Any Duchess Will Do (12 page)

Pauline tried moving away from him but encountered the same resistance. Keeping one eye on the curious crowd, she slanted a look at the place where his sleeve met her side.

“Oh, no.”

The gown had been altered so hastily, the seamstresses must have missed a gap in the seam. When he’d steadied her just now, his cuff button snagged a loose thread. It was thoroughly tangled. No telling how many times it had twisted around.

“I’ll get loose,” he said smoothly, putting a punch cup in her free hand and filling it, just to give them both something to do. “Never fear. I’ve made a career of avoiding entanglements with women.”

He tried again, grasping his sleeve with his free hand and giving it a firm yank. He didn’t manage to free himself, but Pauline sensed the treacherous pop of a stitch giving way. Her punch sloshed from the silver cup back into the bowl.

“Don’t.” She clutched his arm, holding it still. “You’ll rip the whole seam. My gown will fall apart.”

He turned to her then, and gave her an intense, thoughtful look.

No.
He wouldn’t actually do it.

Pauline glanced around the ballroom. She and the duke had been standing here in quiet, linked-arm conversation for a solid minute now, and people were noticing. Everyone was watching them—especially the ladies. Some looked envious, as though they wished to be the woman on Griff’s arm. Yet more of them wore possessive expressions—as though they’d once been the woman in his bed.

No matter which group they belonged to, she was certain of one thing. They’d love nothing more than to see her brought low.

She knew humiliation was the aim of the evening, but that would be . . .

“You
wouldn’t
,” she said.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “When I rip a woman’s clothes off, I almost always prefer to do it in private.” He tilted his head toward a set of doors across the ballroom. “We’ll make for the gardens and sort this out.”

Arm linked tight with Pauline’s, he began leading her back across the room they’d just traversed. However, this time they couldn’t make their way unimpeded. Other guests kept slowing their progress, drawing the duke aside for a word of greeting or two.

Or three or four or five.

Pauline limited herself to monosyllabic answers and polite, shy smiles, not wanting to prolong conversation. What was most maddening, the less she spoke or interacted, the more favorably the ladies and gentlemen seemed to respond.

“You really must cease that,” Griff said, drawing her away from a nattering pair of sisters.

“Cease what?”

“Being demure.”

“I’m just trying to be brief,” she replied.

“Yes, but that’s where you’ve gone wrong. There’s nothing like silence to ingratiate yourself with self-important people. It leaves them so much space to discuss themselves.”

“Halford!” A ruddy-faced gentleman appeared out of nowhere, stopping them in their tracks.

Good heavens. How was it possible they’d made so little progress? Those doors to the garden were still some twenty yards away.

The man pumped Griff’s free arm vigorously. “Haven’t seen you for ages, old devil. Rumor had it you’d finally succumbed to the pox.” He shot a toothy smile in Pauline’s direction. “Who’s this?”

“Miss Simms, of Sussex. She’s in Town as my mother’s guest. Miss Simms, this is Mr. Frederick Martin.”

The gentleman bowed and gave Griff a conspiratorial wink. “Rather possessive of her, aren’t you?”

“She’s new in London. Just getting her feet.”

In the corner, the small orchestra struck up the first strains of a waltz.

“Surely you’ll allow me to steal her for one dance.” Martin extended a white-gloved hand and bowed over it. “Miss Simms, may I have the pleasure?”

Panic jumped in Pauline’s chest. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Halford won’t mind. When it comes to the ladies, he’s always generous.”

Pauline wasn’t sure what the man meant by that remark, but she was certain she didn’t like it.

“She’s not dancing with you.” The duke gave a heavy sigh. He sounded as though even he couldn’t believe the words he was about to speak. “She’s promised this dance to me.”

With that, he pulled her away from Mr. Frederick Martin and led her onto the dance floor.

Pauline tried not to let fear show on her face. “What? Wait. I don’t even know how to—”

“Just follow my lead. It’s the only way to make a quick escape.”

