there she was, the same long limbs and milky skin.

  He spent ten minutes reminding himself of the pleasures of that skin. He took his time with it, until she began to signal her impatience with her body. And as she lost herself, so he lost himself to her.

  Chapter 33

  Poppy lowered her veil over her eyes and stepped onto the street. It was early in the morning to visit an establishment such as this, but she’d known Archer would stop her if he knew where she intended to go, and so she’d left before he’d awoken. Such were the continued advantages of a constitution that rose with dawn.

  She pulled her cloak around her and rapped the heavy iron knocker twice.

  The unsmiling maid opened the door. “You again,” she said.

  “I’ve come for a word with your mistress.”

  The girl looked at her impassively. “Not unless you have a key.”

  Poppy had to concede grudging respect for the girl’s particular brand of insolence. If she was apprenticing in the trade of her mistress, she was well on course to become an adept broker of pitiless contempt.

  She smiled calmly at the maid. “Perhaps you would prefer I locate her myself. If you recall, I’ve done it before.”

  The girl betrayed no reaction, but after a moment she stepped aside.

  “Wait on that bench,” she said. “I’ll ask if Mistress Brearley will see you, but I don’t expect she’ll say yes.”

  Mistress Brearley. So the woman had a name, like a mere mortal.

  Poppy arranged herself stiffly on the ungiving wood, feeling like a naughty child, which she suspected was the intended effect.

  After some time, footsteps broke the quiet.

  Mistress Brearley was tall, dressed head to toe in the same severe black weeds of her house girl. Yet something about the dress she wore was alluring and familiar. It was a Valeria Parc. Dramatic in its sobriety, immaculate in its cut and the fine lacework that emerged from the long sleeves and rose up the neck. In a different color it would not be so unlike the dresses that hung in Poppy’s wardrobe. This meant that Valeria had met the whipping governess, had fitted her and chided her posture and threatened to prick her with a needle if she fidgeted.

  The knowledge made her feel more assured.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mistress Brearley,” she said, rising from the bench. “I’m afraid we have not been properly introduced.”

  “I know who you are, Duchess,” the governess said. Her accent was educated but clipped, with a hint of the northern counties. “What puzzles me is why you are here. Again.”

  “I came to ask a favor.”

  “If you wish me to bar your husband from my establishment, I don’t consider such requests. But in this case, the matter is irrelevant, as Westmead has withdrawn his membership.”

  “You mistake the kind of assistance I require.”

  “Which is?”

  “Instruction.”

  A flash of interest crossed Mistress Brearley’s eyes. “He sent you here?”

  “No. It was my idea to come. I find that his interests have awoken my own. I hoped I might hire you to teach me.”

  The governess crossed her arms, considering this. Then she turned and fiddled with a panel in the wall. It popped open, revealing a safe.

  “If you wish to know what is practiced here, you must first engage a membership and sign an oath of discretion. We are closed to new members, but given you are Westmead’s wife, and I am fond of him, I shall make an exception.”

  “You are fond of him?”

  Mistress Brearley assessed her, then softened her expression. “I am no threat to your claim on his affections. I care for him only as an old friend for whom I want the best.” The woman met her eye and for a moment, her face opened into a wry smile. “Particularly when such friends have the perverse habit of making themselves miserable.”

  “Ah.” Poppy found herself laughing at this unexpected moment of understanding.

  Mistress Brearley handed Poppy two sheets of paper and gestured at a desk.

  I, Poppy wrote, Poplar, Duchess of Westmead, hereby agree … She copied out the remaining script and signed her name.

  “This will be the last time you use that title here. We don’t observe the usual hierarchies. Each man or woman enters these walls with only the lowly power of their own humanity.”

  “Women are among the members of a whipping house?”

  “All sorts are members of this club. And the pleasures they
find here are by no means limited to whipping.”

  Oh.

  Mistress Brearley locked the confession in her safe and handed her a heavy iron key.

  “This looks like—”

  “Your husband’s? Yes. He returned it when he withdrew his membership. I have yet to put it back in circulation. Call me sentimental. Now it’s yours. In the future, present it at the door to gain entry here. It will save you the impudence of my maid.”

