Kiss Me Darkly

by Cecilia Gray

  He shifted his head to turn away from her, embarrassed at his state. Even more embarrassed by how much he wanted to simply wallow.

  Graham did not know how Dinah managed it, but she saw him out of the cottage, across the green field skirting the pond, and back to the house. She somehow shielded his condition from the rest of his family and her sisters, who were, thankfully, distracted by the upcoming happy event. After hiding him in the salon, she brought him water and a thick, black, noxious concoction that reeked of licorice. She forced it down his throat and then bundled him into one of the carriages, along with a distant cousin who prattled on endlessly. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the cushions, steeling himself against the bounce and sway that rocked the contents of his stomach.

  On the cushions opposite him and his cousin, Dinah shifted restlessly. In the sway of her skirt, he saw a flash of the pale curve of her ankle. The memory of warm skin beneath his fingertips slipped through his mind. The hand that had grasped her stockinged leg earlier tightened. He stared out the window.

  They arrived at the church just as the sun set in the west and bathed the meadow in gold. Dinah assisted him down the steps, into the church, and pulled him into a private pew so they were hidden from others. She inconspicuously brushed her gentle hands against his brown locks and worked through the knots along his temples. The cool touch of her hands was soothing upon his brow, and a sigh slipped from his lips.

  She bit off a word—probably an oath. “How could this happen to you?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  She cocked her head and her fingers stilled. She was touching him, far more familiarly than was appropriate, but in her oddly diligent desire to help him, she seemed not to have realized it. But he did. He felt the caress of her fingers keenly, and the accusing look in her eyes, as well. “I wouldn’t understand?” she repeated.

  “Not because you aren’t intelligent,” he said, realizing immediately the reason for her irritation. “We know you’ve more brains than all of us. But you’ve also more sense. I’m afraid that you need a heart to understand my state of affairs.”

  Her hands dropped to her sides. “Need a heart?”

  His balance swayed. He leaned into the wood frame and rested his head against it, his eyes closed.

  “I have a heart.” She poked him in the side. “I love my father.” Another poke. “My sisters.” And another. “All four of them.” All emphasized with pokes.

  “God, woman.” He grabbed her finger, and his stomach roiled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so careless with his words—or his hands.

  “My heart purely has the good sense to have sense.”

  He released her and met her gaze with as much sincerity as he could muster under the circumstances. “I apologize. I was unkind. I am not at my best today.”

  The stubborn set to her jaw slowly eased, as did the wet emotion in her eyes. “When I asked how this could happen to you, I meant today of all days. A day meant for happiness. The timing doesn’t make sense. Unless . . .” Her voice trailed away, and she studied his face.

  He felt her gaze, the cogs of her brain turning. Dinah was brilliant. Enough so that he and his brothers had remarked upon it. Even their father had spoken to it, to wish that his sons could have been gifted with but an ounce of Dinah’s intellect.

  He winced at the reminder.

  “That missive you received yesterday after breakfast . . . It was from her, wasn’t it?” she guessed. “Bearing news.”

  The truth of it slew him even now, a lash across his chest. “She is engaged. Her father accepted an offer. I cannot help but wonder if I had been in London instead of the country preparing for this wedding, if I had done things differently, if my father—” There was no use wishing for another father.

  “I understand fathers,” she said. “But you have rank and fortune enough to engage any woman. Does she not love you?”

  He hoped his irate look was answer enough.

  “Your father doesn’t approve, then? She is poor? You mustn’t look so fiercely at me for speaking the truth. I do not mean her poverty as a commentary on her character. It is the only logical conclusion. You both share feelings, yet you cannot marry. I assume your father forbade the arrangement because it was not advantageous.”

  “He does not know my feelings for her,” Graham muttered, slouching back against the wall. “He likely does not know she exists at all.” Although he could imagine his father’s reaction. And it would involve his head and a platter.

  “Her father disapproves?” Dinah ventured. “Her fiancé has a loftier title than you do?”