They waltzed their way around the ballroom. Because of the way his sleeve was caught on her gown, Griff had to hold his arm jutting out like a chicken wing. Without his hand on her back, he couldn’t lead her properly. Pauline was left to chase him across the dance floor in tiny, tiptoeing steps.

At last they reached the doors to the garden.

“I’ve never seen that waltz before,” an elderly matron remarked.

“A Hungarian variation, madam.” He held open the door for Pauline. “All the rage in Vienna.”

She couldn’t stop giggling as they stumbled into the garden. “That was resourceful. I’ll give you that.”

“Now give me my freedom,” he said. “Get me loose.”

“You act as though this is my fault. It’s your button. And it only snagged because you were too protective. If you’d allowed me to stumble a bit, we could have been on our way home by now.”

She reached between them with her free arm, but quickly realized the situation could only be adequately inspected if her fingers were bare.

She thrust her hand out to him. “My glove. Help me off with it.”

He loosed the ribbon garter at her elbow first, then set to work on the dozen tiny buttons stretching from her elbow to her wrist. It had taken ten minutes of struggling with fingers and teeth to close them earlier that evening.

He had them undone in ten seconds.

She lifted a brow. “Something tells me you’ve done this before.”

“A time or two.”

Or a thousand, she supposed.

He took her wrist, lifted her hand to his mouth, and caught the middle finger of her glove with his teeth. Then he slowly pulled.

The motion was wickedly sensual. Entrancing, even. When her hand slid free, she had no idea what to do with it.

“Oh. Yes.” She felt between them, exploring the place where his button met her bodice seam. It seemed hopelessly twisted, by touch. Her attempts to make a visual inspection were thwarted—her artificially inflated bosom kept getting in the way.

“I could see it better if not for this ridiculous corset,” she said.

“I’m good at removing those, too.”

Pauline threw him a chastening look but he didn’t catch it. He was too busy glazing her breasts with his heated stare.

“Ahem.”

“Sorry. I’m a man. We get distracted.”

She flushed, pleased despite all her attempts not to be. Men might be distractible by nature, but they were hardly ever distracted by her.

“Fortunately,” she said, “I still have a few powers of concentration left. You should remove your coat. Then you’d have both hands free. And if we still can’t work the button loose, I can wait here while you go in search of scissors or a blade.”

“I knew you were clever.”

He tried shrugging his free arm out of his coat but made little progress. It was so tightly fitted, and his arms weren’t lean.

“I need my valet for this.”

“Let me play valet. I am a servant, after all.”

He extended his wrist to her. “Hold the cuff.”

She obeyed, and they began their second absurd dance of the evening: The duke flailing his arm while she attempted to hold the sleeve steady—and make sure that his other cuff didn’t rip free and destroy her bodice. Every time he tugged on his sleeve, he just pulled Pauline forward. They ended up pivoting in a tight, useless circle. If their first waltz was a Hungarian variation, this one must hail from the moon.

He growled. “I should see about switching to a substandard tailor.”

“Perhaps if I tried to work it loose this way.”

Turning to face him as best she could, she slid her hand under his lapel, skimming over the silk front of his waistcoat and the firm wall of muscle beneath. Her heart stuttered when she brushed something that felt distressingly nipplelike—but she proceeded undaunted, working her hand up to his shoulder in an attempt to cleave the garment from his body.

“Lift your arm a bit.”

He flinched, as if ticklish.

“Be still. I’m good at this, remember?” By twisting her arm and wriggling her fingers, she managed to ease her fingers higher. “No one can reach as high as I can.”

“Good God, Simms. My arm is not a foal to be birthed.”

“Almost there.” She slid her fingers over the crest of his shoulder and partway along his sleeve.

“Simms.”

She looked up. They were standing mere inches apart. His lips were very, very close to hers.

Her fingers involuntarily flexed, digging into his biceps. He winced.

