She held herself stiff for a moment, but there was no helping it. His warmth melted her. She let her head rest on his shoulder and let out two more long, gasping breaths.
Silence. He held her, and the world moved onward around them. Selina slowly became aware of the ticking of the clock on the wall, the increasingly irate murmurs coming from Aunt Ursula’s bedroom. She lifted her head.
Malcolm moved to cup her face with his hand, but she backed away before he could do it.
“I am sorry,” she said, smoothing out her dress. “That was ridiculous of me. Ursula is not badly hurt, after all.”
“It was a shock,” said Malcolm. “It is natural to be distressed. Though I am sure the doctor will be able to tell us that Lady Ursula is not in any danger.”
A hysterical bubble rose in Selina’s throat. “No, it is not natural. I don’t succumb to fits of silly tears under pressure. I fix things. I solve problems. I take charge.”
He scratched the back of his neck, his bafflement evident. “Did I usurp your position?”
“You unsettled me.” Irrational rage had Selina by the throat, burning and tight, and she could not shake it free. “I would have known exactly what to do if only you had not feigned a carriage accident and thrust yourself in where you were not invited.”
He folded his arms, a sign of contemplation rather than anger, and regarded her coolly. “You would have known exactly what to do. Solved the problem. Taken charge.”
“Yes.”
“Because you are so accustomed to being the only person you can rely upon that you are unable to ask anyone else for help.”
Her mouth opened. Closed again.
“I must fetch Lady Aldershot’s needlework,” she said, and turned on her heel. She heard Malcolm groan behind her.
“Selina –”
“I have asked you before not to address me in that familiar way,” she said, without looking back. “My name is Lady Selina Balfour.”
She picked up her skirts and marched away down the stairs before she had a chance to hear his response.
Taking Percival for a walk was a fool’s errand. The little dog’s injury had opened his eyes to a world of indolence, and Percy was not much inclined to leave it. Malcolm did not make it more than three steps at a time through Lady Aldershot’s gardens before the familiar tugging at his trouser leg announced Percy’s desire to be picked up.
But Malcolm had embarked upon several fool’s errands lately, and one more made little difference. He persevered until the sun dipped low beneath the woods at the edge of the Aldershot estate, and only gathered Percy into his arms when they reached the steps up to the terrace at the back of the house. Percy forgot his distress in an instant and became a wriggling bundle of joy, licking adoringly at Malcolm’s face.
“Enough,” said Malcolm. “You must take me for a soft-hearted fool. I will not have my chin licked by an idle wretch.”
Percy’s command of English was not strong enough to understand that he was being chastised. He settled into Malcolm’s arms with a yip of contentment, his four legs dangling aimlessly.
Malcolm paused at the bottom of the steps, the weight of the dog comfortable in his arms, the sun sending streaks of vibrant colour across the sky.
“Forget I said anything,” he murmured to the dog, scratching his ears apologetically. “At least there is someone here who appreciates me.”
Percy’s ears pricked. He let out a soft bark of greeting. Malcolm guessed who had caught the dog’s attention before he saw her.
Selina was sitting on the wide terrace steps, watching the sun set, her elbow resting on her knee and her hand propping her chin. Malcolm set Percy down, unsurprised that the duplicitous creature suddenly regained his enthusiasm for walking. Percy hop-skipped up to Selina and rested his head on her knee.
It was one thing to be jealous of a dead man. It was quite another to be jealous of a dog. Malcolm coughed, alerting Selina to his presence, and came up the steps to sit beside her. Percy, the ungrateful creature, did not offer him so much as a sniff.
“A pleasant evening,” he said. Selina did not look at him. Her elegant profile was thrown into perfect relief by the orange fire in the sky. Malcolm traced it with his eyes, waiting.
He had learned that she would speak to him, eventually, if he waited long enough. She would say something worth hearing.
“The doctor says there is no real danger. Aunt Ursula must rest until the bruising fades. He prescribed a poultice.”
