Duchess by Design: The Gilded Age Girls Club

by Maya Rodale

  His plans had irrevocably changed.

  She slept on her side, her backside pressed against his manhood, which was ready for more of her. He dropped a kiss on her bare shoulder and marveled that he should be so lucky to see her in nothing but bare skin and sheets. She was a dressmaker and was always impressively turned out. Only he would get to see her thusly.

  Right?

  He didn’t want to think about it, but once the thought occurred to him, Kingston couldn’t shake it. They had exchanged all their secrets last night.

  Except for one.

  There was still one mystery to Adeline that he had no answer for.

  How did she afford that white silk gown draped across the settee, and every other exquisitely crafted gown he’d seen her wear? How could she afford all the women who had sewn each stitch? How had she gone from penniless and unemployed seamstress to dressmaker with her own establishment in a fortnight? It was an unfortunate fact that banks were not in the habit of granting loans to working-class girls with no collateral and no one to vouch for them.

  Kingston was ashamed of the thought that occurred to him next.

  Instead of how he wondered who.

  But if there wasn’t a who, then there was a how and he wanted to know it. Now that marriage to Miss Van Allen, or any other heiress for that matter, was off the table, he needed to formulate another plan to repair the roof, rebuild the stables, provide the dowries, pay his mother’s millinery bills. He had to find a way to do his duty and marry the woman he loved.

  “How did you do it, Adeline?”

  “Hmm,” she murmured sleepily. “Do what?”

  “Enchant me. Bewitch me.”

  She yawned and stretched against him. The friction made him want her all over again.

  “It was the easiest thing in the world. It was as simple as walking away from you.”

  “You do have a very enchanting backside.” He moved against her. She rolled over to face him. Pressed a quick kiss against his lips. Wriggled up closer to him. Her thoughts did not seem to be along the lines of conversation. Nevertheless. “How did you start your shop?”

  She stilled.

  “Brandon . . .”

  “We’ve told each other all of our other secrets and that is the one of yours I don’t know yet. I want to know you. All of you.” He pushed a lock of hair away from her cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Brandon. But that is the one thing I cannot tell you.”

  She tugged him closer for another kiss. But he couldn’t help it; he had assumed the worst. The worst was distracting.

  “I ask because I need to know how to obtain my own fortune. You seem to have made one, in a very short time.”

  She sat up abruptly, pulling the sheets around her.

  “What happened to Miss Van Allen? Your heiress plan?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not going to work for me anymore. I have fallen for a different girl,” he said. “It so happens that I need to marry a girl who enchants me. Who I can’t take my eyes off of. No fortune required.”

  “It shouldn’t matter. How I got it should not matter.”

  That she wouldn’t tell him made him suspicious. It raised questions he did not want to ask. He wondered who she knew who might have the blunt. A vision of Freddie touching her arm flashed in his brain. Freddie, taking her for a turn about the ballroom. Adeline, laughing at something Freddie had said.

  No.

  “It doesn’t matter but . . .” All of a sudden his heart clenched with jealousy. And it did matter. Because he wanted to love her with his whole heart and he could not if such a monumental secret was between them. Especially if it might involve his cousin.

  “I cannot tell you,” she said. “I am sorry, but I have given my word.”

  “Was it—? No. Never mind. I will not spoil this. There is a beautiful woman in my bed.” He grasped her wrist to pull her down into his embrace, but she resisted and he dropped his hold on her. Damn, he had already ruined the moment.

  “I should go,” she said. “Soon the city will wake up and it will be very bad if I am seen in last night’s dress this morning.”

  “Wait, Adeline . . .”

  She was busy donning various layers, which were strewn about the room. He stood to help her. She was so beautiful. She was so enchanting. She was so ambitious. How did she do it?

  The question, now that he considered it, consumed him. One day she is penniless and alone on the street and just weeks later, she is the proprietress of her own shop. That did not just happen. Not in this world, when nearly all avenues of support that might help an enterprising man were cut off to women.

  Except for one.

  A benefactor. A protector. A man with money who would see her established in return for certain . . . favors. A man like Freddie, admittedly bored and unhappy in his marriage. With money to burn and a taste for young women. And the thought that she might be indebted to Freddie, his own cousin, was unbearable.

  If Adeline needed a supporter, he would have wanted her to come to him.

  But he was broke and she must have known it—why else would he be so doggedly hunting his heiress? He felt embarrassed. She must have concluded—perhaps correctly—that he was not in a position to make a woman’s dreams come true. He felt ashamed. He couldn’t provide for her, so she turned to another man who could. He felt enraged.

  That—that—thought was the one to have sucked the air from his lungs and oxygen from his brain. The noxious feelings, that lack of air—that was the reason for what he said next.

  “Tell me one thing: Was it Freddie?”

  She whirled around to face him. “Freddie?”

  “My cousin, Lord Hewitt. I have seen you two together. You seem very . . . friendly. He is the sort of man who . . .”

  “I know who you mean,” she said so coldly and instantly, he wished to take it back and never breathe a word of it again.

