“No, it was a genuine act. You should act more on your feelings. You restrain yourself too often. Or you let fear restrain you, which I think amounts to the same effect.”
This pronouncement halted his pacing and he gazed at her ruefully, softly. “You must be wondering if I have any ill-intent in telling you all of this.”
She was near the fireplace, now, resting a hand against the complex carvings that his father had so loved. Inspired by a trip to Venice, he’d had the mantel specially commissioned. A range of emotions played out on her face, until at last, she said, “I will admit that I have wondered what you are thinking when you look at me.” She traced a flourished, curled place in the marble with one finger. “We are not of the same station at all, and the only things I could tell myself for certain were that you might want to bed me and, perhaps, you felt I was pretty.”
Will blinked as she said this without shame. She has no reason to think otherwise.
None of his family or friends had been with commoners in the ways she was insinuating, but they were often the exception. When he had spent more of his time in the London clubs and, indeed, working in the infirmaries for the poor, he had heard many tales about women who’d been ill-used.
At best, they were willing participants. Some benefitted quite handsomely, and Will couldn’t judge them for that.
However, not all of them did benefit.
“You did not tell yourself that perhaps I had grown to love you?”
Her eyes went very wide. “No, because you are a duke.”
“I am,” he said mildly. “I didn’t think I would be. Life had other plans.”
“Either way. Thinking that you might love me… that’s the stuff of tales,” she said helplessly. “Only children think that way.”
“What about you loving me?”
“That is something from a tale, too,” she insisted. “Dukes and your lot… you don’t love women like me.”
He didn’t point out that she sidestepped his question, which gave him some hope that she might love him. “I was never supposed to be the duke,” said Will. “I was the youngest.”
“Even if you weren’t, you’d still be—”
He tried a different way of articulating his point. “If I were some lad you met…” Will thought about the most mundane circumstances he could. “In church, or in a…” What sort of decent fellows would she actually come into contact with, given her father’s overbearing nature? “Shop, who had a trade, or a profession, and you grew to love me, would you be so nervous to state it?”
She all but rolled her eyes. “The point is, you are not some lad.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Lord Ainsworth,” she said, slowly, realizing that she could not dodge the discussion he was trying to have, “if you were a hostler, or a valet, or a butler, or a butcher, or almost anything other than what you are, I would easily admit my feelings for you.” She gazed at him with something almost like fear. “I may seem very inexperienced and, in most respects, I am, but I know enough of the world to understand the difference between…” her gaze darted and landed on anything that was not him. “Urges and love. Or affection. I also understand how society works. Enough to understand that I should never dream of you.”
Will did not discount the significance of her saying “love” before “affection”.
“Then pretend I am ordinary,” suggested Will with a smile. “It will be far easier than me trying to pretend you are.”
She blushed a shade of deep rose. “I can’t, can I? Who in your circle will let me keep up the pretense?”
“We won’t know until we meet them, will we? But I would expect that not everyone will be horrid about it.”
Miss Copperweld’s resolve was eroding. He could see it in the way her posture was slumping slightly. Minutely, like a flower opening itself to the sun, she was listing toward him. “Optimism, now, from you?”
“As I said, I don’t know when it—love—happened for me, exactly. But I fully acknowledged it to myself when you and I spoke about your possible employment here.” Will smiled more broadly. “I found I could not consider such a thing, and wondered why it struck me as so… wrong.” Quickly, for he did not want to insult her, he added, “Not that there is anything wrong with work. But I realized that if I wanted you to stay, I wanted you to stay to be my wife.”
“You thought it would be strange for me to work here because you wanted to marry me?” Miss Copperweld summarized, in somewhat of a daze.
“Yes,” he said patiently. He went to her slowly, as though he were trying not to startle a doe.
“But I am… nothing,” she said. “A nobody. You… you are a…” she trailed off. “A hero.”
He tilted his head and brushed some of his hair back as it fell forward with the movement. “No, I’m not. I am always just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.
She looked at him seriously, still taken aback, but now studying his face. “How did it happen? Lady Jane has only briefly said.”
Tentatively, she brought her hand to his cheek. He did not flinch with nerves, even when her palm rested partially on his scar tissue. It was the first time another person apart from himself, not a physician, had touched it with their fingers. Only his aunt had kissed his cheek, at times.
“I saw one of my comrades laying on the ground,” he said. “I went to him to see what I could do.”
“Do you remember the blow?”
“No,” said Will. “Not much. And I woke up in the dark. My eyes, my face, had all been wrapped.”
She began to thumb his cheek. “Were you alone when you awoke?”
He shook his head minutely, afraid that if he moved too much, she would stop touching him. “My good friend, Peter, was the one who explained everything to me. He is a physician, too.”
“That still must have been terrifying. To wake up unable to see.”
“It was,” he admitted. “It was terrifying for months afterward, too. No one knew how well my eyes would recover although, thankfully, they have adjusted remarkably well under the circumstances. They’re even their normal color, now. But I should inquire about spectacles, I think, and some days, too much light overwhelms me.” He said wryly, “Most of the damage to my lovely visage has transpired to be cosmetic.”