  The mistress led her back downstairs and through one of the heavy doors that lined the corridor. The walls were lined with a plush layer of wool to absorb the sounds within and a rack of orderly shelves holding instruments of the profession. Whips in an array of different sizes and made from everything from hemp to leather to chains. Handcuffs, restraints, floggers, and carved cylindrical statues that resembled the male anatomy.

  The next hour was an education in an exacting and physically demanding enterprise. The governess brooked no embarrassment and spoke as plainly as if she were describing farming improvements rather than erotic subjugation. She showed her how to snap a whip—a flick this way for a tease, a shocking snap for a crueler bite. How to tie a cilice, a blindfold, a restraint. How to measure out tenderness and torment in exquisite balance.

  As she returned the items to the shelves, she looked over her shoulder and met Poppy’s eye. “I would be remiss not to add that this is all merely technique. You must look within yourself for what you want from the assignation, and so must he. You understand?”

  “May I ask, then, what you get from it? Why do you practice it?”

  Mistress Brearley gave her that iron gaze.

  “Because there is a heady power in being the one to bestow such intimacies. But then, you already know that, don’t you, Poppy? The seduction of it. I could see it on your face the night you snuck inside my service door.”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “I hope you will come back and visit me. True expertise requires apprenticeship. In the meantime I believe I’ll have a few items sent to your residence. Discreetly. A kind of wedding gift.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Again, the flash of a wry smile. “You needn’t. You’ll receive a bill.”

  “Thank you, Mistress Brearley.”

  “Be well,” the woman said. She paused, and her face was kind. “And be good to him. He must be quite attached to you to give this place up.”

  Poppy smiled. For today, since the first time since she’d met him, she’d awoken and known without question that he was.

  Archer was not in the mood for wassail.

  He was sore. And not languidly so. His skin stung from the icy damp of his carriage. His shirt abraded his back where he’d been struck with the riding crop. His head ached with tension.

  And instead of going home to drown himself in a hot bath or a large decanter of brandy, he was on his way to his sister’s damnable Christmas supper, his last hope for locating his wife, who had disappeared sometime before breakfast.

  He had never felt less possessed of cheer.

  He stepped out into the eerie quiet of the frozen square, emptied of residents who had long since left for the countryside for Christmastide. Inside, the house would be festively strung with greenery and lit with candles. The air would smell like cinnamon and frankincense and roasting goose. The long table would be lined with the orphans, bachelors, and widows his sister assembled every year on Christmas Eve, when the rest of the city retreated for the comforts of hearth and family. And every last one of them would be eager to learn what had become of his wife.

  I haven’t the faintest idea. Do let me know if you locate her. Happy Christmas.

  He had no reason to suspect she had changed her mind and left him. She had made no grand pronouncements nor packed a trunk.

  And yet he could not shake the feeling that the day before had been some fairy tale of his own invention. That he’d woken up to find it was a dream.

  A grand, gilded carriage pulled up behind his, sloshing icy muck onto his already freezing boots. He recognized the Rosecroft crest and groaned. His cousin would be keen to know where Poppy was, having not seen her since the wedding.

  Rosecroft handed Hilary down, followed by a nurse bearing their velvet- and lace-bedecked son. Leading up the rear was the Earl of Apthorp. At least someone here would match him for humorlessness this evening.

  “What are you doing in town?” he asked Rosecroft, after the civilities had been exchanged. “I’m told decent families depart the day Advent commences.”

  “We had planned to spend the holiday in the country, but we got caught up by the snow. Your sister prevailed on my wife to stay on to attend her supper.”

  “Lady Constance is planning a surprise—I take it she did not inform you of her plans?” Hilary asked.

  Constance most assuredly had not. Last year it had been a living Nativity featuring a number of actresses in most unchristian raiments. The prior year, a trained monkey playing hymns on an organ.

  “My sister long ago learned not to favor me with advance knowledge of her pageantry. She knows it only induces me to stay very far away. Especially after the incident with the opera dancers.”

  Apthorp’s mouth fell open. “Opera dancers. On Christmas?”

  Rosecroft clapped him on the back. “Steady on, lad. You shall survive to see Twelfth Night yet.”