“I imagine she was not pleased to be instructed to rest.”
Selina ducked her head, not quite managing to hide her smile. “No.” She turned to him, her face half shadowed, half aglow with the gorgeous sunset. Her eyes were wide, their habitual mask fallen away.
She was radiant. She was always radiant, of course, or he would never have noticed her. Malcolm could not deny that he was a shallow man in many ways, enamoured of beautiful things.
But the beauty of Selina opening her heart to him was a far purer, more perfect one than any physical perfection he had admired before.
“Can you forgive me for the way I spoke to you earlier?”
He smiled wryly. “Only if you forgive me for driving my phaeton into a ditch to force entry into Lady Aldershot’s house.”
Selina extended her hand. “Friends?”
He took it, felt its softness and warmth, and held it steady for a moment. “Can we really be friends, my lady?”
Her fingers stilled in his hand. “Because of the Twynham election?”
“That, too.” He gave her hand a single, solemn shake, and let her go. “May I take you out for a drive tomorrow? If my carriage is repaired in time?”
“No.”
He hadn’t been expecting that, so unequivocal and sudden. Percy raised his head in Selina’s lap, sensing the discordant note in the air.
“Why not?”
The mask descended. “That’s what courting couples do.”
“I know. That’s why I asked you.” He flexed his fingers in his lap, cold and empty without her hand. “We must stop dancing around the question, Selina. One of us has to be honest. Would you like me to speak to your brother first? I’d have thought you could do without his permission, but if it would make you happier –”
“I do not wish to be courted.” The words were flat, final. The ring of command in them would have put a queen to shame.
Well, Malcolm could play at that game. “And I wish to court you. So there it is. One of us will have our way.” He jutted out his chin as she stared at him, shocked into silence. “I am not accustomed to losing.”
“I am.” Blast. She could snuff out her anger like a candle, leaving nothing but softness and smoke behind. Leaving him feeling like a brute for challenging her. “I have lost a great many things. The thought of losing even one more fills me with such horror…” She glanced toward the house, her eyes seeking out the yellow glow in the window upstairs. “Take Aunt Ursula. She is old. She grows more frail every day. Well, I am the same. Not outside, perhaps, but in my heart. Could I recover from the loss of her, the way I did from the loss of my parents? Could I recover from the loss of a lover today, as I recovered from Jeffrey?” She shook her head, weary and sad. “I loved them, all three of them, with a half-grown, childlike love. It would be different today. It would be dreadful. I told you that I felt Jeffrey’s death like a severed limb. What if the next loss tears out my heart?”
Malcolm reached out, his hand trailing lightly down her shoulder. The glow of sunset had faded, the radiant light changing to the cool blue of night, but she was just as devastating. Just as proud, just as lovely, just as unreachable. “What if I offered you something different?” he asked. “Hardly anyone in my position marries for love. As Duchess of Caversham you would be the foremost woman in the country. I can offer you my wealth, my influence. The life you deserve. Does it not hold the faintest appeal? Is it not worth the risk of developing…” He smiled, though he did not feel like it. “A littl
e unwanted tenderness?”
Selina did not answer. Malcolm reluctantly left off his fingertip exploration of her slender arm. “Besides,” he said, through a mouth that was growing dry. “You have made it perfectly clear that you all but despise me. I should have thought the risk of falling in love was minimal at best.”
“Don’t sound so bitter about it, Caversham.” Her lips twisted into an ironic smile. “I think you know that I would not hate you nearly as much if you did not make me feel things I hate to feel. Things I thought I had set aside forever.”
Hope surged, wild and unlooked-for, in Malcolm’s chest. He had not realised how much the hopelessness of his pursuit of Selina had oppressed him until that moment, when it seemed that the weight might finally be lifted.
“I have never lost a loved one,” he said, the confession spilling out of him, as though by opening his heart he could ensnare hers. “I don’t think I can really understand it. The fear, the pain.”
