The Duchess's Secret

by Elizabeth Beacon

  ‘I wish I had been man enough to tell him about you before I took his not very attractive offer of a useful life in another country while I grew up, in return for him paying off my debts and suppressing the worst of my misdeeds while I was at Oxford. He was quite right about me being an expensive young fool, but even he never knew what a heedless idiot I can be.’

  ‘Neither did you,’ she said as she contrasted his manner with her up on the heath to his slightly chastened one now he had found out about Jenny.

  He refused to meet her eyes and reminded her of a boy with a cricket bat in his hand, a nearby broken window and a saintly expression on his face. Great vigorous man as he was, he looked a bit like Jenny’s friend Hal caught in the wrong, but steadfastly refusing to admit it. ‘Maybe I didn’t grow up in India after all,’ he finally admitted. He did have the air of a rich and successful man about him as he brooded over his sins and almost admitted he had been wrong, so maybe he really had made his fortune on the other side of the world and that was another factor to weigh up as they eyed each other warily across Joan’s spotlessly clean kitchen.

  What could she say to his grudging admission? He had been such a boy to carry all that fury across so many miles of ocean, then unloaded it at the other end like heavy baggage for storage until he was ready to unlock it one day and see what it really contained, if that day ever came. He must have been skirting around it ever since, telling himself she was everything he painted her after he found her out in a lie and decided she was just like his mother on the slenderest of evidence. If he had not done so much damage, she might even feel sorry for the rootless young Ash who thought he could wall out his hurts and fears by hating a person she had never been.

  ‘I had Jenny to make me a mother. Without her I hate to think what I might have become,’ she admitted and it was true. If not for her child, what would she have done with herself over the last eight years? She hated to think and almost pitied him for not having a Jenny in his life to make it purposeful.

  ‘Maybe she can make me a father and change me too.’ He sighed and finally seemed to realise he still had his outer garments on. He shucked off his heavy greatcoat and she was impressed with the breadth of shoulder underneath and the power in them to get such a weight of damp wool off so easily without having to ask for help. Yes, he was dressed like a rich man trying to fit into a modest man’s life. She recognised the cut of a master tailor and wondered how much it must have cost him to assemble a comprehensive wardrobe in the brief time he must have been back in London after his long voyage. His riding breeches and boots were the best quality and his linen snowy and immaculate, but the old Ash would have scorned such a plain and workmanlike waistcoat. As for the muffler this Ash could not yet bring himself to part with, he would have given that one glance of contempt and written his future self off as a middle-aged quiz with no sense of fashion.

  Whereas Rosalind rather liked him; or she would, if she was the sort of idle society beauty who had time to spare for casting long, thoughtful sideways glances at a gentleman’s powerful shoulders and those narrow flanks so temptingly displayed in the more modest fashion he aped today. As she was only his wife she did her best not to think those thoughts and turned away to put another lump of coal on the already glowing fire. He was obviously still cold and that was about as wifely as she was prepared to be under the circumstances.

  ‘If you are trying to make me feel small, it’s certainly working,’ he told her after that long and thoughtful silence. ‘I did arrange for the interest on the very small fortune I had left back then to be paid to you every quarter when I left for India,’ he said, looking grim again as he eyed the mismatched plates on the dresser and the rag rug in front of the fire as if they were all the confirmation he needed she never received a penny of his money.

  ‘So I could go from one charity to another? I had quite enough of being an unwanted dependent under Lord Lackbourne’s roof, thank you very much. Even if I had known about it, I would not have been very grateful for your conscience money.’

  ‘Not charity—I had a duty to provide for my wife although we were estranged and you could have starved for all my lawyer cared. My grandfather paid for my passage and arranged a post as a clerk to the Company when I reached Calcutta, then he told me I would have to live off my pay and expect no more help from him. But at least I thought you were provided for as best I could—you could have lived better than this on it anyway.’

  ‘We live well enough, we are warm and well fed and decently clothed, but it was harsh of your grandfather to cut you off without a shilling.’

  ‘Not really, I was a wild and expensive young idiot so I suppose I deserved it. I promised Jasper not to gamble wildly or drink to excess like our father when I went off to Oxford and he went to war, but I never could resist a dare to relieve the boredom of being the extra spare grandson of a duke. Grandfather thought I was becoming as big a wastrel as my father and needed a shock to make something of myself before it was too late. He thought he had failed with his second son so he was determined to make me do something useful. His last throw of the dice with me was timed just right; I had an excuse to run away from my responsibility for you and any child we might have. I never even thought of such a consequence when I left you, which only goes to prove what a careless young idiot I was.’

  ‘It was only one night and I expect he planned to get you away from me as well as forcing you to take some responsibility,’ she pointed out as if she was defending him.

