What I Did For a Duke

by Julie Anne Long

  He never came inside her.

  He kept her from falling. His arms were steel bands ’round her waist. She could have crumpled to the floor just like her night rail.

  He scooped his arms beneath her and lifted her as though she were made of down, and gently, gently, settled her on the bed.

  She’d never felt more precious. And she covered her eyes with her arm at the rush of feelings, too many to sort, all of them bigger than she was, most of them new.

  She was abashed.

  He stretched out next to her and gently but firmly lifted her arm away from her face. He wanted to see her, apparently. She still didn’t want to open her eyes. It felt safer, somehow, to keep them closed. Through the cloud she floated upon she felt his lips, soft, soft, achingly tender, brushing over her eyelids, her cheek, her forehead, her throat, her lips. So soothing. A tender inventory. He murmured things that may have been endearments.

  “Your feet are ice,” he murmured. And his hands matter-of-factly rubbed heat into them, then slid up her calves. He gently, gently combed them through her hair, smoothing it gently, efficiently away from her face. He strummed them over her forehead softly, softly, softly.

  She sighed and opened her eyes. And met his.

  And in her weakened state she simply allowed herself to surrender to their beauty and to the expression in them, which was one of such undisguised tenderness it ought to have unnerved her.

  She smoothed his hair from his face, pushed it back. It stayed. It was soaked with sweat. He was still entirely clothed.

  He lay down alongside her.

  Both were in excellent humor now. Spent, limp, pensive, too magnanimous in their satiety to feel anything but pleased with the world. Other inconvenient emotions could wait. Nothing was confusing or frustrating. It was all about recovery.

  They didn’t speak at all.

  Until she did. “It isn’t a terrible idea.”

  She was certain he knew what she meant.

  She’d expected him to snort. Instead he stiffened next to her.

  “Are you perchance describing my suggestion of marriage?”

  Suggestion. She was never going to get a proposal. She lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant answer.

  “Tell me again it isn’t a terrible idea when you’re not addled from sex.”

  Hmm. She supposed she was rather addled from it. How odd that this existence could feel more vibrant than the one she lived during the day, but it wasn’t at all real and it was entirely temporary. No proper life could be made from the pursuit of blinding pleasure followed by limp exhaustion. All of this had been the most reckless, satisfying, terrifying thing she’d done in all her born days. She supposed she was due for something of the sort, given her bloodline.

  She had the uneasy sense that she’d only just begun discovering the magnitude of what her body demanded.

  “Very well, Genevieve. If Harry proposes to Millicent before the week is out, then I will marry you. I will consent to be your consolation prize.”

  Something about his tone was a bit wrong, but she was still . . . addled. And she couldn’t put her finger precisely on it.

  If Harry proposes to Millicent.

  With those words, reality intruded unpleasantly, and once it made inroads, she noticed that the fire was lower now, the wick on the oil lamp was burning down, sweat was drying on her body and she was now cold, the soreness between her legs made itself known.

  And the notion of Harry marrying anyone but her was painful enough to penetrate the haze of it all. She sighed gustily. Remembering how all of this that had come to pass had begun with Harry.

  The duke had become her means of forgetting. Her brandy, her opium.

  “Shouldn’t at least one of us marry for love?”

  “I thought you loved only Harry and would only love Harry until the mountains crumble into the sea, and so forth. And are you telling me now you wouldn’t mind being a duchess should your love for Harry not come to fruition? You can live with that?”

  There was a taut note in his voice. It wasn’t his usual dryness. She couldn’t read his mood, and when she couldn’t it made her uneasy.

  “If you can,” she added.

  Silence.

  “Anyone would be honored to be your duchess,” she tried softly.

  The softness just made him smile some sort of secret, rueful, dark, and private smile and shake his head. Kind, she suspected he was thinking, and not kindly, either. Disparagingly.

  “It isn’t a weakness to accept kindness,” she told him tartly, which was ironic, as this was hardly a kind thing to say. “It isn’t a weakness to allow yourself to be cared for.”

