‘No, thank you, Patterson,’ the Duchess said, her face a frozen mask. ‘I will ring if I need you.’
What was going on here? It was horrid. Mother and son were at loggerheads in the politest of ways. Minette felt as if there were sharp daggers flying about her head. If she moved incautiously she might lose an arm, or worse.
The duchess commenced the ritual of tea.
‘I assume you drink tea, Miss Rideau?’ The Dowager Duchess’s mouth turned down. ‘I have heard the French prefer coffee.’
‘I like tea,’ Minette said, wishing her smile didn’t feel so stiff and awkward.
Were mother and son always so tense? Was it the presence of a stranger in their midst making them so uncomfortable with each other? Hopefully, when they were used to her company, things would become more relaxed. She had a feeling she might be wishing for the moon.
* * *
Freddy glowered across the tea tray. If Mother made one more unpleasant remark to or about Minette, he would take her to task and to hell with propriety. She could carp at him all she liked. He didn’t care. Neither did he any longer give a fig that the sight of him walking across the room made her queasy. He was hardened to her verbal attacks.
It did matter if she hurt Minette’s feelings, though he couldn’t help the surge of pride at the way Minette had stood up for herself against Mother’s claws. Perfectly polite and yet showing the steel in her spine.
‘From which part of France does your family come?’ Mother asked, after a silence that had lasted a fraction too long. Deliberately so.
‘The Vendée.’ Minette smiled. ‘Our château was like your house, very old. Dating to the fourteenth century in parts.’
‘Older than Falconwood, then,’ Freddy said, glancing at his mother, who always bragged about the antiquity of their line.
‘Our ancestors came over with William, Duke of Normandy,’ Mother said. ‘It was later in the family history that we settled here at Falconwood.’
Minette sipped at her tea. ‘Perhaps we have some ancestors in common. I know that at least one chevalier from my father’s family joined the Duke.’ She put down her cup and saucer. ‘I always feel sorry for the Saxon King, Harold. William’s was the flimsiest excuse on which to base a claim to the throne.’
Mother pursed her lips. ‘I am sure I have no idea what you are talking about. I am no bluestocking, Miss Rideau. Such topics are best left in the schoolroom.’
Freddy felt a growl form in his throat.
‘Mais oui,’ Minette said calmly, agreeably. ‘I notice Englishwomen have a horror of being thought educated. In France the gentlemen admire a woman with whom they can converse.’ She lowered her lashes a fraction. ‘Among other things.’
An incautious mouthful of tea caused Freddy to choke. He carefully set his cup down on the table at his elbow. ‘If you have finished your tea, Miss Rideau, perhaps I may give you a tour of the house before you retire to change for dinner?’
His mother gave him an assessing glance. A small smile touched her lips, and he steeled himself to parry her next thrust. ‘Make sure you show Miss Rideau the Long Gallery, Falconwood.’
Oh, very clever, Mother dear. The last place he would want to take his intended.
She continued without pause. ‘Our most recent addition is a wonderful portrait by Lawrence. A fine example of his work, I am told.’ The smile disappeared. ‘Dinner is at six. I like to keep country hours when we are dining en famille.’
‘Naturally,’ Minette said, rising to her feet and dipping a respectful curtsey. ‘We always do so at Meak, my brother-in-law’s estate.’
Freddy held out his arm, and they strolled from the room.
The fingers on his sleeve trembled. Damn Mother’s mean-spirited innuendoes. Only when they were a good distance from the drawing room did he let himself speak. ‘I apologise for my mother’s sharp tongue. I hope she did not give offence.’
Her short, sharp exhalation spoke of impatience. ‘Why is she so awful to you?’
Cross. Not hurt. Good lord, was she angry on his behalf? ‘I was more concerned for you.’
‘She looks at you so coldly, as if...’ She breathed in and when he glanced down at her face he was surprised to see twin spots of anger on her cheeks. ‘It is as if she has not a scrap of maternal feeling towards you.’
‘She doesn’t. Her firstborn was the sun, moon and stars in her eyes. I am a poor replacement.’ The moment he’d spoken he regretted the bitterness in his words, but it was the truth. Some of it.
The concern remained on her face. ‘I thought your older brother died years ago.’
‘Yes. But as yet she is not reconciled to her loss.’ It was one way to couch his mother’s antipathy.
‘It is almost as if she blames you for his death.’
He was to blame. He’d tormented Reggie into taking up his challenge. Freddy had always known how to make his older brother rise to the bait. And then he’d watched him die. Something burned at the back of his throat. He stiffened against the surge of emotion. Took a deep, slow breath. Damn it all, he never talked about the accident. Surely reliving that day over and over in his dreams was punishment enough? He let the ice inside him surround his unwanted emotions and took a deep breath. ‘She is angry.’ Angry that he had been the one to survive.
‘She hurts you.’
How could she imagine she knew what he felt, when he felt nothing? His back teeth ground against each other. Forcibly, he relaxed his jaw. ‘I don’t let it trouble me, but I will speak to her.’ He would not have Mother making Minette’s life miserable. ‘Would you like to see his portrait?’
She looked sad. ‘Only if you would like to show me.’
