When a Duchess Says I Do

by Grace Burrowes

  His fingers were deft, drawing the fabric of her bodice aside, button by button, to reveal the old-fashioned laces beneath. He untied her corsetry, then undid the bow on her chemise.

  “Your move,” he said, hands falling at his sides.

  Oh, yes. Matilda considered options, strategies, and analogies. She slipped the pin from his cravat and untied the knot, leaving the ends trailing.

  He drew the cravat off and laid it over the open door of the wardrobe. “Your slippers,” he said, “and stockings.”

  Matilda sat and endured the warmth of Duncan’s hands on her feet, ankles, and calves. He untied her garters, rolled down her plain wool stockings, and what should have been a mundane step in the process of disrobing became unbearable seduction.

  He lingered at her ankle, shaping the bones with his fingers. His touch was warm, and so intimate Matilda couldn’t bear to watch.

  “I’m too skinny,” she said, stroking his hair.

  He rose and stood by her, such that she could press her cheek to his thigh. To rest against him was an exquisite pleasure, as was his hand caressing her neck.

  “You have been through a trial,” he said. “Flesh can be regained. Your move.”

  He took half a step back, and Matilda went for the buttons holding his shirt closed, then stopped, lest she give up every advantage in this game of arousal.

  “To you, Mr. Wentworth.”

  He waved a hand. “The dress, if you please.”

  Matilda very much pleased. She drew the dress over her head and laid it on the sofa, then wiggled out of her jumps and set them on a chair. “The shirt.”

  Duncan pulled off his shirt and tossed it atop her dress, then sat and yanked off his boots. “I forfeit,” he said, shoving his breeches down and stepping out of them. “I forfeit the whole match provided you’ll join me in that bed.”

  He was naked in the winter sunlight, a mature god in lean, robust good health. His body hair shaded reddish, his proportions made Matilda ache. Duncan wasn’t the idealized David, with head and hands too big, a torso too slender, posture contorted the better to convey artistic priorities. He was a flesh-and-blood man, and when he held out a hand, inviting Matilda onto the bed, she hesitated.

  “You make me wish I had your ability to sketch,” she said.

  “You make me wish all manner of things. I intend to see many of those wishes come true in the next hour.”

  Matilda lifted the hem of her chemise, and before she could lose her courage, she pitched the garment to the floor. She’d lost much of her figure, her hands were no longer the soft hands of a lady, and her hair needed a serious encounter with a pair of shears.

  None of which mattered when she beheld Duncan in his adult male glory.

  He lifted her in his arms, laid her on the bed, and came down over her. “You’ve granted my first wish. What wish can I grant for you?”

  Chapter Twelve

  After Rachel’s death, Duncan had wandered for four years in the Yorkshire countryside, eking out an existence teaching the children of farmers and squires. Guilt and anger had obscured any longing for intimacies with a female, and common sense had saved him from casual entanglements while at university.

  He wasn’t a virgin. Not by any means. As he’d recovered from his debacle with the church, the occasional willing widow had enlivened his young manhood considerably. Too many of those ladies had been inspecting him as a potential spouse, though, and he hadn’t any interest in reprising that role.

  Then he’d become responsible for Stephen’s education, and opportunities for intimate congress with unattached women had become fewer just as his curiosity about the ladies had stirred back to life.

  Women had a perspective that most man lacked. Women had courage most men overlooked. Women defeated most applications of simple logic, and they were surely interesting to look upon.

  Women were not, in other words, boring.

  Matilda was fascinating, all silky smooth skin, interesting angles and intriguing shadows. She was still slender—also warm and bold.

  “From this day forward, I will have pleasant associations with damask roses,” he said, nuzzling her ear. “The fragrance isn’t the same on other women. On you, I can detect exotic spices. Perhaps that’s the scent of mischief.”

  Her hand on his back stilled. “I smell of soap, you daft man. Kiss me.”

