by Eloisa James
They were tiny men in red caps, and nothing about North was tiny. But he had answered one of her wishes, at least: She had longed for new shoes, and now she had them.
North didn’t come that night, nor the second night either. Diana woke up in the cold dawn, shivering in her robe, wondering why she had slept in the chair again.
No one had eaten the bread, and the milk soured on the hearth.
She had spent both days with the duchess, the lady’s daughters, and Godfrey. Without direct conversation on the subject, she was no longer the castle governess. If Artie needed a new nappy, Her Grace summoned Mabel, or changed it herself.
Within a day, Artie began using the chamber pot, whereas Diana’s previous attempts to persuade her had resulted in Artie protesting and, at one point, kicking over the pot. Diana tried not to mind. The important thing was that the family treated Godfrey as lovingly as they did Artie. He was visiting the stables twice a day, once with Leonidas, and again with North.
Her mind couldn’t get around that last one.
It turned out that North, her foppish, prim fiancé (to call a spade a spade), was a superb horseman, who managed a large breeding program at Lindow Castle. There had been an excursion or two on horseback in the early days of the betrothal party. But she had managed to avoid them, throwing herself on her bed so she could cry in peace, grieving for her sister.
She’d never even seen North on horseback.
On the third day, North didn’t return Godfrey to the nursery after their daily trip to the stables. When Diana found her nephew, he was sitting on the edge of the billiard table, happily watching Leonidas and North knock balls about.
North looked up and caught her eye, but just nodded and wished her good afternoon, with all the emotion of someone greeting . . .
Well, greeting a governess.
That night, she looked at the loaf of bread she’d fetched from the kitchen and felt like a fool. Obviously, North no longer had a problem sleeping.
True, she thought the smudges under his eyes were darker than they had been the day before. But what did she know? With a twinge of humiliation, she put the loaf to the side, uncut. Thank goodness he had no idea that she’d sliced bread for him the last two nights, and then fed them to Fitzy in the morning so that no one would know.
She had deluded herself into thinking that she could help with whatever had happened to him during the war—because she felt guilty. Absurd. Yet guilt was such a familiar companion.
Closing her door firmly, Diana bathed, tightly braided her hair, and climbed into bed. Ophelia had informed her in the afternoon that she intended to bring Artie to London. In the next few months, the duke would buy a new house near Kensington Gardens, where the air was cleaner.
“The girls will need to be in the townhouse for the Season,” Ophelia had said. “But I can go back and forth. Artie can join us at the townhouse now and then.” Ophelia had looked at Diana with pleading eyes. “Do you think Artie’s lungs will be harmed?”
“No,” Diana had said, and then, with a wry smile, “Although you mustn’t consider me an expert in child rearing! All I know is that it will make Artie so happy. She misses you awfully.”
“I cannot bear to leave her again,” Ophelia had said, relief written on her face. “I simply cannot.”
Diana went to sleep thinking about the joy in Artie’s eyes as she curled like a dormouse in the duchess’s lap. Yes, Artie loved Diana. But not the way she loved her mother.
North had survived two nights without venturing into the nursery wing.
His family was here now. They had been cross with him for tossing Diana’s shoes in the lake, but if they learned he had invaded her chamber at night?
No gentleman did such a thing. He’d only done it in the grip of madness.
It reminded him of Alaric’s pithy summing up of the duke’s eldest sons: Horatius had been arrogant but true; Alaric foolhardy and adventurous; North rakish and half mad. And North couldn’t quibble with Alaric’s appraisal.
“Rakish and half mad” were obviously making an appearance again, even though North would have said his childhood was far behind him, buried in a deluge of ducal responsibilities.
At midnight, he was no closer to sleep than he’d been at nine o’clock, when he’d drunk a large amount of brandy and beat Leonidas and his father at billiards, only to lose to Betsy. His sister had laughed madly, cackling about Marie Antoinette’s love for the game—and went on to beat them all handily.