  “It is if the kindness is given out of pity. If it is, then it’s not called being kind. It’s called being patronizing.”

  “I simply cannot bear seeing you unhappy.”

  The admission was an intimate one, and so fierce and almost anguished it startled both of them into stillness and silence.

  “You cannot bear to see me unhappy, or anyone, Genevieve?” he said ironically.

  She wouldn’t answer. She knew the answer.

  You, you, you.

  But what did this mean? How had this come to pass?

  Tension was drum-taut between them.

  “This will be the last time we make love,” he said, almost conversationally.

  She scrambled upright. Last. Not a word she enjoyed.

  The fire had burned very low, and she was thoroughly chilled now. Her night rail was . . . She scanned the room.

  “. . . Over near the wardrobe, where I dropped it.”

  She wasn’t about to press up against him for warmth. He didn’t offer, either. She didn’t quite leap off the bed to retrieve it yet, either.

  He was in fact holding himself still in what appeared to be a finite amount of space on the bed, and she sensed that if she held her hands up she’d encounter walls up around him, invisible ones but present nonetheless.

  “Are you punishing me?”

  She’d blurted it. Two measures of how she’d changed in a few short days. She blurted things—if only to him—and considered being denied the pleasures of his body a punishment. She sounded like a child.

  She hoped it sounded a bit like a jest. It wasn’t. She, once again, was panicked.

  He still wouldn’t look at her. He was watching the ceiling as though it were a crystal ball. He’d rested his forearm across his forehead, as if checking for fever.

  “Mmm . . . consider it a latent attack of honor. Harry is sleeping under this roof, after all. I’m not getting any younger, you know. I’m in danger of being used up by you entirely and if I marry I imagine my wife would object to a spent and useless man. And I’ve so much more I haven’t yet shown you . . .”

  And with that taunt, he rolled from the bed. He’d only to rearrange his clothing and button his trousers, which he did while staring down at her. It was the first time she’d felt a bit of a trollop.

  She watched, going hot in the face. He hadn’t even truly removed any clothes, they couldn’t even wait for that, and they’d gone at it as fiercely as ferrets.

  She’d seen ferrets go at it, so she knew.

  Genevieve wanted to keep him with her and wanted him to go so she could be alone with whatever emotions were buffeting her.

  He stood back and gazed at her. She felt his eyes on her, soft and thorough as his fingers. He inhaled. She watched his fine furred chest rise and fall, and she thought she saw a little mark on it where she’d nipped or clawed him.

  “If this is the last time, oughtn’t there be a farewell?” She sounded so desperate. She wanted a kiss. Because she knew if she kissed him she could make him stay.

  “This was farewell, Genevieve. Couldn’t you tell?”

  And with that he was gone, as quickly as he did most things.

  Chapter 24

  BAM. BAM. BAM.

  Alex had just managed to drift into a shallow fitful sleep when he became aware that the thumping wasn’
t his heart, getting ready to explode, nor was it his head, as he hadn’t had all that much to drink tonight for a change. He’d left Genevieve only an hour before.

  BAM. BAM. BAM.

  He opened one eye and with an extraordinary effort tipped his head to one side on the pillow to squint at the clock. He could just make out that the hands of it were positioned at two and twelve. He dragged his palms up punishingly hard over his face, as if trying to wake himself up one body part at a time, beginning with his features. He pushed his hair back, and rolled over, reluctant to do more than that, and waited for his brain to make sense of the pounding.

  In seconds he realized it was the door. Someone was rhythmically pounding at his chamber door.

  BAM BAM BAM!

  A fire in the house? Was somebody ill? An angry husband? Wait—no, that was a guess rooted in his past; it had been years since he’d seduced a married woman. Jacob Eversea with a pistol prepared to shoot him for making love to his daughter under his roof? Or hammering the door shut to keep him prisoner until he did? Ian Eversea desperately demanding he meet him at dawn over pistols?