He had taken her by surprise. She studied him carefully, as though she thought he might be lying. Her wilful lips pressed together, tempting him to coax them open again.
With his mouth on hers, she would not find it so easy to deny him. Icicles could melt.
But he owed her something first. A secret of his own.
“Your mother?” Selina asked. “Surely you loved her?”
“Died in childbirth. Father never spoke of her.”
“And him?”
“Ah. The eighth Duke of Caversham.” Malcolm rubbed his hands against his thighs, beginning to feel the night-time chill. “You must have heard of him. They called him the Lion Duke.”
“He was a great man. I know that much.”
“War hero. Expert sportsman. Political tour de force. Yes. And I… Well, I was his son. For whatever that was worth.”
He had caught her interest. “I remember meeting him once, when I was very young. He frightened me a little.”
Malcolm grinned, despite the bitterness of the memories. “Perhaps you and I had more in common in our youth than we first thought.”
“Was he a hard father?”
“He had high expectations of me. The older I get, the more I suspect I could never have met them. I certainly did not manage it before he died.”
“You really didn’t love him? Your own father?”
“Love was not something the Old Lion encouraged. But perhaps I did love him, after all, though not in a way you’d recognise. I lived and died for his approval. Isn’t that a sort of love?” He was glad the sky had darkened. He wasn’t sure he wanted Selina to see his face, to see the anger that had haunted him since his childhood, the bitterness. The way he was hard and cold in the ways that he knew she could be soft. “That desperation for him to notice me was fatal, in the end. For him, anyway.”
Selina did not speak. She pushed Percy from her lap, eliciting a soft yelp of discontent, and slid her arm through Malcolm’s. Her head lowered, knocking gently against his, companionable and sweetly simple.
“It was a riding accident,” said Malcolm. “He was a brilliant rider, in his youth, but I was growing up as he was growing older, and I thought – like the boastful boy I was – that I could outstrip him. There was a certain jump I used to make over a riverbed on the Caversham estate. Easy enough, when the ground was hard, and the weather was good. But on that day, when we rode out together, it started to rain. The river had swollen, the banks were muddy and slippery. And I thought it a wonderful opportunity to show him I was not afraid of anything.”
“You didn’t make it?”
“I did. Just. My horse stumbled but found its footing again. And then…” He stopped, finding that he did not know how to tell the story any longer.
Selina put her hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers. “This is it, isn’t it? Your secret. My collateral.”
“Yes.”
“Your father tried to make the jump, and failed?”
Malcolm swallowed. Nodded. Searched her eyes for a hint of shock, or disapprobation. They were twin pools of liquid darkness, and they told him nothing. “His horse landed on top of him. Broke its legs. He made me shoot it with my pistol to put it out of its misery. And I was such a fool that I forgot to tie my own horse up when I dismounted to do it, and it ran away in fright.
“So. I was left with my father, wounded and trapped beneath a dead horse at the edge of a rising river. And the rain was falling. He ordered me to go and fetch help. I’d lost my hat, somehow, in the confusion. It took me an hour to walk home. An hour in which I knew that even if I found help – even when I returned –”
“And the rain kept falling,” said Selina, when he did not finish his sentence. Malcolm shivered. Unmanly, perhaps, but if she challenged him, he could always blame the cold.
Selina’s arm tightened around him in response.
“They called me Your Grace for the first time that day. I had never hated anything more.”
“Do you hate it now?”
He lifted a shoulder, half-shrugging. “I’ve become Caversham completely in the intervening years. The title feels like my own. But I know that I have never fully claimed it from my father. I’m not the Lion Duke.”
“Do you need to be?”
He stared at her. “Of course. What else is there to be?”
“I wouldn’t kiss a Lion Duke,” said Selina, her eyes locked on his. “But I might kiss Malcolm Locke, if such a man exists.”
He doesn’t. That was what he should have told her. What was he, if not the Duke of Caversham? What did he desire, if not power and privilege and position?
There was no Malcolm without Caversham, no man without the duke. He should have told her that.