He threw an arm behind his head and stared at the gathered canopy over his bed. Of course he would sleep. It was just a matter of closing one’s eyes and allowing darkness to descend. He’d wake up in the morning refreshed.
Bloody hell, why had he ever complained about anything when he could sleep? The last two nights he’d lain wide-eyed until the darkness outside his window lightened to gray, followed by a faint pink.
He could remember times when he had caroused until dawn and slept until two in the afternoon. Granted, those halcyon days came before he inherited Horatius’s title and its responsibilities, back when he was earning Alaric’s characterization.
Finally, he gave up. He got out of bed, pulled on his breeches and shirt, and started pacing.
His bedchamber was forty-four steps long, and thirty-eight steps wide. He distracted himself by designing perfect bedchambers in his head. Now that he was free to leave the castle, he’d gone back to planning a mansion of his own. His bedchamber would be large, with a separate room for bathing, and a water closet off that room. There would be a dressing room for him, and a boudoir for his wife.
Despite his resolution to stop thinking about Diana, he pictured the gowns she used to wear, doubled the size of the boudoir, and then added a sizable alcove that could house a large wardrobe.
The bathing room would hold a ceramic tub like those Alaric had described seeing in Florence. He moved his imaginary mansion to Italy, on a hill overlooking fields of silver-leaved olive trees. He enlarged the windows and raised the bathtub so that it looked down the hill at the ocean.
A large bath, big enough for two.
His mind obligingly presented him with an image of Diana smiling at him, hair spilling over the side of the bath, cheekbones flushed by warm water and desire.
He began pacing again. Forty-four, turn. Forty-four, turn. Forty-four . . . He flung open the door and moved into the corridor. His bedchamber was in one of the oldest parts of the castle, where the corridors were stone, and a chill wind whistled around the window glazing in the winter. Snow sometimes found its way in. He padded barefoot through the castle, not even the clip of his boots accompanying him.
One hundred and twenty-three steps later, he started down a pair of winding stone steps that looked as if they belonged in a production of Hamlet, or at the very least, in a melodrama with a ghost.
A desperate man will do anything. He was a desperate man.
Intent came over him the way hope might come over a dying man, or love a desirous one. Like an unexpected visitor who can’t be denied.
The fastest route from the east wing to the nursery was across the echoing ballroom, through the ladies’ retiring room, up one flight and down another, and down a long crooked corridor. He emerged at the servants’ staircase leading to the nursery, which was just as steep and narrow as the one designated for family.
There was no welcoming lamp turned low in the corridor.
The door to Diana’s bedchamber was shut tight. Yet surely she hadn’t locked it, in case Godfrey came to her bed with a nightmare. He and Godfrey, both plagued by nightmares and both in search of a single remedy.
He turned the doorknob as deliberately as if he’d entered a hundred maidens’ chambers, though he hadn’t. “Rakish” had never involved virgins, and Diana was a virgin; he was certain of that.
Whether she remained so was up to her.
Intent again.
She was curled under the covers, facing away from the door. The fire was low, and he sa
w with a quick glance that no jar of honey and half-melted butter were to be seen. The stab of disappointment he felt was wildly out of proportion.
It wasn’t as if he needed toast. The chef had made six or seven dishes per course, as was normal when the duke was in residence. In the midst of all the French cooking, there had unexpectedly appeared simple English dishes, the kind he used to have as a child.
So he had eaten cottage pie, followed by a pasty with a wonderfully flaky crust, and then a bit of suet pudding.
He toppled a log on the fire before moving silently to Diana’s bed, scarcely breathing. Her skin glowed in the moonlight like the inside of a periwinkle seashell they had in the nursery when he was a boy.
His breeches were on the floor in a moment. But his shirt . . .
He didn’t want to be that character in the Shakespeare play, the one parodied in the etching. If he slipped naked into bed with her, was he any better than Shakespeare’s ravisher?