  Freddie made no secret of the fact that he had married for money, not love, and was the sort who would pay for a mistress, whether in the form of jewels or dressmaker’s establishments. It was a fair question to ask of Freddie.

  But not Adeline.

  “Do you really mean to ask if I slept with a married man for funds to start my shop? Do you truly mean to suggest that I traded my body for money?”

  She was incredulous. Righteously furious with him. Rightfully so.

  The only thing to do was quit cringing and try to back out of this hole he was digging for himself. He had not meant to insult her. But he had, deeply.

  “No, I don’t mean to lay such accusations at your feet. But . . . you have done a remarkable thing.”

  “Yes, I have,” she said proudly.

  “I have seen the way he flirts with you. And I have seen you return his affections. And I know how the world works. I would not judge you.”

  “Let me tell you what you have seen,” she said coldly. “You have seen the husband of one of my clients take an interest in me. An interest that I do not reciprocate, which you should know after last night. You have seen me feign delight in his attentions because I cannot afford to anger the husband of a woman who has ordered an astronomical number of dresses. Should he decide not to pay, I will be financially ruined. And until he pays, I shall laugh at his jokes and allow him to believe I might entertain his advances while at the same time doing everything to make it appear that I am an honest, virtuous woman, in case I scare off the rest of my clientele. Shall I tell you more about the impossible position in which I find myself?”

  Kingston was speechless.

  Freddie. Harmless old Freddie. Good old Freddie. Just having a spot of fun and oh, just keeping a hardworking woman suspended between a rock and a hard place. He could not quite wrap his brain around it.

  “I shouldn’t even be here with you,” she said, storming about the room collecting bits of her attire. A stocking, underthings. “You do not deserve me.”

  He could not disagree.

  “I cannot tell you how I came to
open my establishment—and now I most certainly will not—but I hope I have sufficiently explained Lord Hewitt to you.”

  “You should have a word with him. Explain your position. Tell him to stop.”

  She laughed.

  “Too many people depend upon me for their livelihood. I’ll sacrifice myself before I ruin everything for them. You should understand that, Duke. Isn’t that the same reason you will marry an heiress you don’t love?”

  “I’ll have a word with him.” Kingston said this in his most ducal, lord-of-the-manor voice. His I will solve all known problems of the universe voice.

  “Will you, though?” Her voice was weary. “Will you really stand up to your fellow peers, your own family, your good friend on behalf of some working-class girl?”

  “You’re not just some working-class girl to me.”

  “But to the rest of the world, I’m nothing. A nobody. Are you willing to risk your reputation to go protect mine?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”

  She tilted her chin up stubbornly.

  “And what if I don’t want you to fight my battles for me?”

  He had been to Eton. Had the best tutors. Taken a first at Oxford. He had done a tour of the Continent, passably spoke a few languages, had a seat in the House of Lords. He was an educated man who knew things. He did not know what to say to Adeline in this moment.

  “I want to be a man worthy of you.”

  “You can start by not accusing me of trading my body for money in order to get ahead. And so what if I have? Why should I be faulted for seizing one of the only ways of advancement the world allows a woman?”

  Kingston was still, silent, rocked to his core.

  His jealousy had gotten the better of him. His determination to step in and be the hero had gotten the better of him. He had gotten in his own damn way. Once again, Adeline opened his eyes and set him straight.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. She was struggling to get into her gown, and he moved to help her.

  “I am going home. I am going to my shop. Some of us have work to do.”

  Later that evening

  The Metropolitan Club

  Kingston had come to Manhattan to find an heiress and a fortune. Instead he had fallen in love with a dressmaker. Now he had neither fortune nor dressmaker. There were some decisions he needed to make about how to save his dukedom and if—no, how—to woo an angry woman.

  And then there was his cousin Freddie, the devil himself, strolling toward him as if nothing had changed at all.

  “There you are! Where did you disappear to last night?” He dropped into a chair opposite and signaled to a waiter for a drink. Of course he assumed that Kingston was in the mood for his company.

  Kingston thought of all the times they’d done exactly this: secluded themselves in their clubs and traded stories of wild and reckless nights the next day. Ever since they were schoolboys, during university, and through the early years of their London seasons. And, to Kingston’s everlasting shame, even after Freddie had married Marian, though Freddie never spoke intimately of her.

  “I finally discovered some haunts downtown,” he said by way of explanation. He found that he did not want to discuss the details of his time with Adeline with his cousin, friend, partner-in-crime. For all sorts of reasons.

  Not that any of this was apparent to Freddie.

  “Finally.” His cousin grinned. “Finally you’ve had enough of your respectable engagements and we can now have some real fun. Just don’t tell the missus.”

  “How is Marian?”

  “Running up quite a bill at the dressmaker’s but, you know, it keeps her out of my hair.”

  It was the little thing, a throwaway line that until last night, Kingston wouldn’t have given much thought to. Of course a person of their position often had an outstanding amount due to a tradesperson. Frankly he did as well, on behalf of his mother.

  But Kingston never flirted with the milliner.

  He never made his presence known or felt at the modiste his female relations frequented.

  He never slid his arm around the waist of a barmaid.

