by Mary Balogh
They both chuckled at the thought, and Hannah, finished with her buttered bread and cheese and her tea, dug her hands under the cuffs of the opposite sleeves and grasped her arms tightly. None of her dreams and plans over the winter had included them laughing together at treasonous absurdities.
He looked purely handsome when he laughed—especially when he was also sleepy.
“And how did the conversation get from the Tower to Ainsley?” he asked.
“He frowned in thought when I mentioned your name,” she said, “and then seemed to remember who you were. A dashed shame, he said, that you could not have been Earl of Merton, though he was inordinately fond of the current earl. And there was something about you he ought to remember. He dug very deep into his memory, Constantine, and then popped up with the name of Ainsley Park without any prompting at all. He looked just as pleased with himself as if he had pulled a plum out of the Christmas pudding. A wonderful man, he declared—you, that is, Constantine—and he fully intends to offer you some assistance in your charitable endeavors and to honor you personally in some suitable way.”
He shook his head.
“Was he inebriated?” he asked.
“Not to the point of making an idiot of himself,” she said. “But he did drink an alarming amount even when I was looking. I daresay he drank just as much if not more when I was not looking.”
“One must hope, then,” he said, “that he will forget—again.”
“He saw a plump and frumpish matron as he finished speaking,” she said, “and his eyes lit up and he went in pursuit of her. I was totally forgotten and abandoned. I might not have existed. It was very lowering, Constantine.”
“The king’s tastes in women were always eccentric,” he said, “to put a kind spin on them. Peculiar, to be a little less kind. Bizarre, to be truthful. Did everyone else ignore your existence?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I am the Duchess of Dunbarton.”
“That is the spirit, Duchess,” he said, and his very dark eyes smiled at her.
It was very disconcerting and very knee-weakening. None of the rest of his face smiled. Yet she did not feel mocked. She felt—teased. Liked. Did he like her?
And did she like him? Like, as opposed to lust after?
“If you had made off with the crown jewels this afternoon and presented them all to Babs,” she said, “instead of merely buying her an ice at Gunter’s, she would not have been half as delighted.”
“She was pleased, was she not?” he said. “Have you met her vicar? Is he worthy of her?”
“Among other lesser virtues,” she said, “he possesses a special smile, which he saves just for her. And it pierces straight through to her heart.”
They gazed at each other across the low table.
“Do you believe in love?” she asked him. “That kind of love, I mean.”
“Yes,” he said. “I would have said no once upon a time. It is easy to be cynical—life gives one much evidence to suggest that there is nothing else to be and remain honest. But I have four cousins—second cousins—who grew up in the country in genteel poverty and burst upon the social scene with the death of Jon. Country bumpkins, no less, whom I expected to be wild and extravagant and vulgar. I hated them even before I set eyes upon them, especially the new Merton. They turned out to be none of those things, and one by one they all made matches that should have been disastrous. And yet all the evidence points to the conclusion that my cousins have converted their marriages into love matches. All of them. It is unmistakable and extraordinary.”
“Even the cousin who married the Duke of Moreland?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, “even Vanessa. And yes, I believe in love.”
“But not for yourself?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Does one have to work at finding and building it?” he asked her. “The experiences of my cousins would seem to suggest that one does. I am not sure I am prepared to put in the effort. How would one know it would not all be in vain? If love arrives in my arms full blown one day, I will be quite happy. But I will not be unhappy if it does not. I am contented with my life as it is.”
And yet it seemed to Hannah that he looked melancholy as he said it. He had, she thought a little wistfully, an enormous amount of love to give to the right woman. A love that would move mountains or universes.
“And you, Duchess,” he said. “You loved when you were a girl and were badly hurt. You loved Dunbarton, but not, I think, in any romantic way. Do you believe in the sort of love Miss Leavensworth has found?”
“When I was nineteen,” she said, “I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep—or not deep—that love would have gone. All things happen for a purpose—or so the duke taught me, and I believe him. Perhaps discovering Colin and Dawn together was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Strange, that. She had never consciously thought it before. What if she had not discovered the truth until too late? What would her life be like now? And what if Colin had never loved Dawn? Would she still love him now? Would she be content with her life with him? There was no way of knowing. But she no longer felt the pain of losing him, she realized. She probably had not for a long time. Only the pain of betrayal and rejection. That had lingered.
“Even without the example of Barbara, though,” she said, “I would know that real love exists. I mean that real, once-in-a-lifetime, soul-deep love that happens to a few people but never to most. The duke knew it and told me about it.”
“Dunbarton flaunted a former love before you?” he asked. “If it was former.”
“He was a year into his mourning when I met and married him,” she said. “The worst should have been over and perhaps was. But he never stopped grieving. Never for a moment. It was a love that had endured for more than fifty years, and it was a love that defined his entire life. It enabled him to love me.”