  Everyone must have known Ash was besotted with Lord Lackbourne’s penniless stepdaughter back then. They had thought it such a delicious secret to meet even after her stepfather had turned down Ash’s suit, but with hindsight it was probably obvious to the gossips. Someone must have told Ash’s grandfather the affair was not as nipped in the bud by that refusal as he and her stepfather had thought. Sending his grandson to India was the perfect solution for a duke faced with supporting the feckless pair she and Ash would have been if they had been allowed to marry openly and carry on with their lives as if the ravens would feed them like Elijah. Rosalind was glad she had been left free to bring Jenny up as an ordinary human being, until Ash came back, but his family were not to know when he was sent away for his own good that they had eloped together before he went.

  ‘He never knew I had married you,’ Ash said.

  ‘Maybe not, but he never made an effort to meet me and judge for himself if I was a good enough wife for you. My father must have been a good man since my mother loved him, but the real truth is I can never have looked like a suitable match for a true aristocrat like you.’

  Ash shifted in the Windsor chair he had sunk into as the fire warmed him, as if he didn’t want to admit even now that he no longer loved her. ‘The dukedom was so unlikely to fall on me I was no more than a gentleman when we married. If I had told him what we meant to do, he and your stepfather would have felt obliged to stop the wedding simply because we were so young and foolish we could not be trusted to know our minds,’ he pointed out with the wisdom of hindsight.

  ‘True, but once the deed was done and neither of them could do anything about it, why did you not tell him then?’ she asked, thinking he must have been ashamed of his poor catch and scorned bride. He still looked as if he would rather not discuss the past now they had so much of Jenny’s future to consider, but it felt vital for her to at least try to understand why he did and said what he had back then. Even a convenient wife needed some sense of the ground under her feet and she had always vowed she would do anything to keep her daughter safe and happy, hadn’t she?

  ‘We parted so quickly it seemed best not to advertise what an idiot I had been. And he would have raged at me for spoiling your life as well as my own. I thought providing for you as best I could was enough and went to India fully expecting his furious letter disowning me to follow as soon as he found out what a coward I had been.’ Again his chair creaked as he fidgeted in it
as if the thought of his boyish irresponsibility made him feel uncomfortable now it was too late to remedy.

  ‘Do you expect me to cheer you for admitting it?’

  ‘No, I was a cur. Grandfather and my brother Jasper and even my little cousin Charlie would have been so disappointed in me if they knew I had run away and pretended our marriage never happened.’

  She thought about the effect his boyish excuses and evasion had had on her young life and wished she could go back in time and give him a very large slice of tongue pie, but there was little point now and there were more important things to worry about. ‘I have known some curs with the most gentlemanly of souls,’ she still said with a pointed look to make clear he was not one of them.

  ‘Very well, then, I was worse than a cur. I was so wrapped up in my own ills I took no account of yours and I am very sorry for it now.’

  Not then or at any time after I got to India, or even yesterday or earlier today, when I set out to finally rid myself of you for good, Rosalind. But now...now I am finally sorry.

  She silently put the words into his mouth and found they fitted it too well. She argued silently that was not good enough and he shrugged as if he knew what she was thinking and she was right.

  ‘I cannot go back and put any of it right now, it happened too long ago,’ he admitted out loud.

  ‘I hid as far away from Edenhope and your family as I could get once I realised I was with child. And it turns out that I could have gone to live in the next town for all the difference it would have made to them. I was even glad when I found out your grandfather was dead and I no longer had to fear every passing stranger was sent here to rescue his great-grandchild from my clutches. That memory makes me ashamed, for I expect he was only trying to do his best for his family.’

  ‘Aye, he was, he would have welcomed you at Edenhope and felt sorry for you for being tangled up by his idiot grandson. It is my fault you and my child have been living in poverty and she has no idea about her heritage. He would be the first one to tell me so if he was still alive.’

  His critical gaze was stern on the jumble of oddments they used here on a day-to-day basis and Rosalind had to see it through his eyes. What seemed cheerful and cosy until he came looked scraped together and poverty-stricken. If this was how it felt to see with a duchess’s gaze she wasn’t sure she liked it. ‘I am proud of our home. Jenny loves to pick out memories when Joan makes those rag rugs out of odds and ends,’ she told him, since he was staring at the latest example with a frown.

  ‘What?’ he said as if lost in completely different thoughts. ‘Oh, yes, I can see how she would.’

  ‘Money isn’t everything,’ she added.

  ‘Weighed against over seven years of my daughter’s life it seems very close to nothing right now, but I still have it and you are still a duchess.’

  ‘Then let me go, Ash; leave us be.’

  ‘Don’t you see how impossible that is? With my daughter to protect and me still wanting you like the very devil,’ he said, voice rasped by the fire and hot need in his eyes now he had turned them full on her.

  ‘You do?’ she asked, shocked when she thought she was the only one struggling against the fiery passions that had always hummed between them whenever they were together in the old days. Now those needs and wants were screaming for everything they had been denied while they were apart and apparently he was torn by them as well.

  Chapter Five

  ‘How would you feel if I really was first mate of a merchantman come back to you after all these years, Mrs Rose Meadows?’ he asked as if her answer was important to him.

  How much simpler their lives would be if he was, but it was a fantasy she could not afford. ‘I would feel deeply relieved you were still alive,’ she said tightly.

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘As you are not Mr Meadows what does it matter?’