  He never told maids bad jokes that required feigned laughs, right?

  “So I’ve heard,” Kingston remarked dryly. He felt a constriction in his chest as Adeline’s words clanged in his head: Will you really stand up to your fellow peer, your own family, your good friend on behalf of some working-class girl? She had been asking if he would really stand up for her.

  If he would burn bridges for the love between them.

  If he would simply respect a woman of her position.

  This morning, he hadn’t quite believed that his cousin was the man she accused him of being. But tonight, now that his eyes had been opened, Kingston could see that Freddie would take a flirtation too far, intentionally or not, and would think nothing of it. After all, no one had ever asked him to consider anyone else’s position.

  The question was now whether Kingston should say something. Here. Now. To Freddie. It would be easier to laugh the whole thing off or to make his excuses and leave. But that would not stop Freddie from pressing his advantage with Adeline or any other girl.

  He was a duke. A member of Parliament. He was born to lead. Yet these words—defending a woman against his fellow peer—were not ones that had been handed down to him, generation to generation. They were not readily available but Kingston started searching for them.

  “Your seamstress is quite fetching,” Freddie went on, either oblivious to Kingston’s inner turmoil or intent upon being deliberately provocative. “Say, did you finally run off with her last night?”

  “Dressmaker,” he corrected. Kingston was determined to prove—if only to himself—that he was a changed man. “She’s not a seamstress, she is a dressmaker. A proprietress of her own shop. As you are well aware.”

  “Oh come on.” Freddie laughed. “She’s just a girl, and she’s not even duchess material!”

  “You should probably quit with that line of thinking,” Kingston said hotly. His hands flexed and clinched around the arms of the chair. It was either that or start throwing punches.

  “Are you honestly considering wedding her?” Freddie asked. “Or is she just a girl for a bit of fun before settling down with someone else? Or, in my case, just a girl you flirt with when you are trapped in a loveless marriage. But all in a day’s—or night’s—work for us lordly types. Give it a year or two with Miss Van Allen and you’ll see what I mean.” Freddie sullenly sipped his drink.

  It was almost as if Freddie were deliberately taunting him with this dismal vision of the future.

  “You give Miss Black too much of your attention. It’s improper. Unacceptable.” He stopped short of saying unwanted, remembering what Adeline had said about her difficult position.

  “She’s a pretty girl.” Freddie shrugged as if to say, why does it matter so much?

  Kingston felt the pressure inside him start to build as his heart pumped harder. He leaned forward, barely containing his fury.

  “Just a pretty girl? That’s the only reason you touch her arm, make her laugh, make insinuations of more with her?”

  Freddie was now taken aback. “Christ, it’s simply flirtation, Kingston. She likes it. She flirts back. What does it matter to you? Especially if you aren’t even going to marry her?”

  Kingston had never quite recovered his equilibrium since the words of this morning. Hell, ever since Adeline had crashed into him. Because of her, things had been churning around, breaking down, and building up into something new. Because of her, his placid and perfectly planned existence was simply no longer an option. Because of her, the little fissures that had appeared in his relationship with Freddie were starting to crack wide open.

  He wanted, more than anything, to be with her.

  To do that, he had to become a man worthy of her.

  If he married her, or not.

  She wasn’t here to see or hear him champion her, but he was
going to do it anyway.

  “You’re wrong. She doesn’t flirt back. She politely tolerates your attentions. You should stop.”

  “Well, no need to spoil a man’s fun.”

  Fun. He thought it was fun. It was Adeline’s whole life on the line and for Freddie it was just a bit of amusement. But Kingston had a glimpse at Adeline’s outrage and frustration. He had bemoaned the constraints of his position, but now he was aware of hers.

  “Did you ever consider that she didn’t genuinely return the sentiment?” Kingston asked.

  “Are you saying I’m not the charming lord about town I think I am?” Freddie replied hotly.

  Kingston knew his friend; he always meant well but he was spoiled by his position. As he was a decent-looking, wealthy peer, most people were forever obliging to him if they meant it or not. The time had passed for making excuses for him.

  “Yes. I am saying that. You should settle your bill with her, then leave her alone.”

  “Are you her lord and protector now?” Freddie retorted. “I know you’d like to be, but I doubt you’ll step up to the job. I’m not sure she’ll even have you if you do.”

  “I would like to be her protector. Starting yesterday.”

  “What about Miss Van Allen?”

  “We will not suit.”

  Freddie leaned forward, a gleam in his eye that Kingston could not read.

  “The duke I used to know would have his cake and eat it, too. All the Kingston dukes wouldn’t have thought twice about a dalliance with a dressmaker on the side. What happened to you to turn your back on tradition?”

  “What happened was that I fell in love.”

  “What about your family, your tenants, your servants? What about the goddamned roof?”

  It had come down to this: choosing between his best friend and the woman he loved, choosing between tradition and some uncertain future.

  “I will find another way. But I won’t compromise when it comes to the woman I love.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  His Grace has still not proposed to Miss Van Allen. Inquiring minds want to know why not, and more than a few women—marriage-minded mothers, particularly—want to know if the duke is still up for grabs.