Much laughter ensued. Ian’s sounded strained and his eyes weren’t involved in it. They were fixed on the duke.
The duke eyed him in return until Ian at last looked down, becoming fascinated by his upside down reflection in a spoon.
Maidservants swarmed the table, curtsying like accordions for the benefit of the duke and all but wrestling over the opportunity to sweep up the eggs, jostling one another and nearly cracking their skulls at one point in a competition to clean.
“I’ve never seen you move so fast on my behalf before, Harriet,” Ian declared.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, Master Ian, but it ain’t on yer behalf. Ye ain’t a duke, are ye now?”
“No,” he confirmed darkly.
“And we’ve one in t’ ’ouse.” This was unassailable logic as far as Harriet was concerned.
The duke, accepting the uproar as his due, calmly attended to cleaning his plate with the speed and efficiency with which he did nearly everything he considered necessary rather than a luxury.
He looked across the table at Genevieve, who had surgically incised what appeared to be a triangle on the top of her fried egg. With the tine of her fork, she delicately lifted off the limp white ceiling of it to expose runny yoke. Satisfied, she laid her fork down and dipped the corner of her toast into it.
She paused mid-bite when she noticed the duke watching her with rapt fascination.
And then she shrugged with one shoulder, smiled a little, and snipped off the corner of the toast with her teeth.
It was decided—no one knew where or when the idea originated, but it had been taken up with enthusiasm—that a walk would be undertaken to enjoy the weather while it lasted. The ladies would bring their sketchbooks and embroidery and the men would bring their cricket bats out to perfect their swings ahead of cricket season, and presumably to impress the women.
Since Genevieve could conceive of no place where she would be happy, outside was as good as inside, and it hardly seemed likely that Harry would propose to Millicent whilst surrounded by friends and holding a cricket bat.
And so walk out they did.
The day had remained insultingly bright and clear. It hardly seemed fair to her that autumn had divested the trees of their leaves and left them to stand embarrassingly nude in a relentlessly lemony sun, let alone the fact that made the world seem cheerfully indifferent to her internal chaos.
Everyone seemed to be oblivious. Chase, if he were here, might have noticed. Chase was seeing to business in London; he’d sent a brother and a sister he’d recently met, Liam and Meggy Plum, to live in Pennyroyal Green. And Colin could be very observant, but he was generally a rascal before he was sensitive, and he was at home with his wife a few miles away. Olivia assumed her head hurt. Louisa sent concerned glances and said nothing. Marcus didn’t notice.
Ian had asked her if her head hurt, which seemed to be the extent of male knowledge of female complaints. She’d asked Ian if his head hurt, as he’d looked a little wobbly, too.
They both denied a thing was wrong.
She drifted away and found a place on the scrupulously barbered lawn far enough away from the cricket horseplay to spread out an old shawl. She sat down, tucked her dress neatly over her knees and leaned back on her hands and she watched the men, and ached, and thought.
Harry was all but glowing in the autumn sun. It was both soothing and bittersweet to watch him. A painter could create an entire palette and call it “Harry’s Hair,” and include in it gold and wheat and flaxen and—
A shadow blotted her view before she could add another color to the palette in her mind.
The shadow turned out to be the Duke of Falconbridge.
He settled down next to her on the grass. His pose almost mimicked hers. He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands. He plucked off his hat and gently laid it alongside him.
He said nothing at all for a time.
Merely shaded his eyes and followed the direction of hers.
She wondered again if she’d imagined him walking through the garden. So sodden and exhausted had she been she somehow doubted she’d actually seen him. And yet . . .
She wasn’t going to trouble to be polite.
She was certain he would find something to say that she would object to or be uncomfortably fascinated by.
“He’s handsome.” The duke gestured with his chin toward Harry. “Osborne is. No lines.”
She froze.
And then slowly, slowly turned toward him and fixed him with what she hoped was a subject-quelling incredulous stare.