  ‘Maybe I would prefer myself that way as well, my Rosalind.’

  ‘Not yours, Ash. Not any more.’

  ‘Ah, Ros, we made such a mess of things, didn’t we?’ he said as if he truly regretted it and she was still too cautious to be convinced.

  ‘You look like a successful man to me, Your Grace,’ she said, but he went on staring into the fire as if searching for answers to far bigger questions. ‘We have both done well enough,’ she added. ‘You in your way and I in mine.’

  ‘Aye, I thought I was rich until I came here and found out what I lacked.’

  Rosalind was tempted to breach the gulf between them and say she and Jenny would fill the spaces in his life he seemed to have only just found out about, but this was far too important to be mended with easy words and generous impulses. This decision he was almost asking her to make would affect the rest of her life, and perhaps define Jenny’s as well. ‘You are tired and cold and probably feel like a stranger in your own land,’ she told him instead and even to her the words sounded trite.

  ‘Don’t mother me,’ he argued, turning his brooding gaze on her again and letting her see the very grown-up need in his smoky eyes. He looked so familiar and yet so different from the boy she once knew as he stared back at her in the firelight.

  ‘Perish the thought,’ she muttered and looked away.

  He moved so fast he had pulled her out of her chair and into his arms before she drew breath. Her body clung to his as if it was home after eight years in the wilderness. Her world had shrunk to arms that felt like steel sheathed in muscle and the instant familiarity of his body against hers. There was a moment of getting used to the fit of him and her, then here they were again; her body plastered against his masculine one and purring like a cat. He was ten times stronger than last time he held her so close and more emphatically male, but he still felt dear and familiar and it was appallingly alluring. He met her mesmerised gaze with the devilment, the old wild spirit and stubbornness of her young husband in his hot grey gaze and a new helping of Ash, the Duke, to add a steadier flame to the mix.

  Her humble kitchen faded away as they stepped out of the everyday world and could have been anywhere. His lips teased hers and she gave a faint little moan of encouragement instead of the demand to let her go her last traces of good sense had been working on until he kissed her. He dipped a butterfly kiss on her half-open mouth and what point was there pretending she didn’t want him when it was like a force of nature raging to be unleashed inside her? Next he opened his wickedly persuasive mouth on hers, let his tongue slide in with a leisurely flick that made her insides flip over in hot and heady anticipation. The aching memory of their only night of love was sultry and yearning, a goad to do it all again, right now. He must know her tongue would dart out to meet his, but he withdrew from the full ardent contact of lovers before she got there. One last gentle, lover’s nip at her lower lip and he raised his head again. She felt tears sting and blinked them away. It would never do to let him see her cry and she seemed to have been holding back a whole river of tears since she set eyes on him again.

  If only, oh, if only... The old besotted Rosalind almost betrayed her by whispering it out loud.

  That part of her was distraught at the terrible waste of all they could have been together, if he had not turned into her stern judge when they had been so young and dangerously in love it was almost certain to end in tears. The rest of her was a lot more cautious and tried to read his reaction to the kiss she had returned with so much interest. She even did her best to douse the sweet fire inside and gazed back coolly.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t done that,’ she managed to murmur huskily at last.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because what went wrong between us can’t be put right with a few kisses and a pat on the head, then back to where we left off eight years ago.’

  ‘How can we make it better, then?’

  A good question. ‘With honesty and good will, I suppose,’ was the only answer she could come up with an
d she read the cynical look in his eyes that said her dishonesty did for them last time, so she knew they were still a very long way from mending a broken marriage. If it was even possible to do so.

  ‘Joan will be back soon,’ she reminded them both.

  ‘We had best not fall on one another like wild beasts again until bedtime, then,’ he said as if he had said and done all he needed.

  ‘Oh, no, you are not staying here.’ Moments ago she had been longing for her bed and freedom to slake whatever was left between them now the love was gone. The idea of him cynically climbing the narrow stairs to a bed she had only ever shared with her daughter when Jenny could not sleep in her own felt unthinkable. She needed more than lust and his urgent need of an heir to risk so much of herself with him after he had hurt her so much last time.

  ‘Come to my room at the inn, then,’ he urged as if he thought it was only fear of Jenny or Joan bursting in and interrupting that kept her from eagerly agreeing to be his devoted slave. ‘It seemed comfortable enough and at least the whole place is spotless. I told them I was Mr Meadows as well so it will be perfectly respectable.’

  ‘You have a very strange idea of not causing scandal in a small village, especially one about to be shut down by a snowstorm so we cannot escape watching eyes and wagging tongues.’

  ‘How can they make up warm stories about us? We are married.’

  ‘Because I have been living here without you for seven and a half years and you don’t look like any merchant seaman I ever saw. I am not adding fuel to the fire by strolling through the inn to your bedchamber.’

  ‘If they are going to gossip anyway, why not give them something to gossip about?’

  ‘No, you’re not getting round me by turning the truth inside out. You always did have a smooth tongue when you cared to use it.’

  ‘You have become very free with that No of yours since we last met, despite my not-very-persuasive powers.’