For some reason he couldn’t fathom, he did want her to see Reggie and he didn’t. His brother would have liked her. They would have competed for her attention. And Reggie’s innate easy charm would no doubt have won the day. It was a hard truth to swallow.
He walked her up to the second floor and along to the east wing. The long gallery was one of the most beautiful parts of the house and also one of the most ancient. He and Reggie had spent endless hours here on rainy days when not tied to their books. As they had grown older, Reggie had spent more time with their father, learning the duties he would one day inherit, spending less and less time with Freddy. He’d been envious of his father’s attention to his older brother. Of his father’s pride in his elder son. It was partly why he’d tempted Reggie into playing truant on the day of the accident.
They walked past the family portraits, some large by famous artists of the time and some little more than miniatures, until they came to the portrait of his immediate family done by a local artist. They stood together in front of a view of one of the most beautiful parts of Falconwood’s park. Dogs gambolled at his father’s feet, his mother a radiant beauty, not the pinched, pale creature she was today. Reggie stood beside his father, so like his mother with his golden hair and bright blue eyes, already showing signs of the man. Both parents were looking with pride at their elder son. On the other side of his seated mother stood Freddy. The ugly duckling, dark-complexioned with a beak of a nose and overly large hands and feet for the size of his frame. At twelve, he’d been embarrassingly short and skinny. He certainly didn’t look like the rest of his family, though his father’s hair was brown, not golden.
Minette viewed the portrait, tilting her head first to one side then the other. ‘He looks like your mother and you look more like your father.’
‘My colouring mostly comes from my mother’s grandmother, I’m told.’ Along with other less desirable traits.
‘It is easy to see they loved your brother.’
His throat closed, but he forced himself to speak. ‘As did I. He was one of the best brothers a fellow could wish for.’
He moved on to the next portrait. This o
ne was of his brother alone, a few years older than in the previous one, a shotgun over his shoulder, a brace of partridge at his feet and a look of pure mischief in his bright blue eyes. ‘This is the Lawrence Mother spoke of. Reggie was going to be eighteen later that summer.’ He’d never reached his eighteenth birthday. Freddy had been sixteen.
‘He makes one think of an English Apollo. Where is your portrait by Lawrence?’
The question jolted his gut. His hands clenched. His shoulders tightened. He turned from the picture and went to look out of the window, coward that he was. ‘There was no need of a portrait of the spare at that time.’
He’d been so damnably jealous.
‘His loss must have been a dreadful shock to you, as well as your parents.’
Worse than she could possibly imagine. ‘I was devastated. And then, God help me, I was expected to step into his shoes. It was years before I could bear to think about it, let alone apply myself to the matter.’
‘The reason you do not come to Falconwood very often.’
That and the bitter recriminations from his mother. Recriminations that echoed loud and clear in his conscience. ‘I hate coming here.’
Chapter Ten
His words were cold. Perhaps even calculated to shock. He stood looking out of the window, so alone, so remote. And beneath the coldness Minette sensed the pain of an old wound. Something he was not talking about. She strolled to stand beside him at the window, looking out at the view. ‘Thank you for bringing me to see your brother’s likeness,’ she said softly. ‘I am sure he would be proud of you.’
He looked startled then turned away as if he did not want her to see his reaction. Sadness filled her that he would not share his thoughts with her, but it was only to be expected. Theirs was a betrothal of convenience and they barely knew each other and trusted each other even less.
Giving him time to collect himself, she gazed silently at the vista, from the formal gardens near the house across the ha-ha and out over the large expanse of treed park. A gleam of white beside a lake caught her eye. ‘Oh, what is that?’ She pointed. ‘At the edge of the lake.’
‘The Pantheon. My family’s version of a folly from the early part of the last century. There’s a hermit’s cave in the woods nearby, too. And a grotto. Would you like to see it?’
‘As long as we are back in time for dinner,’ she said, smiling at the eagerness in his voice. Clearly this was something he would enjoy showing her.
With the day warm and sunny it was not a hardship to take the path that led from the house down to the lake and meander across the grassy arched bridge to arrive at the folly she had seen from the upstairs window. The view of the house was lovely from this vantage point, the red-brick fiery in the afternoon sun. But it was the folly that held her attention. A fully realised Roman temple of glowing white marble. ‘It looks so real,’ she said. ‘As if we have stepped back in time and been transported to Rome itself.’
‘One of my ancestors had it build after the Restoration. They were all the rage.’
‘Can we go inside?’
‘Of course.’ He took her arm and walked her up the steps and through an enormous set of oak doors. Inside there were marble statues and reliefs around the circular chamber.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she said. ‘It is astonishing. One almost expects to meet Caesar in his toga.’
‘My mother used to hold picnics here when my father was alive. Before...’ He pressed his lips together. ‘Their summer parties were famous. No one ever turned down an invitation. Come, let me show you the grotto and the hermit’s cave.’
‘Was there really a hermit?’
‘Oh, yes. There were three of them over the years, when they were fashionable. Before my time. They were paid a handsome sum to stay in the cave all summer. When the last one retired, the duke at the time gave him and his wife a cottage on the estate. Reggie and I used the place as a fort when we were young.’