He was amazed at how comfortable he felt speaking to her, how effortlessly she seemed to draw out the darkest of horrors in his past.
“You weren’t in the wrong place.”
“Pardon?”
“You were doing your duty, and your life was changed forever.” She brightened. “Much as you were the night you found me.”
“I couldn’t ignore someone in need,” he prevaricated.
She teased, “I thought I was special.”
Will closed his eyes under her touch. She had not stopped petting his face. It was a soothing and intimate gesture. “You are, even if, at the time, I was warring between my instincts as a doctor and my desire to retain my privacy. Until the matter with Benedict, I had not ventured into Brookfield during the day for quite some time. I was too afraid of what reactions I might spur.”
Tenderly, she said, “No one was frightened by your appearance. Your scars are proof that you served your country, nothing more. Even Eggy did not mention them when I visited, and children can be too frank for their own good. He would have mentioned it.”
Laughing, Will said, “I suppose you are correct.”
“May I tell you something?”
“You may.” Utterly basking in the moment and the points of contact her fingers made with his skin, she could have told Will there was a poisonous, deathly spider in his hair and he would not have moved a muscle.
Miss Copperweld paused only barely in her ministrations. “You are beautiful.”
“I know I was, once,” murmured Will. “Luckily, I was never vain. My elder brothers inherited that trait, not me.”
“No,” she said impatiently. “You are, still. The sum of all
that you are is…” she sighed. “Beautiful, to me. But I did not think you were mine.”
“Why not?”
“The world is the way it is,” she said helplessly. It was the first time he had ever heard such final, firm despair in her voice. This was the woman who refused to tell him her name for days and days, the woman who always spoke forthrightly to his aunt and then to him. “You are a duke. I’m nothing but a drunk’s daughter, and apparently even that could be in question.” She laughed hollowly. “The only times I have ever been in great houses were when my mother could not leave me alone at home.” Miss Copperweld looked around the library, at its great displays of expensive, leather-bound books, and the furnishings that had been purchased by generations of Ainsworths. “And I have never been somewhere so grand as here.”
She started to take her hand away from his face. He intercepted it gently, taking it in his own. “So?”
“There are rules. Expectations.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t abided by them.”
“You haven’t,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ve friends and acquaintances who do. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m fit to be your mistress, not your…” she broke off, blushing a deep shade of rose. “Well. Regardless. I don’t think you want a mistress.”
One question mattered to Will. “Do you truly love me?”
Tears filled her eyes, brightening their brown. “Yes,” she said, her lips forming the word more than speaking it aloud. Then, she said, more loudly, “And it’s folly, isn’t it?”
Will took her hand and kissed her palm. She shivered. “No. Not at all.”
“No?”
“Let us turn that on its head for a moment, then,” he said, all but grinning with joy. “I should be as surprised that you love me.”
“Why?” she eyed him suspiciously.
“I am scarred. Ugly. Rather strange in my ways and habits, though I was not always this reclusive. Why should you be in love with me, even if I am a duke? You are clearly unafraid of making your own way in the world, and I know you are not scheming to get my wealth. Were that the case, you would have been entirely more obvious about it.”
Her expression relaxed and she wiped away the tears that had trickled gently from her eyes. “You are not ugly,” she insisted.
“Scarred, then,” he countered playfully.
“In the literal sense, yes,” she conceded.
Again, he kissed her palm, allowing his lips to trail down to her wrist. He nibbled it softly. “I’ve wanted to touch you like this for days.”
“I’ve wanted you to,” she said, leaning even closer to him.
Before she could tumble, he drew her close and she did not object, either with words or actions. She felt warm and soft in his arms, almost glowing with the liveliness she always projected. “Miss Copperweld, if it does not ruffle your sense of how the world is or should be, I think we should marry.”
He expected her to respond archly, for with the exception of when she watched her father be taken into the villagers’ custody, she had never truly broken in front of him. Instead, her buoyant facade shifted.
His proposal was received with apparent shock at first and, for all of one minute, Miss Copperweld scarcely breathed. Will just held her, patient enough to wait for her to digest her emotions.
When she did regain her power of speech, she promptly burst into tears and was capable of uttering only one word repeatedly.
“Yes.”
*
Six weeks later, the entire village attended the wedding ceremony. It was a fine day filled with merrymaking and the finest food and spirits that could be found. Augusta could hardly fathom the grandiosity of the breakfast, much less the idea that she was now married to a duke. Rather than dwell on the immense change her life had seen in the matter of months, she enjoyed the feelings of contentment and abundance. She had never been so well-fed or felt so loved, and even if both of those sensations were somewhat alien, they were welcome.
Not for the first time, she thought, I wish Mama was here. She would love Will.
Will.
It was still surreal to call him by his Christian name. But that bright morning, six weeks ago, in the library, he’d told her quite firmly to call him William, or preferably, Will. He said that Jane never did, but Jane rarely called anyone by anything less than their full name. She was not “Gussie”, she was “Augusta”.