Yes, he was.
He would never take what wasn’t freely given.
He left his shirt on, lifted the covers, and slid beneath them. Diana didn’t move, which surprised him until he remembered that she was used to another body, albeit a small one, slipping into bed beside her.
Sure enough, she murmured something and rolled over, one arm coming around him—
And froze.
North waited, enjoying himself the way he hadn’t since he was a young man just free of university, sharing his God-given talents with any woman generous enough to smile at him.
Her eyes opened slowly. He brought her fingers to his mouth. If the lake turned her eyes blue, moonlight restored them to a beautiful silvery gray color.
“I must be dreaming,” she muttered.
He eased forward and kissed her, his tongue sliding over her lips and then past them. Heat blazed down to his groin. His cock was hard; it had been hard from the moment he’d entered the room and breathed the flowery honey scent that was Diana.
“I must be dreaming,” she said again, her voice husky with sleep, “because no duke’s son would be so lost to propriety, so indelicate, and so immoral as to enter a woman’s bed without her express invitation.”
The words were indignant, but her tone wasn’t. And she was looking at his mouth, not at his eyes.
“I had the idea from a print that my sister Betsy bought in London,” North said, keeping his voice serious.
“Who would have thought a future duke had a theatrical bone in his body?” The words were a retort, but her voice held such pure longing that he responded to it instantly. This time he kissed her gently and sweetly, waiting for her to open her mouth.
Which she did.
They kissed until his loins ached to arch toward her softness. His fingers trembling and his cock thicker and harder than it had ever been, he murmured, “May I kiss you in other places, Diana?”
She pulled back. Her eyes had darkened from moonshine to . . . to the color of gunmetal. Or a mouse, with fur the color of tarnished silver.
“What are you asking?”
“For more kisses.”
“Where, exactly?”
“Everywhere.” He edged closer, enough so that he could feel the warmth of her silky skin, and nudged her until she rolled on her back. He thanked her with a kiss. A raw, hungry, possessive kiss.
When he raised his head, she was looking at him in a dazed way. “As long as you understand that I’m never going to be your duchess.”
“So you’ve said.” He didn’t allow himself a scowl.
“No, I need you to acknowledge what I said, not simply repeat it.”
He groaned. “Diana Belgrave refuses to be a duchess. I know it, and so does most of England. She’d prefer to do menial labor, such as cleaning chamber pots, than allow me to buy her all the shoes her feet deserve.”
Her eyes softened and she laughed. “My feet don’t deserve fancy shoes.”
“Saffron-colored shoes are not good enough for you,” North murmured, one hand sliding under her head so he could cradle it. “Your toes should be in diamond-studded shoes and pearl-adorned slippers.”
He kissed her cheekbone, heading toward her chin, heading . . . down.
“I spent the last two days with the duchess,” Diana said with a little gasp. Her fingers curled in his hair. “His Grace came to find his wife every few hours. Sometimes just for a kiss, but often to ask her something about the estate.”
North murmured something. He was unbuttoning her nightdress and she wasn’t stopping him.
“Yesterday he made an absurd excuse and bore her away with him,” Diana whispered. “I think they went to his bedchamber. In the middle of the day!”
North raised his head. “I’m certain they did.”
“Most of England believes that you have seduced me,” Diana said. “From that point of view, you’re somewhat behind schedule, although my edict stands: I will not be your duchess.”
A moment of stunned silence followed. She was looking at him expectantly, a smile on her lips.
She meant it. The small part of his brain capable of logical thought registered utter determination. “I want you to be my wife,” North said. “I want to lure you away in the middle of the day.”
“I know . . . I mean, I know you used to want that,” she said. Her hands slipped from his hair. “I’m enormously fond of you, North. I am. But I don’t love you the way a wife ought to love her husband. Now that my mother is no longer in control of my life, I mean to marry for love, or not at all.”