  “Her”—he couldn’t bring himself to say fiancé—”suitor is but a physician.” The truth tasted bitter in his mouth.

  “A physician? And that was preferable to you?”

  Graham buried his face in his hands. He had thought he wanted to discuss Lily, but hearing Dinah’s incredulity only made him feel worse.

  “Were you not clear in your intentions?” she asked.

  “It apparently would not have mattered,” he said. “The letter indicates their understanding predates our association.”

  Dinah sat back, her brow crinkled. “Are you implying she misled you deliberately or—”

  “Absolutely not,” he roared, then recollected where they were. In a box pew. In a church. At his brother’s wedding. “The fault is mine. I must have misunderstood. I must have been blinded by my affections. I am the one who must have subjected her to unwanted attentions she did not have the maturity or experience to deflect.”

  “If English ladies have but one skill from the cradle, it is to navigate the marriage market.”

  He was already shaking his head and scowling, although she’d yet to finish her argument. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand this much: you don’t want to be understood.”

  With that, she stuck her head out the door and must have found the church sufficiently empty, for she pulled him out and led him to the groom’s side.

  * * *

  Dinah was relieved to note that while Graham was in no shape to dance, he was at least standing upright—although propped against one wall of the ballroom—and back to his usual charming ways, judging by the tittering laughter of the society matrons circled around him like predators with easy prey. There was nothing like a wedding to bring out matchmaking claws in the gentlest of mothers.

  Her father stood a short distance away with his usual sycophants—a man who fancied himself an engineer who wanted to discuss the new steam technologies, a few lords who believed they held enough sway in Parliament to buy them interest in his company, and young bucks who wanted to know the secret to becoming one of the richest men of the ton. She shouldered her way past them when they didn’t notice her and allow her room. She was used to not being noticed. She was short and easily deemed insignificant. It frustrated her to no end.

  Dinah had once believed if she were smart enough, quick enough, witty enough, that men would set aside her stature and gender and treat her as an equal. But if anything, they only treated her like a quaint curiosity, an amusement. Even her father was guilty of it.

  “There you are,” her father said. With a dismissive wave of his hand, his admirers dispersed. How annoying that he carried more power in a flick of his wrist than she did in her entire being. “Ah, Dinah. To finally know your mother is smiling down from above. Even your logician’s heart must see the beauty in joining our family with that of the Abernathys.”

  It appeared her matchmaking father was also not immune to wedding nostalgia, even at the risk of insulting her.

  A logician’s heart? Why? Just because she didn’t see the point of marriage, particularly as a business contract? But she did not voice this opinion. It had already fallen on deaf ears time and time again.

  “Sera looks very happy,” she said instead.

  Sera did glow with joy, though in all fairness, with her feather-white hair and radiant skin, Ser
a glowed every day. She danced a quadrille with her new husband, a dance their eldest sister Alice had made her practice over and over as this—at sixteen years of age—was not only her wedding reception but her first ball. Dinah felt a ball following a wedding ceremony was a bit excessive, but the Duke of Rivington longed to be excessive, and fortunately for him, her father was an excessive man, as well.

  Only an excessive man would want to become the fastest man in the world—at least in parcel shipments, covering territory said to put the Ottoman Empire to shame. Only an excessive man would pine for his long-deceased wife to the exclusion of all else. Only an excessive man would take his wife’s final words, issued in the exhaustion of birth—that he must ensure his daughters marry dukes—as her dying wish, especially when her mother hadn’t known she was dying at the time.

  But who was Dinah to voice these opinions? She had been one year old the day her mother died, a fact her sisters and father were quick to point out whenever she claimed to have any opinion on the woman who had borne her.

  “Of course Sera is happy! She’ll be a duchess one day, just as your mother wanted for all of you.” His voice cracked on the last word.

  Dinah glanced at him, shocked at his public show of emotion.

