Heiress Without a Cause (21 page)

Josephine looked at the duke, frowned, and looked back at her charge. “I should not leave you alone.”

Madeleine set her jaw. “I will be safe here for the two minutes it takes to deposit the bouquet. You shan’t take advantage, Ferguson?”

He tried to look appropriately somber as he gave Josephine his assurances. Madeleine thought he failed miserably, but the maid left them alone, her smile undermining her admonishment for Madeleine to behave herself.

As soon as she was gone, Madeleine ignored her advice. “Did you come in a curricle or a closed coach?”

“A curricle, of course. If I had any hope of seeing you without a chaperone, it had to be an open carriage.”

“Then shall we leave at once?” Madeleine asked. He raised an eyebrow at this; it was painfully obvious that she was evading her maid. However, he did as she requested, escorting her out the door and to the curricle before Josephine returned.

Luckily, Chilton was not aware that Madeleine required a chaperone. The Stauntons would wish to maintain the appearance of normalcy, after all, and so they could not take the butler into their confidence. He might have thought it unusual for Madeleine to leave with the duke — but only because men so rarely called for her, not because an afternoon ride in an open carriage was improper. Perhaps comparing her old life to a prison was unfair — it was remarkably easy to escape, after all.

Ferguson handed her up into his curricle, a smart, well-proportioned two-seater hitched to a pair of perfectly matched blacks. He tucked a blanket around her skirts to protect them from the dirt of the London streets, then settled in on her left. Releasing the brake and taking the reins from the waiting footman, he urged the horses forward at a smart pace toward Piccadilly, which would lead them to Hyde Park’s nearest gate.

When they turned the corner, safely away from anyone sitting in one of Salford House’s windows, Ferguson said, “I did not expect to win your attention so easily. I was prepared for you to give me another setdown.”

She couldn’t look directly in his eyes, but she felt an edge to his voice despite the lightness of his tone. “I do not wish to end our acquaintance, Ferguson.”

He did steal a look at her then, necessarily brief as he navigated the curricle through the delivery wagons, coaches, horses, and darting pedestrians thronging the midday street. “So you can admit that we have something between us that should not be lost?”

She hesitated. It had taken her ten years to finally, temporarily pursue her passion for the stage, and it felt like she had only known Ferguson for ten minutes in comparison to the decade that had gone before. She needed to know the risks and understand her heart before deciding. The thought of declaring some half-formed sentiments of how much she liked Ferguson made last night’s panic rise again. She could not say she wanted to be his duchess, but she couldn’t say goodbye to him either.

She took the coward’s path. It was the only one she could choose without fainting. “Must we talk of this now? Unless you have changed your mind, we need not part ways until I am done with the theatre and your sisters have made appropriate matches.”

“What I do not understand,” he said, ignoring her obvious prevarication, “is how you could turn down my offer so quickly. I’m not such an ogre as the ton makes me out to be, after all.”

“I’ve never thought that,” she said with a laugh. “You are an arrogant scoundrel, not an ogre.”

He smiled, a sad sort of grin that pulled at her heart. “You’re the first, Mad. How could I not want to marry the one woman who sees beyond my reputation?”

She turned away, not willing to let his face move her. “You will find another. You’ve only been in London a month. In another season or two, you will discover that there are many women who are better suited to be your duchess.”

“People do not change, no matter how long I stay away. The women are all featherbrained beauties without an ounce of sense, shrill harpies who would seek to reform me, or dead bores whom I would wish to abandon within a fortnight. I’ve met hundreds of women in London, and you are the only one who doesn’t fit into one of those categories.”

“Amelia isn’t a featherbrained beauty,” Madeleine said, more for the sake of argument than anything else.

“I suspect she is a shrill harpy when she doesn’t get her way.”

Madeleine laughed despite herself. “Still, you are surely expected to marry an heiress with better connections than mine.”

“Your excuses don’t wash, Mad,” he snapped, finally sounding frustrated. “I’ve more income than I can ever spend and your connections are impeccable. I even checked
Burke’s
this morning to see if that was your reason — your mother and Augusta are descended from William the bloody Conqueror, not a swineherd. And a French marquis is good enough for me, even if he is dead and cannot give you a dowry.”

It was a callous thing to say. Allowances could be made for his temper, but it didn’t stop her from retorting, “You shouldn’t place too much weight on
Burke’s
. Your bloodlines are perfect too, and yet your father was a notorious autocrat and your brothers were unstable.”

He stiffened and she immediately regretted her words. “Is that why you said no? Because my brother shot my father and killed himself?”

Madeleine gasped. “Is that rumor true? I am very sorry, Ferguson. I should have thought before I spoke.”

“No need to apologize. I am not insulted by the truth. But is that why you won’t marry me?”