He folded his arms and gazed steadily at her for a while.
“And yet,” he said, “he never married her. And he kept her such a secret that no whisper of her existence ever seems to have reached the ears of the ton.”
“He was the duke’s secretary,” she said, “and remained so all his adult life. And so they were able to be together and live together without anyone remarking upon the fact. They must have been very discreet, though. Even the servants seemed not to know the truth, or else they were so loyal to the duke that they never spoke of what they knew beyond his household. They were loyal. They still are.”
“Dunbarton told you of such things?” he asked her.
“Before we married,” she said, “when he was making clear to me that he had no ulterior motive in marrying me but to take me away and teach me to be a duchess and a proud, independent beauty in the short time remaining to him. He had not been able to take his eyes off me during the wedding, he told me, not because he felt lasciviously toward me but because I looked so like an angel that I surely could not possibly be human. But angels ought not to have their hearts broken by plodding yokels—his words. I was shocked to the roots of my being by his story. I did not even know such a thing existed as what he described. But I believed in his kindness. Perhaps I was foolish—undoubtedly I was. But sometimes it is a good thing to be foolish. He talked freely about the love of his life during our years together. I think it soothed him to be able to do so at last, after so many years of secrecy and silence. And he promised me that one day I would find such a love for myself—though not with someone of my own sex.”
“And you believed him?” he asked.
“I believed in the possibility of it,” she said, “even if not the probability. All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart. But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. He promised it would, in fact. B
ut how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?”
She smiled. What a very strange conversation to be having with her lover. She got to her feet and walked around the table.
“But in the meantime,” she said, “I am not waiting around for something that may never happen to me. Taking you as a lover is something I wanted to happen—no, something I decided would happen as soon as my year of mourning was at an end. And for this spring what you have to offer is quite sufficient.”
“You decided even before you returned to London,” he asked her, raising his eyebrows, “that I was to be the one?”
“I did,” she said. “Are you not flattered?”
She undid the sash of his dressing gown, opened it back, and climbed onto the large leather chair with him, straddling him as she did so and bending her head to kiss his lips.
“And so Dunbarton taught you, did he,” he asked, pushing the dressing gown off her shoulders and down her arms, and tossing it to the floor, “always to get what you want?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I have got you.”
She looked directly into his eyes and smiled dazzlingly.
“A puppet on a string,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head. “You had to want it too. And you do. Tell me you do.”
“I cannot just show you?” he asked, and there was a smile lurking in his eyes again.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Vulnerable, Duchess?” He almost whispered against her mouth, causing her to shiver. “I want it. Badly. I want you. Badly.”
And he undid the buttons at his waist, opened back the flap of his pantaloons, grasped her by the hips to lift her above him, and brought her down hard onto him.
Hannah had always found their encounters on his bed almost unbearably pleasurable. This time the almost was missing. She knelt on the chair, her legs on either side of his body, and she rode him as vigorously and heedlessly as he rode her, feeling him hard and deep inside her, hearing the wetness of their coupling, seeing his harsh, dark-complexioned face, as his head rested against the back of the chair, his eyes closed, his hair disheveled.
And when the pain had reached almost to its limit and he should have held her firm and put a stop to it with his own release, it did not end but hurtled onward until it became all the way unbearable—and then fell away suddenly and instantly into such total glory that there were no words even if she had been searching for them.
Only a wordless cry.
And a shivering, shuddering descent against his body and a shoulder to cradle the side of her head and an irresistible urge to sleep.
He held her close until she had almost completed the descent, and then he disengaged from her and lifted her in his arms, somehow managed to wrap his dressing gown about her like a blanket, and carried her through to his bedchamber.
He kissed her before setting her down.
“Tell me it was as good for you as I think it was,” he said.
“You need compliments?” she asked him sleepily. “It was good. Oh, Constantine, it was good.”
He chuckled.
She curled up on the bed and was already well on her way back to sleep before he joined her there and covered them both with the blankets.
Jewels, she thought just before she fell over the barrier into sleep.
The crown jewels she had joked about his stealing for Barbara.
Her own jewels, sold for funds with which to finance the dearest wish of her heart.
His half-stolen jewel converted to cash with which he had gambled and won Ainsley Park.
Whose jewel had it been? Jonathan’s?
To have been sold for what? For the home for unmarried mothers and their children that had been Jonathan’s idea?
Had Jonathan and Constantine between them been up to the same thing as she had? Not just with the one jewel, but perhaps with more?
Was there that degree of similarity between her and Constantine?
All things happen for a purpose, the duke had told her, and she had come to believe for herself.
There are no coincidences, he had also said more than once. She had never quite believed that.
Love would find her one day when she was not looking, he had told her.
She did not expect it. She was afraid to expect it.