They strolled back out into the sunshine and wandered to the other end of the lake. There, rocks had been placed artfully to form a tunnel that led to a grotto complete with natural spring. A shaft in the roof brought in light from outside, but the effect was cool and damp and unpleasantly gloomy. The white marble statue of a water nymph tucked against the wall behind the bubbling spring gazed at them soulfully.
Minette shivered.
Freddy took her hand. ‘You are cold. Let us go back outside.’
The sunshine was a welcome relief. They turned the end of the lake, and he showed her the ruined walls of the hermit’s dwelling. ‘A great place for boys to play,’ she said.
His eyes seemed to look inside himself, and then he smiled. ‘It was.’
They strolled arm in arm back to the house. The coldness that had settled over Freddy in the portrait gallery had thawed and there was a pleasant easiness between them. It was as if they were becoming friends.
‘Your home is beautiful,’ Minette said, standing in the dappled shade of a tree at the edge of the lawn leading up to the house. ‘This tree is huge. Oak, n’est pas?’
‘It is supposed to be three hundred years old. It is on one of the earliest drawings of the house.’ He looked up into the branches. ‘It is amazing to think this tree was right here at the time of Henry the Eighth.’
She stroked the bark. ‘If trees could only talk, they would whisper a great many secrets.’
His hand came down beside hers. Large. Encased in black gloves as hers were in tan. He didn’t move. Slowly she turned to face him, and he brought his other hand up to cage her against the tree.
The heat of his body washed up against her like a wave. She raised her face to meet his intent gaze. While she could make out nothing from his expression, the heat in his eyes said exactly where his thoughts had gone. Her body flushed with answering heat, as it always did when he looked at her that way.
What was it about this man that brought forth longings she’d thought she had long ago repressed? She knew too well the heartbreak of giving a man what he wanted. The pain of betrayal. Yet inside she trembled with familiar sensations. The bloom of desire.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she whispered.
‘No.’
‘Someone might see us.’
‘No one can see us here.’
He would know all the secret places where a man could be alone with a woman.
When his eyes searched her face and his head dipped slowly, giving her every chance to reject his advance, she rose up on her toes and claimed his lips with her own.
His sigh of satisfaction made her breasts tingle and long for his touch. She arched into him, pressing her body against the hard wall of his chest.
One strong arm pulled her into him, the other caressed the curve of her spine, and he nudged her backwards until she was supported by the tree. His thigh pressed into her and she widened her stance to accommodate the sweet pressure against her lower body, rocking against him, purring deep in her throat, the sweet ache throbbing low in her core. Slowly one hand skimmed her bottom, then up her side until it rested heavy on her breast. She pushed into his palm, longing to feel his touch against the aching fullness.
He broke the kiss. ‘Every time. You drive me beyond reason,’ he said, his voice harsh. ‘Have you any idea of the consequences of this game you are playing with me?’
‘I think you are the cat and I am the mouse,’ she whispered. Of course he was. He tempted her unbearably. Made her want things she should not want. And if she let him have his way, he thought she would have no choice but to marry him, when in truth it might cause him to send her away. Something she could not allow until the threat of Moreau was vanquished.
She pushed at his shoulder.
He lifted his head, gazed around and groaned. ‘You are right. This is not the right place.’
‘Or the
right time,’ she said as calmly as her frustration would allow.
‘We should not anticipate our vows.’
She gave him a tight smile. ‘Precisely.’
He glanced at the ground and then at her face with a wicked smile she’d never seen before, wicked and boyish. ‘If it hadn’t rained yesterday, I might think about trying to change your mind.’
Loverlike teasing. Such a shock from this emotionless man. ‘Thank heavens for the rain, then.’
The smile remained.
She wagged a finger at him. ‘A kiss between those newly betrothed is perfectly acceptable. It fits with our story. But anything more is not a good idea.’ Oh, what a dissembler she was. She would like nothing more than to romp with him in the grass, but she didn’t dare give him a glimpse of how she was tempted. She had no doubt he would take advantage of any sign of her weakening under the onslaught of his charm.
‘You are right,’ he said, though he sounded grudging.
A tone that made her foolish heart lift.
* * *
Dinner over, Freddy forwent the glass of port in solitary state after the ladies withdrew. Instead, he took it with him to the drawing room. He would not leave Minette to the tender mercies of Mother, despite the fact that over dinner she had more than held her own.
Once the tea was poured, he leaned back in his chair and sipped his port. ‘Thank you for attending to the arrangements for the ball, Mother.’
‘Given how the little time I have been given to prepare, I hope you are not expecting anything extraordinary,’ his mother said stiffly.
‘It was too bad of us,’ Minette said, clearly trying to soothe the other woman’s ruffled feathers. Given Mother’s penchant for slicing into one with her tongue while looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, he could only feel admiration. Minette was kind as well as lovely, no matter how much she tried to hide it. But kindness would not help her with Mother.
‘Perhaps we should scale back on the guest list. Keep it to family only,’ he said, stretching out his legs.
The Duke's Daring Debutante (Regency Historical Romance) Page 12