“I suppose,” she agreed warily. When one looked from Harry to the duke, the duke certainly suffered by comparison. And it wasn’t as though sunlight wouldn’t have anything to do with him. But he was certainly Harry’s chiaroscuro opposite. He didn’t glow. His hair was . . . his hair was black. Apart from that frost of gray at the temples, that was. And it was straight and just a bit too rakishly long, just in case anyone should forget his reputation for being dangerous. His skin was so fair that his dark eyes and brows were like punctuation on a page.
She turned away again, her body tensed against any further insights he might volunteer. Olivia and Millicent and Louisa looked like an autumn bouquet in their walking dresses. She focused on that soothing sight instead, deliberately blurring her vision until they were only color, rather than people, one of whom Harry wanted to marry.
“And you’re in love with him?”
Holy—!
She actually yelped. It was as much his tone as the observation: conversational. She turned away again and looked straight ahead, her vision blurring in shock. I am a glacier, she told herself. I am a slippery ice wall against which his insights can gain no purchase. He will stop talking. He will stop talking.
“And he’s . . . somehow broken your heart?”
He said this almost brightly, as though they’d set out to play a guessing game.
Oh God. Pain. She made a short involuntary sound. As though a wasp had sunk a stinger in.
She whirled furiously on him again, eyes burning with outrage.
So much for glacial control.
Oddly, he didn’t look triumphant. He looked almost sympathetic.
“I’m afraid it’s evident, Miss Eversea. To me, anyhow. If I’m not mistaken, no one else seems to have bothered to notice, if that’s any comfort. Unless you’ve confided in anyone? Your sister, perhaps?”
Rather than claw him in fury, she curled her fingers into the grass, and would have yanked it up by the roots if she wouldn’t have felt guilty about killing innocent plant life and creating more work for the groundskeeper.
And no. Olivia was the last person she would burden with the news of hopeless love.
“No,” she said shortly. Thereby admitting her deepest, darkest secret.
“And has he kissed you?” he asked, lightly.
Each impertinent question shocked her anew and flayed fresh welts over raw and newly exposed secrets. All of her muscles contracted, as if colluding to shrink away from him.
Why was he doing this? How did he know?
“He’s a gentleman,” she said tightly.
How quickly could she spring up and bolt away? Could she pretend she was being chased by a wasp? If she ran screaming from the duke surely a scandal would ensue. If this was his idea of courtship then she had no doubt his fiancée had abandoned him.
“And has he kissed you?” he repeated in precisely the same inflection apart from a fresh and maddening hint of amusement.
Her heart rabbited away in her chest, kicking, kicking painfully. This kind of misery was entirely new, and she hadn’t yet learned to accommodate it. Her stomach was roiling, her cheeks were flushed, and she wondered if she ought to go have a lengthy heartfelt chat with her handsome cousin, the vicar, to ask if there was any particular penance she could do to stop the unprecedented variety of suffering raining down upon her this week.
“He has kissed me,” she confirmed coldly.
What made her say it? It wasn’t entirely a lie. Perhaps pride had made her say it. Perhaps the very notion of another man kissing her would drive him away.
But Harry had kissed her hand once, lingeringly, as though her hand was a precious thing. It had surprised her; in her mind it had cemented their attachment.
“Has he?” Amused and clearly disbelieving. “Point to the part of your body he kissed.”
She stared rigidly across the expanse of green, eyeing her brother’s cricket bat and contemplating other more satisfying uses for it. Ian was demonstrating a swing for Harry. And for Olivia and Millicent, of course, so Olivia and Millicent could admire his form.
As if they knew or cared anything about form. The things we do for men, Genevieve thought.
She was silent. She could simply refuse to say another word to the man.
“Was this the part?” The duke tapped the back of her hand with one long finger.
She snatched it away from him and cupped it in her other hand as though comforting it and glared daggers at him.