  Duncan obliged, starting with a joining of his mouth to hers. He was daft, for the big, soft bed allowed him the luxury of draping himself over Matilda, chest to breast, belly to belly, sex to sex. The intimacy was at once intoxicating and soothing.

  “That tickles,” Matilda whispered as Duncan nuzzled and tasted his way along her shoulder.

  “Good.” He pushed his arousal against her heat. “Retaliate however you please. I’m willing to sacrifice my stoutest pieces in the interests of capturing a queen.”

  “Not chess,” she panted, running a toe up his calf. “I can’t think if you speak to me in chess metaphors.”

  This was lovely. To feel Matilda unraveling beneath him, to come undone himself, one sigh, one caress, one wicked, teasing undulation of Matilda’s hips at a time.

  Duncan eased lower, taking a rosy, puckered nipple into his mouth. “You even taste of flowers.”

  She locked her legs around him. “That’s the flavor of frustration, Duncan Wentworth. I want you—do that again.”

  He used a free hand to cup her other breast, applying pressure with his hand and mouth in unison.

  Next time, no bed. If he were bracing Matilda against a wall, trying to balance on the narrow bench of a sofa, making love with her standing up, her back to his front—oh, the possibilities!—then logistics and sore muscles would give his self-restraint a sensory anchor. Devouring Matilda amid clean sheets and soft quilts was bliss, a feast before a warm hearth in the midst of deepest winter.

  “Duncan…” She used leg strength to lift herself against him. “I adore your patience, but if you’re waiting for me to send an engraved invitation—that is delightful.”

  He’d started the joining, shallowly, slowly, because this was more than becoming lovers. This was the beginning of a commitment he’d never thought to make again. Then too, if he sought a future with Matilda—and he did—then her pleasure was not only his obligation but also his ally.

  Pleasure. Not logic, not keen observations, not pretty sketches.

  He set up a languid rhythm, distracting himself by easing pins from Matilda’s hair between kisses and caresses.

  “What are you doing, Duncan?”

  Advancing my knights. “Making love with my intended.”

  She buried her face against his shoulder.

  He didn’t know whether his admission pleased her, but she was certainly pleasing him. Matilda was a robust lover, meeting him thrust for thrust, and accelerating the tempo—or trying to. They wrestled for control, though in this arena Duncan had no intention of ceding the match.

  “Duncan, why must you be so—oh, damn and blast you, you dratted, wonderful man.”

  She’d learned to swear. He tucked that victory aside and rode out her pleasure as she bucked and thrashed beneath him. She made not a sound, but her body spoke volumes. Matilda of the measured strategies and hoarded secrets surrendered in his arms, to intimacy and to satisfaction.

  Mindful that she had not surrendered to him, Duncan let her have a few minutes of panting stillness before he withdrew.

  “Hold me, Matilda. Please.”

  Her embrace was fierce as Duncan finished against her belly. The gratification was more in having exercised restraint than in sexual fulfillment, and the voice of conscience reminded Duncan that even withdrawing was not a guarantee against conception.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For all of it, but especially for denying yourself.”

  Duncan did not want her thanks, but perhaps on the Continent, the etiquette for such moments required it. He remained in her arms, bracing himself just enough to allow them room to breathe.
Her scent was on him, roses and woman, and a tension he’d been carrying for years had fallen away. The urge to speak to her of that luscious feeling of freedom was bounded by caution.

  Had Matilda made love with him because she wanted to stay with him, or because she planned to leave?

  He eased away and took a handkerchief from the night table. “I won’t be long.” He passed her the handkerchief and took himself behind the privacy screen. A cold, wet cloth ruthlessly applied to intimate locations helped restore his mental functioning.

  He climbed back under the covers, and Matilda bundled against his side. His breeding organs were all too ready for a re-match, which would be greedy and inconsiderate.

  “Let me hold you,” he said, wrestling Matilda atop him. “You do know that the measures I took are not sufficient to reliably prevent conception?”

  She drew a finger along his brows, her touch exquisitely relaxing. “The women I’ve consulted said it’s as good a precaution as any.”