  He was awake now. As none of the possibilities were pleasant he slid from bed, reflexively seized his pistol from the table next to his bed—always clean, always loaded, powder always dry, such was his trusting nature and so beloved was he by the ton—and unlocked and cocked it. He seized his trousers and shoved his legs in, and with another stride was at the door.

  BAM! BAM!—

  He slid the bolt abruptly and opened the door about two inches.

  Someone nearly fell in. He shoved the door hard back to keep them from landing on top of him.

  The hall was dark; all the candles in the sconces long since doused. And yet the damned golden hair still gleamed.

  “I need to talk to you, Moncrieffe.”

  Good grief. The man had slurred an entire sentence into a single multisyllabic word.

  He pushed open the door a few more inches, and Osborne all but poured through the opening.

  “Osborne, what the devil—”

  He was in shirtsleeves, floppy hair a scrambled mop, his eyes ringed in red. From fatigue? Weeping?

  “Do you love her?” he slurred.

  Moncrieffe was instantly alert for danger. He flicked his eyes over the man, searching for weapons. He shifted his pistol in his hand.

  What did Osborne know?

  “Osborne, I want you to leave now,” he managed coldly.

  “DO YOU LOVE HER?”

  Harry lunged forward and tried to seize Moncrieffe by the lapels and stopped short, confused, when he realized Moncrieffe wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  The stopping short nearly toppled him.

  He righted himself with some effort. Moncrieffe stood back, pistol lowered surreptitiously at his hip.

  Good God, the boy was foxed.

  Harry immediately looked sincere and apologetic and frantic.

  “Here ish the thing, Moncrieffe. It hash all gone badly, badly wrong. Badly wrong. Badly . . .” Harry stopped, and frowned, displeased that his chain of thought had slipped his grip.

  “Wrong?” Moncrieffe suggested darkly.

  “Yesh!” Harry agreed in almost angry surprise. “That’s preshisely it. You see it, too!”

  Oh, for God’s sake. “I’m not certain I do. What have you been at, Osborne? Whiskey, brandy?”

  Harry waved impatiently, vaguely, and the gesture nearly swung him off his feet. “Whatever was in all the bottles in the library. For the pain.”

  “Well, naturally. It’s why liquor was invented. ‘For the pain.’ There were quite a few bottles in the library.”

  “None now,” Harry announced with glum satisfaction.

  Wonderful.

  “Have you come to . . . hurt me, Osborne?” He managed to make this sentence sound amused.

  Harry eyed the pistol balefully.

  “Oh, I’m afraid of you, I’ll admit, Falconbridge. But you can put your pistol away. I’m not the sort. I cannot see you’ve done anything wrong.”

  The relief was profound. The intensity of it was a potent reminder that what he’d been doing was not only foolish . . . he’d allowed it to get out of control.

  It was far more in command of him than he was of it.

  “But here ish the thing, Moncrieffe. I had a plan. I did. You weren’t meant to be here at this house party. You weren’t meant to court her, she wasn’t meant to care for you, you weren’t meant to . . .”

  He shoved his hands through his hair as his despair escalated until his words rushed from him in angry, tormented, bursts.

  He paused.

  “I. Love. Her. I do.”

  The words were anguished gasps.

  Moncrieffe stood back. As much from the fumes as from the pure force of the terror of first heartbreak.

  Something was amiss here.

  Osborne took a noncommittal step, then paused and frowned at the ground, puzzled. Wondering perhaps whether one of his boot heels had suddenly grown higher than the other, or whether the carpet was laid over water.

  Moncrieffe hooked his boot around the rungs of the chair at the writing desks and shoved it over to Harry with his foot.

  Osborne sat down in stages: bum hard on chair, elbows hard on thighs, head dropped hard into his hands, breath rushing out of him in a great exhale.

  And for a while he just breathed.

  Everything has a rhythm, Moncrieffe couldn’t help but think, watching. The sea, our breathing, our anguish, our love. We couldn’t endure the force of any of it all at once. It has to ebb and flow.