“If you please, Lord Moncrieffe.”
The anguished embarrassment and her glare deterred him not at all. He raised his brows, waiting with infinite, infinite, downright evil patience, unruffled. His eyes were dark and deep, as reflective in the sunlight as the polished toes of his boots. Like a body of water, where one couldn’t tell whether you could wade safely through or step in and be swallowed whole by depth. She had the strangest sense he could absorb anything with those eyes and reflect back the same irony: a glare, a smile, a tragedy, a comedy.
But there was something about him . . . She was tempted to wade in. Just a little. It was the same temptation she’d succumbed to when he’d discussed—just as deliberately—Venus and Mars. Because he wasn’t wrong. Because he was honest, and she liked it. Because he was relentless, and she admired it. Because she half hated him, but he didn’t bore her.
Because he spoke to her the way no one else had ever spoken to her, which meant he saw her in a way no one else saw her.
“Very well. He has kissed my hand, yes. Surely there’s nothing untoward about that.”
“I suppose whether it was untoward depends on his intent and the circumstances and how much you enjoyed it.”
“It was an excellent kiss,” she all but whispered.
“Oh, I’m certain it was.” The bloody man was amused. “A real man would have kissed you on the mouth, Miss Eversea. ‘Gentleman’ or no. And it’s a very good mouth you have.” He volunteered this as though offering advice on Harry’s cricket form.
She stared at him, shock dropping open her mouth.
Her very good mouth.
Damn him for inciting curiosity about what constituted a good mouth.
She nearly raised her hand to touch it. Stopped herself. And then she did, surreptitiously, rest the back of her hand against it.
They were soft, her lips, barely pink. Shaped neatly and elegantly.
But what made it good?
She’d no vocabulary at all for this type of conversation. For the types of compliments he produced. They were very adult, and he presented them to her as though she ought to know what to do with them.
She didn’t. But speaking with him reminded her of the first time she’d taken a sip of coffee. A bitter, foreign black brew, that grew more appealing, more rich and complex, the more necessary, the more she sipped.
He casually, deliberately removed his coat, folded it neatly, laid it next to him. The wind took the opportunity to play in his hair, lifting it a bit, tossing it about, letting it drop, satisfied at having mussed a duke.
He leaned back on his hands. And then idly turned to her. He inhaled, and exhaled an almost long-suffering sigh.
And he began in a patient, almost leisurely fashion, in a voice fashioned from dark velvet, a voice that stroked over her senses until they were lulled, to lecture directly to her as if she was a girl in the schoolroom.
“A proper kiss, Miss Eversea, should turn you inside out. It should . . . touch places in you that you didn’t know existed, set them ablaze, until your entire being is hungry and wild. It should . . . hold a moment, I want to explain this as clearly as possible . . .” He tipped his head back and paused to consider, as though he were envisioning this and wanted to relate every detail correctly. “It should slice right down through you like a cutlass with a pleasure so devastating it’s very nearly pain.”
He waited, watching her face, allowing her to accommodate the potent words.
Her mouth was parted. Her breathing short. She couldn’t look away. His eyes and voice held her as fast as if he’d cradled her face with his hands.
And as he said them, an echo of sensation sounded in her, like a remembered dream, an instinct awakened.
She thought about Mars getting ready to give Venus a good pleasuring.
Stop, she should say.
“And . . . ?” she whispered.
“It should make you do battle for control of your senses and your will. It should make you want to do things you’d never dreamed you’d want to do, and in that moment all of those things will make perfect sense. And it should herald, or at least promise, the most intense physical pleasure you’ve ever known, regardless of whether that promise is ever, ever fulfilled. It should, in fact . . .” he paused for effect “. . . haunt you for the rest of your life.”
She sat wordlessly when he was done. As though waiting for the last notes of a stormy, discordant symphony to echo into silence.
The most intense physical pleasure.