“Oh.” She sucked in her breath, apologetic. “I’m so sorry. I’d forgotten your wound.”

“It’s not my arm, Simms. It’s everything. We’re alone in the garden while a ball goes on. I can’t stop staring at your breasts, and your hand is . . . violating my topcoat. It is time to face hard truths. As attempts at avoiding entanglement go, this one isn’t working. At all.”

“But . . . but it could be worse.”

“It’s hard to see how.”

She didn’t know what made her say it. The words just came from her lips. “You could be kissing me.”

Chapter Ten

“K
issing
you,” Griff echoed. He tried to make it sound as though the words were some outlandish sentiment spoken in a foreign, unfamiliar tongue—and not the exact same thought he’d been harboring.

She was so close and so warm. They were entangled, and her deft, impertinent hands were all over him—reminding him just how long it had been since he’d been touched, stroked, fussed over. Given a damn about.

The hell of it was, none of her attentions were soothing in the least. Only provoking, arousing. Inflaming the hurt not only in his slashed arm, but in those raw, hollowed-out chambers of his heart.

“You’re right,” he told her. “Kissing is the one thing that would undoubtedly make this moment worse.”

“Oh, Lord.” She leaned forward until her brow met his chest. Then she lifted her head slightly. Then let it fall forward again. After a few more repetitions, he understood the meaning behind this strange gesture.

His chest was the brick wall, and she was bashing her head against it.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

“This is terrible,” she moaned. “I can’t fail at this, too. I just can’t. My life before this was bad enough. What kind of hapless, hopeless person fails at failing?”

“I’m not following you.”

She snuffled a little, using his pocket square to wipe her nose—without actually easing it from his pocket.

“At home,” she said, “my sister and I, we’re always those Simms girls who
mean
well. They say that because we can’t
do
anything right.”

Her breasts were now pressed against his chest, soft and springy. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Didn’t help.

“I’m no stranger to humiliation,” she went on. “The day you came into the Bull and Blossom, I’d been having the worst morning of my life. Everything went wrong. And I agreed to come to London with you because this was my chance. Surely, I thought, social disaster is the
one
thing I can do right. I’m expert at it.” Her voice tweaked. “But just look at this. I can’t even succeed at failure.”

She wriggled the hand trapped deep in his sleeve. Those breasts trapped against his chest now shimmied in a little dance.

He took a deep breath. He had to take control of this situation, fast—or he would lose his grip entirely. “Listen, Simms. Let’s just remain calm.”

He sent a mental message downward:
That goes for you, too.

“First, extricate your hand from my sleeve.”

She obeyed, and he suffered all the same torture in reverse as her fingers dragged and wrestled over his shoulder, then his chest. But once it was done, he could step back, put some distance between them. They were only tangled in one place.

He nodded toward a nearby bench. “Now sit. Give me a moment, and I’ll have this sorted.”

He worked his own gloves free, then set about exploring the connection between his sleeve and her side. He found the place where his button had snagged. By now the cursed thing had twisted several times. He turned it this way and that, looking for the slack, resisting the urge to rush. Haste would only make it worse. This was a task that required patience.

Patience, and extreme fortitude.

God, what she did to him. Her brandy-colored hair made him yearn for a drink. He breathed deeply instead. A mistake. She smelled of French-milled soap and dusting powder and crisp, new linen. Now he wanted, quite desperately, to taste her bare skin. To run his tongue down that delicate slope of her neck, all the way to the graceful curve of her shoulder.

Then lower . . .

Lower, lower, lower.

“I had a dozen ways to be a disaster this evening,” she said softly. “I’d thought them all out.”

“Such as . . . ?”

“Eating far more than is ladylike, to start. Gentlemen despise indulgence in a lady.”

This was news to Griff. “We do?”

“Of course you do.” She gave him an incredulous look. “Secondly, I was going to express far too many opinions. A lady never airs her opinions.”