Her eyes were bright, clear—entirely honest.
He felt it like a blow to the gut, the kind that felled a man. She wasn’t saying anything he didn’t already know.
Diana’s face was uncertain. He leaned forward and brushed her lips with his. He was thinking fast. She wanted to marry for love.
As he saw it, toast and honey was a way of saying, “I love you.” Making love was another way.
“You refuse to be a duchess,” he said softly.
She nodded, her eyes on his. “I would be terribly unhappy.” Her hand curved around his cheek. “If anyone could convince me, it would be you, dear friend.”
“You lost Rose and I lost Horatius,” he said, kissing her again. “So we are clinging to each other like shipwrecked sailors with one raft.”
She giggled, and her arms wound around his neck. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I am relishing my freedom.”
“I know you don’t love me,” he said, keeping his voice even. “Just so you know, I do love you. I think it is a lifelong condition.”
Her eyes filled with remorse, but he shook his head. “Love should never be regretted. But what might be regretted by you is this evening, Diana. You wish to marry for love. Won’t the man you choose expect you to come to him without knowledge of men?”
Never mind the fact that he had every intention of being the man she chose. Look what happened to Godfrey’s father. What happened to the men in his regiment. Life should never be taken for granted.
“Whoever marries me will already know that I jilted a ravishing future duke,” she said firmly, and then, with a twinkle, “You can take ‘ravishing’ in two ways.”
Who would have guessed that his melancholy fiancée could have such a naughty grin?
“My husband will love me enough not to care,” Diana said, her eyes shining with faith.
Everything in North chilled at the idea of Diana being loved by another man. Loving another man. He cleared his throat, because he had the feeling she wouldn’t approve of her romantic ambitions making him homicidal.
“Miss Belgrave, are you giving me permission to ravish you?”
She dimpled at him. “Yes! I requested just that, Lord Roland.”
A gentleman wouldn’t agree. But that perfect gentleman likely wasn’t as focused on winning as North was. Sometimes winning involved breaking some rules. Taking risks. Thinking creatively.
Diana kept stealing glances at his lips.
&
nbsp; “A gentleman never refuses a lady,” he said, making up his mind. He rose onto his knees, pulled off his shirt, and threw it over the side of the bed. “What do you know about intimacy?” he asked, enjoying the way she was looking at his chest, wide-eyed.
“Everything.”
It took a moment for the word to register.
“I’m glad one of us is an expert,” North said, suppressing the wish to smile. He’d bet his life that Diana was a virgin. He bent and traced her lips with his tongue. The expert was shy, and he chased her mouth, demanding entrance. When her mouth eased open, he kissed her, deep and wet and desirous.
And let his hands wander.
Every caress made Diana jump—and then moan. He wrapped a hand up one lush hip. She startled, and then smiled, letting her legs fall apart.
“You’re perfect,” he said, the word rasping in the quiet night. His hand slid down and curled around a plump thigh. “Not scrawny.”
“I like buttered muffins.”
“I will have muffins sent to your bedchamber every morning.”
His hand slid over the softest skin he’d ever felt, making him reel with the desire to tear off her nightdress and leave kisses all over her pale skin.
She let out a little scream when his finger stroked her core. In his head, North was shouting something incoherent, made up of a string of curse words, forged from soft, wet, plump, trembling, heat. Heat.
With every caress, her eyes got larger and larger. He paused, his hand cupping her, one finger poised at her entrance. “Is this all right?” he whispered.
“Is that allowed?” his expert whispered back, stunned. Her hips arched, just enough so one broad fingertip sank inside.
“Oh, my,” Diana gasped, her hands curling around his arms, fingernails biting into his skin.
North stroked her again, loving the way her hips were twisting. “I need to kiss you,” he said, his voice a jagged sliver of sound.
Diana’s thighs were rising toward his hand. He took her gasp as agreement; he sat up and eased his hand away.