Eggy seemed to be the exception.
She recalled that Will had then reinforced the direction by kissing her so thoroughly that she’d had to use the bookshelves behind her for purchase or risk falling over. Any thoughts she might have had about Lord Ainsworth, Duke of Ravenwood, being shy or retiring fled in those delicious moments.
As it transpired, he was entirely able to claim what he wanted.
And he wanted her.
After a few deliriously pleasurable minutes had passed, he pulled away from her breathlessly and declared they’d best stop, or else they’d have less to look forward to on their wedding night.
He didn’t look as though he believed what he said, and Augusta wanted to tempt him.
“That’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?” asked Augusta, as a giant tome dug into the small of her back. She realized she sounded very wanton, but now that she knew what it felt like to kiss Will, she couldn’t not be kissing him. In fact, she dearly wanted to do more than kiss him, and it didn’t matter much to her if they were in a library instead of his chambers.
He looked at her ravenously, like a man starved, and pressed both his body and his mouth against her own. Groaning, she reached between them to the front of his trousers as they kissed again.
Lord only knew what they would have gotten up to had Marcus not interrupted them with a polite cough and knock on the doorframe.
Will had left the library’s massive doors open. Rather, she had not closed them when she entered.
To be fair, she had not been expecting a marriage proposal. She had been expecting an offer of employment at the most.
“Come in, Marcus,” Will said with a crackle in his voice, after clearing his throat. He shifted minutely, and Augusta imagined that his arousal was making it uncomfortable to stand up straight.
Marcus, grinning like a fool, kept his eyes on Will’s face as Augusta straightened her dress. “There is the boy’s father here to see you… Mr. Cooper. He says Mr. Croft sent him to ask what kind of salve to use on Eggy’s wound.” When Augusta had completely righted herself, he flashed her the smallest of winks. “Why he’d not just trust Mr. Croft, I wouldn’t know. I’ve seen that man heal all manner of things. If I didn’t believe in the sciences, I would say he’s a Druid.”
“I suggested something from the East that Croft has less familiarity with,” said Will, and his voice was admirably level. “In large enough doses, the plant can be toxic. It’s all right, Marcus. I’d rather Mr. Cooper check with me than put Eggy in any more danger. Miss Copperweld has just told me that the boy is recovering very well.”
Will had given Augusta one last smile and followed Marcus out of the library.
The memory began to fade from her thoughts.
Looking at him today, on their wedding day, Augusta was infinitely thankful that this kind, clever man was hers. They had delayed the ceremony partially to make sure the banns had been read and that guests who did not reside near Brookfield could attend—neither Lady Jane nor Augusta would hear of Will declining to invite his old friends, or old family friends—but they also had visited a tailor and modiste, respectively, in London. Will’s wedding attire was the first new clothing he had purchased in months. The outing was also the first one he had undertaken since coming home from battle, not counting his time in transit between London and Blackbrook when he’d been sent home. But that had not been nearly the same.
He looked magnificent. His waistcoat, trousers, and overcoat were all in tones of deep green that mirrored his eyes, while the white lawn of his shirt and cravat under
scored the greens. His curly, dark hair was still longer than many men wore theirs, but it had been brushed to a shine and remained, somehow, tucked behind his ears and neatly queued.
Augusta herself felt no less decadent. After considering the colors his tailor had chosen for him, the modiste they’d called upon declared that a more delicate jade hue would suit her coloring perfectly while complementing Will’s clothing. The stately, silver-haired woman, Mrs. Kelley, had served Will’s mother and was visibly touched to serve his fiancée. She praised Augusta’s luminous brown hair and eyes, and had the tact not to mention the various scars that still peppered her otherwise immaculate, peach-toned skin. She had at least grown less pale since coming to Blackbrook.
It couldn’t be helped, but some scars would still show over the neckline of her wedding dress. Augusta found that she did not mind, for with Will, she was moving forward from those dark times.
And if Mrs. Kelley was surprised to see the state of Will’s own scars, she did not show it. Augusta was grateful for her tact.
For the most part, their excursions into London had not merited more than the small handful of dark looks from strangers. Since Augusta had not been raised to adhere to a highborn lady’s sense of manners, and had not been afraid of anyone but her father, she was more than ready to return any stares with murderous, pointed glares.
The first time Will caught her doing so on a crowded little stretch of Bond Street, he burst out laughing.
“What?” she said, somewhat defensively.
“You could scare Wellington himself with that expression,” he said, bringing her more closely to his side. “You and Jane, both.”
“People need to know that they cannot look at you as though you are a… an… an oddity,” she declared. “They would not do so if you were lame or… missing an arm… or…” She scowled. “If it is a woman who sends them that reminder, then so be it.”
“I love you,” he murmured into her ear, still chuckling a little at her pugnacious attitude. “But you have already saved me from them.”
Smiling at the remembrance, now, she said to Will, “Look, I think Lady Jane—Aunt Jane—has finally gotten the chance to greet her paramour.”
Regency Scandals and Scoundrels Collection Page 136