But he wanted to kiss her more than he wanted to preserve his honour, or hers. So he took her face in his hands and pressed his lips to her mouth before either of them could realise what a foolish idea it was.
It was a simple kiss, unhurried, a careful exploration of the contours of her perfect, wilful lips. Didn’t she deserve his respect, after all? His restraint?
But then their eyes fluttered open both together, and he saw his own longing mirrored in her face, and he heard the sigh that escaped her lips, and he could not stop himself from kissing her in a different way entirely. Ruinously. Rapturously. His hands clasped her to him the way a drowning man might clutch at a rock, and his mouth began its passionate, inexorable conquest.
He learned quickly. The way she responded when he caressed her here, or when his lips found purchase there. The way she gasped when he lightly bit her lower lip. It was all new, urgent, overpowering, and by the time they broke apart, their chests were both heaving.
Selina stared at him with her hand pressed to her reddened lips. “Malcolm,” she said.
That was all. But his name, his first name, the one he so rarely heard, had never held such meaning.
“Selina.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “It’s dark. I should go. We should –”
“Don’t tell me we shouldn’t speak of this again.” He rose to his feet too, Percy waking from his doze and nuzzling Malcolm’s ankle with sleepy confusion. He let out a puzzled bark, which broke through Selina’s sudden horror like a charm. She let out a laugh, low and musical.
“Very well. We can speak of it tomorrow. When you take me out for that carriage ride.”
Then she was gone, slipping into the dark house like a shadow, leaving Malcolm with nothing but Percy at his feet and an ache beginning, somewhere deep in his chest.
“We have made some progress there, my friend,” he said, bending to detach Percy’s inquisitive teeth from his boot. “Though what we are progressing towards…. Well.” He looked up at the sky, where very few stars were visible through the overhanging clouds. “Perhaps it’s best not to ask too many questions.”
12
The following morning brought clear skies, colour in Ursula’s cheeks, and a carriage filled with three welcome visitors: Isobel, Anthea, and George.
Selina was more relieved than she cared to admit to see Isobel descend from the carriage armed with a stack of Aunt Ursula’s favourite books and a bottle of sherry that she must have clutched in her lap all the way from London. Isobel’s patience and gentleness made her the ideal companion for their crotchety old aunt, and she knew how to soothe Ursula’s discomforts as no one else could.
“Poor Selina,” she said, rising up on tiptoe to kiss Selina fondly. “What a fright you must have had!”
“There is no serious harm done, thank goodness,” said Selina. “I am almost sorry I sent for you. Aunt Ursula is much better this morning.”
Isobel pressed her lips together to hide a smile. “I would not dream of leaving you to sit with our dear aunt while she lies in bed all day. You would surely drive each other to distraction. Oh!” This exclamation as Malcolm stepped forward and bowed in greeting. “Your Grace. I did not expect to see you here.”
“The dear duke has been so helpful to us poor ladies in our hour of need!” effused Lady Aldershot. “I am almost grateful to the potholes in the London road that ruined his carriage yesterday!” She turned to George and Anthea, who had descended the carriage behind Isobel. “Lord and Lady Streatham! What a pleasure to see you both. My dear friend Ursula is so fortunate to have such a loving family.”
George gave a smile some might have called rueful. “There’s nobody better than the Balfour sisters to call on in a crisis, my lady.” His eyes lingered a little too long on Malcolm. “Good morning, Caversham.”
Malcolm extended his hand, and after an almost imperceptible pause, George shook it. “Good morning, Streatham. I trust your journey was not too tiresome.”
“We managed to avoid all those potholes,” George answered drily, with such a light of impudence in his eyes that Selina began to think she had imagined his hesitation.
“Ladies, let me take you upstairs to see your aunt at once,” said Lady Aldershot, ushering Isobel and Anthea into the house. “I am sure you will raise her spirits.”
No Dukes Need Apply (The Impossible Balfours Book 4) Page 10