“That can’t be one of my mother’s lessons. That woman never formed an opinion she didn’t share.”

“I didn’t learn it from your mother. I read it in a book.” Her voice took on an affected tone. “ ‘Save for unsightly mustaches, there are few things gentlemen find less appealing in a lady than a political opinion.’ Well, I couldn’t grow any whiskers. But I’m prepared to make six outrageous statements about the Corn Laws.”

“The Corn Laws?” He couldn’t help but laugh.

“You don’t think it improper?”

“I think you’re greatly overestimating a man’s ability to heed conversation about the Corn Laws while confronted with a sight like this.”

He let his gaze dip to her bosom, where it had been wanting to stray all night. Two soft, pale mounds pressed to the border of her neckline. Like twin pillows. His attention bounced back and forth between them.

“It’s all right,” she said in a playful whisper. “I can’t stop looking at them either. This corset is a feat of engineering.”

“I think it’s sorcery.”

“You’re right about the illusion part. Here.” She took his hand and brought it to her breast.

Griff froze, lust rocketing through him.

“There’s cotton batting in the corset,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?”

She kept her hand over his, molding his fingers around the ample swell of fabric and the soft flesh beneath.

He swallowed hard. “Yes. I can feel it.”

He could also feel
her
. Warm and supple and enticing.

“See? It’s not real. So there’s another strike against me.” She adopted that strange tone of voice again. “A young lady who employs artifice to catch a gentleman’s eye will
never
secure his admiration.”

With profound reluctance, he let his hand slip from her breast. “Believe me. Right now, I only wish you could decrease my admiration. My admiration is currently rather . . . large.”

She looked him in the eye and blurted out, “I’m not a virgin.”

Damn. Just like that, he went fully erect, with a swiftness that rivaled swordplay. Upon reflection, he wasn’t sure he could have drawn an actual blade that quickly. Were he wearing a metal codpiece, his cock would have met it with an audible clang.

“That won’t help,” he told her. “What makes you think that will help? I’m not a virgin, either.”

“I didn’t think you were, but—”

“But nothing. I was hoping to hear something like, ‘I have a creeping skin disease.’ Or, ‘I hoot like a barn owl when I reach orgasm.’ Those would be deterrents. I’m not sure the second is strong enough, actually. Curiosity might win out over trepidation.”

“But noblemen don’t want a woman who’s lost her virtue. Mrs. Worthington was very clear.”

“Who is this rabidly ill-informed person you keep quoting? Mrs. Who-ington?”

“She wrote an etiquette book. Haven’t you heard of it?
Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom for Young Ladies.
That book is how I know exactly what a proper young lady should—and shouldn’t—do.”

“Did my mother give you that?” The title sounded vaguely familiar, but he didn’t think such a book could be from his library.

“No, no. I’ve been reading it for years. There are copies of it all over Spindle Cove. Miss Finch—she’s Lady Rycliff now—wanted to remove every copy from circulation. There are hundreds of them in the village, just heaped everywhere.”

Griff frowned, remembering that first afternoon in the village. “Right. I remember it now. They had stacks of them. And they were ripping them apart to make tea trays.”

She nodded. “They try to find uses for them. It used to be powder cartridges for the militia, but since the war’s over, they’ve moved on to tea trays.”

The logic in this eluded Griff, but he didn’t want to interrupt.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “a few years ago I took a copy home from the tavern. I knew they wouldn’t miss it, and I’d never had a proper book of my own before. I wanted to see what it was that had the ladies so angry. A good half of the book
is
twaddle, I’ll grant them. But the rest is just practical advice. Recipes for orange flower water. How to write invitations to parties and sew your own silk gloves. Suggestions for polite dinner conversation. Reading that book was like peering through a window onto a different world, until . . .” She dropped her gaze. “ . . . until my father slammed it shut.”

“Your father?”

“He found the book. I caught him staring at it. He can’t read much, you know. But still, he stared at that title for the longest time. He didn’t have to read the words to understand what it meant. It meant I wanted something more.”