His words reverberated in her. As if her body contained the ancient wisdom of what that meant, and now, having been reminded, craved it.
She should have gotten up to leave and not looked back.
“So you’ve had this kiss? Or is it something you aspire to?” Her voice was a low rasp.
For a moment he said nothing at all. And then he smiled a faint, slow, satisfied smile.
She had the oddest impression she’d passed a test. And that she’d surprised him yet again.
“I’ll leave you to wonder about that, as well, Miss Eversea. I’m a man who cherishes my mystique.”
She gave a little snort. But she was undoubtedly shaken.
She turned back to watch Harry, who was now making a great show of balancing the cricket bat on his palm. It was jarringly the opposite of the conversation she was in the midst of.
Does Harry know about those sorts of kisses? Does he have those kinds of thoughts? Does he have any idea what one kiss of my hand would do to me? Of what dreams I would unfurl from it?
Is it only me, or do all women think this way?
Would a real man have kissed my mouth?
She was tempted to touch her mouth again, and to imagine.
She gripped the grass again, more tightly, needing to feel solid ground. She was dizzy, more confused than she’d been yesterday. As though the land around her was sea and she’d just been cast adrift in an ocean of sensual knowledge she would never now partake of if Harry married Millicent.
Damn the duke. She was devastatingly clever, but he’d just made it very, very clear that she knew nothing, nothing at all about . . . anything.
“Did he make you a promise on the heels of this ‘kiss,’ Miss Eversea?”
She was never going to enjoy the mocking way he referred to that kiss.
She said nothing.
But he seemed to take this as a confirmation.
“Are you spoken for? Did he back away from a promise?” he asked hurriedly. He sounded tense. Oddly as though he intended to deal unkindly with Harry if this was the case.
“Not . . . not as much. No. But everything was . . . implied. Or so I thought. We’ve been so close for so long, you see, and . . . there was no reason at all not to believe . . . especially not after yesterday . . .”
“And yet he is preparing to launch a proposal at your dear friend Millicent.”
He might as well have shot an arrow straight into her solar p
lexus. Hearing those words spoken aloud by another human were just that pleasant.
She covered her eyes with her hand, sucked in a jagged breath. “Yes. He told me so. Yes.”
She took her hand away and bravely looked back at him.
The duke took this in with raised eyebrows. And gave his head a little wondering shake, whether at Harry’s or her expense, she could not be certain.
“Has he ever sent flowers to you?”
“He once presented me with a bouquet of wildflowers he’d just picked,” she confessed dismally.
The duke thought this was amusing, judging from what his eyebrows did.
“Has he kissed her? Any of her parts? Or sent flowers to her?”
Argh. The misery. “I don’t know. She hasn’t told me. He hasn’t told me. And usually . . . well, Millicent and I tell each other everything. And I thought Harry told me everything, too.”
“If you haven’t told Millicent how you feel about Lord Harry, then you haven’t told Millicent everything, have you?”
Well, then. She was generally assumed to be clever, but in that moment she felt a fool. He had an excellent point. She hadn’t dreamed Harry harbored a tendre for Millicent; she’d floated along in the comfortable certainty of friendship.
“I’m afraid all of this is rather evident. To me. Otherwise, you are exceptionally inscrutable and I’m certain not a soul suspects,” he humored with suppressed laughter in his voice.
She scowled darkly at him. “And isn’t that just my good fortune that you should notice and choose to torment me with it.”
He laughed. Admittedly, he had a fine laugh, deep and genuine. She sensed he didn’t do it easily. She liked the sense that she’d surprised it from him.
And therein lay his vulnerability. She could make him laugh.
She had another surprise for him. “Lord Moncrieffe, do tell me, since we’re speaking so frankly. What is your game?”
Chapter 10
He didn’t precisely . . . blink. But for an almost imperceptible second he went shockingly still.
“Game? I don’t understand. What makes you feel there’s a—”
What I Did For a Duke Page 11