  “My wife didn’t find it adequate, but then, she was not a well-educated woman, and that precautionary measure was not consistently taken.”

  Matilda’s finger traced down his nose to sketch his lips. “You were young. She was your wife. Why exercise restraint?”

  “She was not my wife when she conceived the child, and I was not the father of her child.”

  Matilda looked both sad and unsurprised, as if she’d puzzled out the conclusion of a moralizing novel a hundred pages from the end.

  “Tell me, Duncan. I suspect this story matters a great deal.”

  “The story didn’t matter to anybody who might have given it a happier ending.” The bitterness of that truth still haunted Duncan more than a decade later, but mostly as old grief, as disappointment in himself and in those he’d trusted.

  Matilda folded down onto his chest and wrapped him close. “Tell me.”

  Even having become her lover, Duncan was hungry to know Matilda more intimately. He didn’t know all of her secrets, he had not won all of her trust, but he’d made a start.

  And she had made a start earning his. “Once upon a time,” he began, “there lived a small boy who grew up in his uncle’s vicarage. The small boy was taught right from wrong, and right from potentially wrong, until life presented him with not a single moral conundrum. He went into the church, and from there, the whole bloody business went straight to hell.”

  Matilda gathered him close. “I can keep a secret. Give me the rest of it.”

  She was keeping secrets. Now that desire had ebbed to a dull roar, her secrets bothered Duncan more than ever. He was keeping secrets too, though, and for what purpose except to pretend the past had happened to another man?

  For the first time since taking off his collar, Duncan prepared to recite the whole, miserable, rotten tale. He stroked his hand over the woman whom he hoped to make his wife and vowed to give her and her alone the truth.

  * * *

  “If you’d told Mr. Parker about the woman, he mighta paid for more than a few pints,” Herman groused.

  Herm was practicing a card trick—a cheater’s maneuver by any other name—though the dear lad would never be a card sharp. Herman lacked sincere friendliness, which Jeffrey knew to be the successful card sharp’s most essential trait.

  “If I’d told Parker about the woman,” Jeffrey said, “I’d have been confessing to trespassing, you idjit. Do you fancy a trip to New South Wales?”

  Herman attempted to shuffle the deck, the cards splattering all over the common’s plank table. “You didn’t have to mention that part. We mighta been passing by the home wood when we seen her, along the lane, like.”

  “Mr. Parker is a military man, Herm. Didn’t you notice how he stood like he had a poker up his arse? His coach was crested, with the panels turned.”

  Herman gathered up the cards. “When did you see his coach?”

  Herman, Herman, Herman. Ma’s last words had been to look out for Herman, but a brother grew weary of such a thankless task.

  “Man’s gotta step around to the jakes, don’t he?”

  “So what’s being military got to do wiff it? Half the men in England have taken the king’s shilling a time or two.”

  “He’s military and he’s related to a title, close enough to borrow that fine coach. He’s got younger son written all over him. What’s he doing, skulking about with the crests turned, biding at a lowly place like this, except trying to avoid notice while he hunts down a wife what’s run off.”

  Herman began arranging the cards in a manner that would disadvantage any who sat down for a friendly game.

  “Damned female knew which end of a pistol was what,” he said. “Following the drum does that to women. Makes ’em bold. Our Mr. Parker likely dragged her all over the battlefields.”

  Mr. Parker, indeed. “Exactly, but a woman like that won’t want to be found. She ran off for reasons. The lord of Brightwell manor could be harboring a fugitive wife and might not even know it.”

  Herman pushed the deck across the table. “And where there’s a fugitive wife, there’s often a reward.”

  Jeffrey cut the cards. “Or there’s a gesture of appreciation from the lady’s current protector, for not revealing her whereabouts to her heartbroke husband. We can’t lose, Herm.”

  Herman dealt for a game of piquet. “But we were poaching at Brightwell, and trespassing, and we put hands on the landowner, Jeffrey.”

  A serving maid scrubbing tables looked up at that bit of foolishness. Jeffrey winked at her. She went back to her drudging.