  Tears stained her father’s cheeks. “I neglected my duties for too long, indulged you and your sisters. I blame it on a father’s love, but I cannot, in good conscience, continue. I must see you all married well. And soon.”

  Dinah hardly knew what to say. Her father was still obsessed with seeing them all married to men who might become dukes. She supposed the Abernathys were gentlemen enough—except for the present duke, who was a cur through and through—but still, the marriage of a girl of sixteen to someone twice her age?

  “But Father,” she said gently, “there is not a wealth of young dukes to share among the ton, much less just your daughters.”

  “No need to confound the issue with mathematics, Dinah. A marquis or earl may do under the right circumstances. And who needs young?” With that none-too-comforting thought, he patted his belly as if he’d just enjoyed a good meal, pushed his rimless glasses up the bridge of his nose, and wandered back to his crowd of admirers.

  She stared after him with growing horror. To whom would her father see her married? An old, liver-spotted man with rotting teeth but titles to spare?

  If only she could cure her father of his heartache over Mother. If only she could find a way to remedy the very existence of love.

  Love was the root of all their problems. When she considered its symptoms—the heartache, the irrationality—it almost seemed an illness. And if there was an illness, there must be an antidote.

  As her mind began to turn, she walked the perimeter of the ballroom rather than pace in a circle as she usually did when engaged in thought. She could come up with a series of experiments designed to rid the sufferer of the symptoms, because without the symptoms, how could there be the sensation? Once the sensation of love was cured, it stood to reason that all resulting emotional fallacies would also disperse.

  If only she could test it. She needed a subject. Someone in love who wanted to be out of it.

  Her gaze snapped across the ballroom to Graham, who had taken up refuge by a small alcove next to a table with an expensive blue-and-ivory vase, only to have that refuge invaded by his father.

  The man looked in need of rescuing, and she was just the heroine to do it.

  * * *

  Graham could barely make it through a conversation with his father sober, so surviving his current interaction in his drunken condition would prove the pinnacle of his social accomplishments.

  The duke glowered, his now-graying moustache slick over his thin lips. With a sneer, he said, “You will dance, Graham, and with a Belle. I don’t care which one. Work it out with Benjamin as to whom you prefer. It’s not as though I’m asking you to marry the redheaded cow. Their dowries are all the same. By God, that pretty face of yours will be of some use to me.”

  Normally he would defend Charlotte—who was redheaded but not a cow, although quite a sturdy woman—but in his inebriated state he had to pick his battles. “I’ve explained, Father, that I am feeling unwell. Something I ate.”

  Or drank. Why quibble over details?

  “Then go rest your pretty head on one of their laps. Must I undo your breeches on your wedding day, too?”

  Graham closed his eyes on a grimace. The best thing he could say of his father was that he never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. He did not pretend to be a loving parent, nor did he pretend to be above money. He was what he was. And that was the best of him.

  Spittle flew from his father’s angry red mouth. “By God, Graham.” His head pounded. “You will open your eyes—” pound “—be a man—” pound “—and woo one of the Belles.”

  “I am not your whore.” His voice was a strained whisper, and even as the words left his lips, he wanted to swallow them back. What had overcome him? Surely something more than drink. His father words kept swirling in his head. That pretty face of yours. Rest your pretty head. Was that all he was? Was that all people saw of him?

  His father reared back, eyes wide, then his face contorted in a sneer.

  He was the one his father liked. The one his father approved of. Or so he’d thought.

  “You aren’t much of anything, Graham. Easy enough to look at? With a knowledge of music and art? These things fade quickly. You may wear the hero’s mantle from the Battle of Salamanca, but I know the truth. You probably never left the tent. You’ll earn your place in Rivington history or you won’t have one. I’ve already let one son go and you’ll be disinherited just as easily.”

  Graham heard his own breath slice the air, and his ribs tightened to cage his heart. He could denounce his father. Run away like his youngest brother, Gray, had. Persuade Lily to elope with him.