  Moncrieffe sat down opposite Harry, almost gingerly. The emotion in the room was too volatile and uncertain; he didn’t know what might disturb it. The hour was late, he was weary, and in his vulnerability an image crossed the membrane of his memory then: it was midnight, the clock his wife had loved chimed out the hour with obscenely merry chimes. He was hunched over in a chair, and another man, a doctor, stood near him, having delivered his news. She was dead in the next room.

  Agony. Emptiness.

  He watched Harry. He tried to ignore the creeping contempt he felt for himself. Oh, he’d been so clever. With his games and strategy. He’d nearly had for himself what he wanted. He would have punished Ian Eversea beautifully.

  Instead he’d managed to build for himself a brilliant trap with nasty teeth, and no matter how he turned, they tore at him.

  Then again, with the arrival of Harry, he may have just been presented with a brilliant opportunity.

  What a man he’d become to have such a thought in such a moment. He was not wealthy by accident.

  Harry sighed. His voice was steadier, but still muffled with emotion.

  “My whole life I’ve loved her. Genevieve.”

  “Your whole life.” Moncrieffe repeated the words, stalling to give his mind space in which to unravel what was happening here. He didn’t think he was witnessing his plan, Genevieve’s plan, coming to fruition. The plan where they showed Harry his heart because he didn’t know it.

  I had a plan, Osborne had said.

  They’d all had a “plan,” apparently. Not one of those plans seemed to be unfolding as . . . planned.

  It was almost funny.

  He sighed and reached behind him for the shirt he’d abandoned next to his bed when he’d fallen into it. He slid his arms into it, but didn’t bother to button it. He seized the poker to poke at the fire, but the fire wasn’t interested in giving off more heat.

  “She’s . . . oh, but she’s beautiful. Don’t you think? For heaven’s sake, don’t answer that,” Harry added hurriedly. “I don’t want to know. I know I will do anything to make her smile. She has a dimple here.” He pointed. “Have you seen her shmile, Moncrieffe? What am I saying? Of course you have. She smiles for you . . . all the time.”

  He drifted momentarily on a satisfying tide of self-pity.

  Alex said nothing.

  “And by God . . . she’s . . . she’s so funny and clever and
very, very funny and . . .” He sighed, and stared into the fire.

  “She’s clever, too,” Moncrieffe suggested diabolically.

  “She ish,” Harry agreed vehemently, shocked at their accord. “So you noticed all of it, too.”

  A pause, as in his weary state all of the things that Harry had said, all the things Genevieve was, settled over him, beat inside him.

  “Yes.” With an effort he said it in a voice of infinite, implacable patience and reason. A steady voice, that gave away nothing. “I’ve seen it, too.”

  “From the first?” Harry demanded.

  As if he would answer such a question. From the first he’d wanted to ruin her, abandon her to punish someone who had yet again taken something from him too soon.

  He didn’t care at all about Ian Eversea anymore.

  He was standing once again on the precipice of losing her. When there was a hairsbreadth of a chance, after tonight, he could have her forever, simply because her body wanted him.

  All he said was, “You ought to choose fewer words that contain S for the time being. You are spitting all over me.”

  Harry inhaled deeply, as if hoping to suck a little of Moncrieffe’s own patience from the air. “Likely you are right,” Harry agreed gloomily. “I shall try.”

  “Why are you here? Why have you so rudely interrupted my sleep?”

  “I need to tell you this, Moncrieffe. It’s my only hope. For as long as I’ve known her I’ve loved her. From the start I knew. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt such a thing, Moncrieffe, but I shaw her . . . saw her . . . and it was like I could . . . I could see . . .” He glanced up, sheepishly, then turned his face back toward the fire, mouth tilted wryly, abashed at his own hyperbole. “I could see what forever would be like. I liked it.” His voice grew pensive again.

  The muscles of Alex’s stomach tensed. Forever. He could see what forever would be like. And forever was what he was about to lose.

  Again.

  He couldn’t allow it again.

  Harry looked up. “And then you came along.” He was back to the self-pity now. “They say you plan to marry her.”