  “He coulda had us up before the king’s man, Herm. That was a serious pistol, he had a witness in the lady, and we were taken unawares.”

  Herman studied his hand. “But he didn’t bother with us. He were too interested in the lady.”

  “Exactly. So now we’ll be interested in the lady too.”

  * * *

  “You went into the church.” Matilda rejoiced to have a piece of Duncan’s past entrusted to her keeping, even as her own dissembling bothered her more.

  “Like a coach horse to his oats,” Duncan said, drawing lazy patterns on her bare arm, “and with nearly as unsophisticated a grasp of the potential hazards.”

  She could fall in love with his touch, if his sheer decency weren’t even more alluring. “And then what happened?”

  “I was given a post as curate to a vicar in rural Yorkshire. What family I had was in York, and a Yorkshireman’s speech was the sound of home to me. Better still, my vicar was a well-loved clergyman. His sermons were tolerant and even humorous. He chided gently if at all, and his demeanor was jovial.”

  A perfect mentor for an earnest young man, in other words. “This paradise must have a serpent.”

  “The usual complement of the seven deadly sins, though I didn’t expect to find them in my vicar. I came upon him trifling with a maid. The verb does not do justice to the potential harm inflicted.”

  That sort of trifling. “He had her skirts up?”

  “He’d pinned her against a sideboard with his weight, and her skirts were in his hand. She was trying not to touch him, turning her head to avoid his kisses. Please stop, Vicar. I’m a good girl, Vicar. Vicar, you mustn’t.”

  Matilda scooted closer beneath the covers. “You intervened.”

  “I asked him what on earth he was about, for the girl—she was barely sixteen—was clearly unwilling and not his wife.” Duncan’s hands went still. “He laughed. He did not let her go.”

  No wonder Duncan understood a snared creature’s plight. “And you did not desist with your remonstrations.”

  “I hauled him off of her and physically threatened the most beloved man in the parish. He stopped laughing and proceeded to lecture me. Women protest for form’s sake, which I might have known had I been more than a pious boy. Women enjoy it, they’ve been enticing men since Eve plucked the apple, and if they conceive, that is clearly God’s will. If they die in childbed, that’s the price they must all pay eternall
y for plucking that one apple. Scripture tells us all of this, though not in any passage I could find.”

  “Scripture written and propounded by men,” Matilda said.

  Duncan regarded her in the gloom of the bed hangings. “A valid point. Not one I considered at the time.”

  “So you left the church. A sound decision.”

  He drew the covers up over Matilda’s shoulders. “I did not leave, I was drummed out of the regiment. The second time I caught the vicar at his pleasures, I went to his wife. She informed me that I was jealous of my superior, and if I breathed another word of what I’d mistaken for familial affection, she’d see me defrocked. I had mistaken nothing.”

  The tale would grow worse, which felt perilously like being exiled from home in winter with no means of support. Matilda was particularly grateful for the warmth and privacy of the bed, given the bitter tale Duncan told.

  “What did you do?”

  “I confronted the girl, offered her my pittance of a savings and an exquisitely written character in the event she wanted to flee. She was from a foundling home in York and knew nobody in the parish to whom she might have turned. I was not confident that she even understood the connection between copulation and conception.”

  “You explained it to her.”

  “Vicar had assured her that nobody conceived from a few little interludes of harmless sport. Vicar was a man of God, he would not lie. He would fornicate, exploit, and cite scripture for his own purposes, but she assured me emphatically that he would not lie about that.”

  Duncan’s distaste for mendacity had been learned early and well.

  “He got her with child,” Matilda said, “and you offered to marry her.”

  Duncan rolled, so he was on his side, and Matilda lay facing him. “First, I went to the bishop, thinking that surely, surely the spiritual authority in a position to right this wrong would insist on intervening. If nothing else, the vicar’s eternal salvation was imperiled. The bishop laughed as well. At me. If anybody ever addresses me as ‘my boy’ again, I will not answer for the consequences.”