Reaching up, she plucked a low-hanging leaf and twirled it between her fingertips. “All my life, he’d made it no secret that he was disappointed in me. He’d wanted a boy to help with the farm, and he never hid the fact that he viewed me as useless. But when he found that book . . . For the first time, he was seeing it went both ways. That I might not be happy with the life he’d given me. Oh, it made him so angry.”

Griff was becoming rather furious himself. Not with her. Never her.

“What did he do to you?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“Tell me.”

“He picked up that book in one hand.” She held the leaf in her fingertips and regarded it. “Said, ‘That’s not for you, girl.’ And then he struck me with it, right across the face.”

I’ll kill him.

The intent roared to life in Griff’s chest before his mind could even conceive the words. He was harboring elaborate fantasies of finding a horse and a blade, then haring down to Sussex to have a very short exchange with Amos Simms. One that began with “You rat-faced bastard” and ended with blood.

He was calculating just how long it would take, and how much daylight he’d have when he arrived. Whether he’d permit the man to beg for mercy, or skip straight to—

“I was nineteen years old,” she said.

He closed his eyes and breathed deep, forcing himself to abandon his thoughts of the far-off villain who deserved to be run through. He should concentrate on the woman who needed him, here and now.

“Nineteen,” she repeated. “Already a woman grown. I helped with the farm and earned wages for the family. And he struck me across the face like a child, just for wanting to improve myself. To learn.” She let the leaf twirl to the ground. “Then he threw the book in the fire.”

Griff cursed, sliding closer on the bench. He’d given up on disentangling his button for the moment. He didn’t give a damn about the people inside, what they might think or conclude. For now, his only goal in this garden—in this life, perhaps—was to guard her. And to make her
feel
safe, which he suspected would be the more difficult task. Too many people had failed her that way.

“It didn’t matter.” Her chin lifted bravely. “I got another copy. And that time, I hid it somewhere else. When that book disappeared, I got another. Over and over again, until I found the way to outsmart him for good.”

“What was that?”

A little smile curved her lips. “I learnt it by heart. Page by page, cover to cover. I committed the entire thing to memory. He couldn’t beat that out of me, now could he?”

With a single fingertip, he tilted her face to his. Her eyes sparkled with the reflected torchlight. Brave and beautiful.

He marveled at the wild kaleidoscope of emotions she inspired in him. Violence, admiration, skin-scorching desire. The tenderness welling in his heart was almost too much to bear. No woman made him feel these things. Not all of them at once.

He cupped her chin in his hand and stroked the lovely cheek that had received such vile treatment. “You are never going back to that man again.”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m going to have my very own circulating library, stocked with every book a proper young lady should never read.” She sent a look toward the house. “Just as soon as I can get back into that ballroom and earn it.”

He studied her delicate profile, amazed by the strength and determination writ there. She couldn’t know how remarkable she was.

Perhaps . . .

Oh, damn. Perhaps he ought to tell her. Gather her close, turn her face to his. Give her the truth.

You’re lovely. You’re clever. You’re turning me inside out, and I don’t like it. I don’t want to care for you. I’ve suffered enough over females who crawled inside my heart and deserted it after one week.
But if I don’t say these words right now, I’m the lowest of the low. So here it is. You’re remarkable.

“Your stickpin,” she said.

“What?” His mind reeled. It was as if wild horses had been dragging his thoughts to Blitherington, Clodpateshire—and they’d stopped just shy of a dizzying cliff.

“Your stickpin.” She stared hopefully at the diamond stud embedded in his cravat. “It’s the answer. We can use it to cut the threads.”

Right. She was too clever by half.

Her fingers flew to his neck cloth and she started tugging at the diamond stud. “How does it come apart?”

“There’s a clasp.” He dug under the folds of his cravat to find it. “Here. I’ll hold the bottom and you take the top.”