  But then what? Subject her to society’s censure for breaking her engagement? And how would he support her? What means did he have to take care of a wife? Join the Regulars? Even his youngest brother, the only one among them brave enough to defy their father by leaving the fold, was living at the mercy of strangers from one guest home to the next. No, he wouldn’t do that to the love of his life.

  Besides, could he leave behind Tom and Benjamin, whom he loved? Expose them further to their father’s wrath?

  He saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A flash of blond, and his teeth unclenched. His jaw clicked with release.

  Dinah made her way toward him with haste and intent. He marked her progress with wariness but also relief. He did not miss how she assessed the situation—his father’s menacing posture, his own tense anger. He swore he could see an opus of thought in a single flicker of her lashes.

  She laid her hand on his arm, which seemed to bring his father about. “Miss Dinah,” the duke said with a bow, “might I officially welcome you into our family.”

  “Lord Graham has already done so, Your Grace,” Dinah said in a syrupy voice he knew was for his father’s benefit. She turned to Graham with a gracious smile, the first he had seen from her all day. “I thank you for saving me this seat, away from the heat of the dance floor and with a breeze from the windows.” She settled herself onto the bench next to him.

  He marked his father’s satisfied and calculating look, and had to stifle the urge to laugh. Dinah really was a remarkable woman to have maneuvered her father so easily.

  “I must take my leave,” the duke said. “I am promised to a dance. Until later, Miss Dinah.”

  She inclined her head. “Your Grace.” She watched his father’s retreating back with a smile, as if she thought he might turn around at any moment and catch her act. “Forgive me, but he’s odious,” she ground out.

  “He is honorable.” He said the words before he could wonder why he was defending the man.

  “As you say.” She turned a keen eye to him. “You and your brothers are not like him.”

  There was no point
in lying. She was too smart for her own good. “No.”

  Her gaze roamed his face. “I can help you.”

  “You have helped enough,” he said. “Any more and I will have to cut off my arm in your debt.”

  “But in helping you, I will also help myself,” she said. “I need you, too.”

  His heartbeat startled at the admission. Dinah was the Belle who needed no one. He leaned forward, intrigued. “How so?”

  “I believe I can cure you of love. Of your feelings for Lady X.”

  Graham felt the contents of the wedding supper, what little he managed to consume, sloshing in his stomach. Her words were so patently offensive, so wrong, one might have thought they were in another language. He couldn’t comprehend her intention. Cure him of love for Lily? She may as well have said she wanted to walk the sky. If she’d been a man, he would have called her out for such an insult. He’d be roaring with anger. Which strangely, he was not. Perhaps it was the earnestness in her face, upturned to his with such hope. She did not intend him the insult that he felt.

  She must have taken his silence for curiosity or acceptance, because she continued, “Let me study you. I can come to understand the origin of your symptoms and how to disrupt them. Then maybe I can help you find relief. Then . . .” She glanced across the ballroom. He’d never thought to see Dinah Belle looking lost, but in that moment, he saw the flicker of doubt in the way she chewed her lower lip. When she looked back at him, her face was a mask of quiet determination. “Then I can help my father find relief.”

  “Relief from what?” he asked.

  “From the memory of my mother,” she said as she fixed her eyes upon him. “She died shortly after Sera’s birth, after she told him that he was to see us all married well, to dukes. A whimsical comment, I believe, but they were her last words and ones he has taken to heart to be fulfilled. Perhaps . . . perhaps if he loved her less, perhaps if I could free him from the bonds of his commitment, he might not feel so compelled to see us all married.”

  Understanding dawned. He’d always assumed the Belles would find marriage into his family a coup. Had always assumed any woman would want to marry into his family. The Rivington title was old and its coffers full, thanks to the ongoing tradition of marrying heiresses. It had never occurred to him that perhaps there might be some reluctance in that quarter. Did Dinah not want to marry…ever? And what of her sister’s desires?