But her mind could not cope with so many apparent non sequiturs tumbling about in it.
She slept just as Constantine’s arms came about her and drew her close.
HANNAH WAS FULLY AWARE that the ton had long ago come to the conclusion that the Duchess of Dunbarton’s newest lover was Mr. Constantine Huxtable. They would have thought it even if it were not true, as they had thought it of the many men, mostly her friends or the duke’s, who had gone before him. She was aware too that it was expected she would tire of him within a week or two and cast him off in favor of someone else.
Her reputation did not bother her. Indeed, she had almost deliberately cultivated it during the years of her marriage. It was part of the cocoon inside which she hid and nurtured her real self.
She did not believe that on the whole the ton was actively hostile to her, even the ladies. She was invited everywhere, and her own invitations were almost always accepted. She was taken into any conversational group to which she chose to attach herself at the various entertainments she attended.
It was with some surprise, then, that she greeted the refusal of her invitation to join her brief house party at Copeland Manor first by the Earl and Countess of Merton, then by Lord and Lady Montford, and last by the Earl and Countess of Sheringford. The only members of that family who did not refuse were the Duke and Duchess of Moreland, and that perhaps had something to do with the fact that they had not been invited.
Never believe in a coincidence, the duke had always said. Hannah would have had to be an imbecile to believe this was a coincidence.
Constantine had confessed to a fondness for his second cousins. They seemed fond of him. That was why she had invited them, though in retrospect it probably had not been a great idea, even if they had accepted. Or perhaps especially if they had accepted. He was not courting her, after all. They were lovers.
It must be that fact that had caused them all to refuse. She could almost picture them all putting their heads together and deciding that the invitation was in bad taste. Or that she was in bad taste. Perhaps they were afraid she would corrupt Constantine. Or hurt him. Or make a fool of him.
Probably that last point.
Hannah had been taught—and had taught herself—not to care what anyone thought of her. Except the duke, of course. He had frowned at her perhaps two or three times in all the ten years of their marriage, though he had never raised his voice against her, and each time she had felt that the world had surely come to an end. And except the servants at Dunbarton House and their other establishments in the country. Servants always knew one for who or what one really was, and it mattered to Hannah that they like her. She believed they did.
And now—annoyingly—she discovered that she did not like being shunned by three families that had meant nothing whatsoever to her until she had taken their second cousin as her lover.
Why she did not like it she did not know, except that they had inconvenienced her and she was going to have to invite other people to take their place.
“The third refusal,” she said, holding aloft the note from the Countess of Sheringford at the breakfast table. “And now none of them is coming to Copeland, Babs. It makes me feel a little as though I must have leprosy. Is it because I always wear white, do you suppose? Do I look sickly?”
Barbara looked up with blank eyes from her own letter. It was a long one—it must be from the Reverend Newcombe.
“No one is coming?” she said. “But I thought you had already had several acceptances, Hannah.”
“No one from Constantine’s family,” Hannah explained. “His father’s side of the family, anyway. They are the ones to whom he appears to be closest. But they have all
refused.”
“That is a pity,” Barbara said. “Will you invite other people instead? There is still time, is there not?”
“Do they believe it would be distasteful to come to Copeland because Constantine and I are lovers?” Hannah asked, frowning at the offending piece of paper in her hand. “I was always rumored to have lovers, even when it was not true, but no one ever shunned me. Even when I was still married.”
Barbara set her letter down, resigned to the interruption.
“You are upset?” she asked.
“I am never upset,” Hannah said. Then she set down her own letter and smiled ruefully at her friend. “Well, a little, I suppose. I had looked forward to having them there.”
“Why?” Barbara asked. “When one is to have one’s lover at a house party, Hannah, why would one want his family there too?”
It was a good question and one she had been asking herself just a few moments ago.
“Is it a little like inviting one’s family to join one on honeymoon?” Hannah asked.
They both laughed.
“But we will, of course, behave with the utmost discretion,” Hannah said. “Good heavens, the very idea that we might not. You will be there and all sorts of other respectable guests.”
“Then the cousins will be missing a pleasant few days in the country,” Barbara said, laying a hand on her letter again. “It will be their loss.”
“But I wanted them there,” Hannah said, hearing too late the slight petulance of her tone. And there was that word again that she had been warned against—wanted, but could not have.
Well, you cannot always have what you want, she expected Barbara to say before returning her attention to her vicar’s love letter. But she said something else instead.
“Hannah,” she said, “you are not behaving at all like the jaded aristocrat with a new lover you like to see yourself as. You are behaving like a woman in love.”
“What?” Hannah half screeched.
“Is it not a little peculiar,” Barbara asked—and she looked suddenly every inch a vicar’s daughter, “that you should care for the good opinion of your lover’s relatives?”