  An elaborately coiffed blond head emerged from an upper window, followed by a frantically waving pair of arms in gold-embroidered gloves.

  “Happy Christmas, my darlings!” Constance trilled down at them, dangling out the window. “Do come in, do come in—quickly now! You must see the surprise!”

  “Lady Constance looks well, does she not?” Hilary remarked in a low voice to Apthorp. “Our time in Paris quite agreed with her. I suspect this will be her last season.”

  Oh, God help him. So this was why his cousin had thrown off her family’s customary journey south: matchmaking. And with Apthorp, of all people. Was Hilary deranged? Apthorp was the steady sort, but stiffer than a frozen leg of mutton and every bit as humorless. Constance would spread the poor lad with her favorite rose-petal jam and devour him on toast, only to grow too bored to swallow halfway through the meal.

  Apthorp glanced warily up at the joyous blond visage dangling from the window. “Lady Constance,” he replied to Hilary, “is inches away from a broken neck. I suggest we go inside before she falls to her death.”

  “Where is the lovely duchess this evening?” Rosecroft asked as they went inside. “Not arriving separately?”

  Here it was. The burning question. “My wife is indisposed,” he muttered. She was due to join him here. If she did not turn up within the hour, he was going out to find her.

  A pair of footmen opened the atrium doors, and his bleak thoughts were interrupted by the crisp, tart scent of evergreens. The exact scent of his wife’s grove of English firs.

  He paused in the doorway, inhaling.

  And then he saw the surprise.

  All around them, fronds of green. Thick, fragrant bowers were strung along the walls, spiraling up toward the ceiling and trailing down the sides of the room, such that to sit at the dining table was to sit within a winter forest. It was, indeed, remarkable. But he had eyes only for the woman who stood in green satin beneath it, fiddling with an errant piece of mistletoe.

  “Cavendish,” he said raggedly.

  She flashed him a brilliant smile.

  “You’re late. The invitation was for six.”

  He did not care that he was surrounded by mixed company, including his sister and his godson. He strode over to his wife, picked her up against the column, and kissed her for all he was worth.

  “Well, good evening,” she said softly. “My fault for hanging so much mistletoe, I suppose.”

  “Damn you, I was worried you’d left me,” he whispered, in between the kisses he placed on her forehead, her eyebrow, her cheekbone, her mouth.

  “I only went to retr
ieve your Christmas gift. And when you discover what I’ve gotten you, I think you may find that my absence was well worth it.”

  “You could have left a note,” he raged against her clavicle.

  He put his head against her chest and hoped no one would see that he was subtly, very subtly, weeping with relief.

  “My, my, these two,” he heard Hilary say with a distinct note of amusement. “Such dramatics from the newlyweds. You wonder if they’ve had a moment’s peace.”

  He didn’t care to reply, as he was now kissing his wife’s shoulder.

  “Indeed. I had no idea marriage could involve such theatrics,” Constance marveled. “I shall have to set about finding a husband immediately.”

  “Doubtless you shall,” Hilary said, smiling meaningfully at Apthorp.

  Archer finally set his wife on her feet, reassured that she did not, in fact, intend to flee the country to escape him.

  “I love you,” he told her, loud enough for all to hear.

  “Did he just say,” Rosecroft asked in a loud voice, “that he loves her?”

  “Is that a tear I see in his eye?” Constance crowed.

  “And to think prior to this day I’ve scarcely seen him laugh,” Hilary mused. “Many said it wasn’t possible.”

  He turned to them all, and blessed them with a serene smile.

  “I do love my wife. Most fervently. Now I kindly invite you to leave us so that I may demonstrate to her exactly how much.”

  When Archer looked back on his life, he would remember that those first mornings in the house in Hammersmith, the house that would become their family home, the air had smelled like roses and fresh rosemary.

  Her room—their room, he corrected himself when he awoke on Christmas morning, for he did not intend to let her sleep alone ever again—was still warm and redolent of her scent, but she was not in it.

  This time, out of deference for his newly tender sensibilities, she had left a note beside him on her pillow.

  Your Christmas gift is in the library.

  He wrapped himself in a dressing gown, yawned, and padded down the stairs.