“No,” she said, snatching at the excuse closest to the surface. “I won’t marry you because I’ve no desire to trap myself into being a duchess.”

He laughed, louder than normal, but at least his stiffness subsided. “What woman doesn’t want to be a duchess?”

They turned into Hyde Park, making for the driving path along Rotten Row. It was too early for the crush of carriages that would arrive later in the afternoon, but they should not have gone somewhere so public — it would draw attention their relationship, which Madeleine did not want. But if the choice was between being examined by the grandes dames and sitting at home with the Stauntons, she knew where she preferred to be.

Then again, with Ferguson’s increasingly persistent questions, perhaps she should have stayed locked in her room. “You do not want to be a duke. Why do you assume I would want to be a duchess?”

“Fair enough. I should remind you, though, that being a duchess would be far more exciting than staying on as Salford’s dependent.”

“Who says I must stay on in Alex’s household forever?” she asked, bristling despite the inevitability of that choice. “If I do not marry you, it does not mean I cannot marry someone else.”

He colored slightly, and she congratulated herself on winning the point. But then his voice dropped as he said, “If you do marry another, you might wish it over — I doubt any man could equal the pleasure I gave you last night.”

He sounded so smug that she wanted to swat him with her reticule. But they were in public, so she plastered her best false smile on her face. “Someone must have drawn all those engravings I’ve seen. It may be I just need to move to Italy? Or the Orient?”

She won another point, watching his cocky smirk turn into a scowl. “You’ll move nowhere until we’ve settled what’s between us, Mad.”

She had awoken the autocrat within, and she shivered at the dark note of promise in his voice. Still, she held her chin up, pretending not to be affected by the way his sideways gaze raked across her. “And you wonder why I would not wish to be duchess. Why should I marry an all-powerful duke who has demonstrated such little regard for his family?”

He turned off Rotten Row abruptly, following a smaller lane toward the Serpentine. He didn’t say a word, and while his silence didn’t frighten her, Madeleine had enough sense not to provoke him further. While he kept his hands loose on the reins, his shoulders were tense, and he was taut with something he could barely keep in check.

Finally he pulled them to a halt near a small copse of trees. They were still in plain view if anyone happened across them, but not noticeable from the more frequently used paths. Setting the brake, he turned to her — and she nearly recoiled from the blaze of anger in his blue eyes.

“Is that why you won’t have me? Because I am turning into my father?”

“You aren’t turning into your father,” she said, trying to soothe him. “But you must understand how I feel about family. My parents sent me away and stayed in France because they felt they had a duty to their country and their estate. Aunt Augusta and Alex have made it clear that they will also place duty over my happiness if my acting threatens our family. In our class, everything — duty, money, honor, status — trumps love. And I am not prepared to love a duke. Even if you love me, your duties will eventually win.”

“No,” he said flatly. “Come with me to Scotland. My managers can oversee the duchy, and we can be as free as we please in the Highlands.”

She knew that what she wanted was a contradiction even as she said it, but she couldn’t stop herself. “You would respect yourself less for leaving your responsibilities again. And if you didn’t, I would respect you less, after the pain it caused your sisters before. Perhaps your duty didn’t trump your love for them, but something did.”

He laughed harshly. “You can’t have it both ways, Mad. The only way I can meet this fantasy of yours is if you trust that I can be the duke I am supposed to be without ever leaving you. But it’s clear you won’t be satisfied with one if I cannot provide the other.”

“I’m sorry, Ferguson,” she said. “It may be possible — but it seems just as likely you will either become an autocrat or run away again.”

His voice turned to chipped ice. “When I was ten, my mother died. I believe my father loved her — I saw him kiss her whenever he could get away with it. I never understood why he turned so cold after she died, why he sent Ellie and me away, why he could never bear to look at me. I thought I must have done something wrong, upset him somehow.”

She made a soft sound of distress, but he ignored her. “Now I know how much it must have pained him to see us, when we looked so much like her. I can’t forgive him for leaving us — he should have been stronger, should have loved us despite his loss. And I did the same thing to my sisters, leaving them to preserve myself. It’s something I can’t forgive, and I can’t expect you to either. But if I lost you, Mad...”

His voice trailed off. She felt tears gathering in her eyes — not at the thought of her future with or without Ferguson, but of the little boy he must have been, just as confused as she was when she lost her parents.

“If I lost you, I would become the man he was. So I can’t let you go,” he said, force and despair mingling in his voice — a tone she never thought to hear from him. “I will never run away from you, unless you beg me to. And the only way I will turn into an autocrat is if you disappear from my life.”

She stared at him in shock, her gorgeous green eyes lit up by a sunbeam and shining with unshed tears. He should have been more careful, shouldn’t have been so open. She had been a virgin the night before, and he realized too late that she did not know how to cope with the depth of his demands. Hell, even the most experienced Cyprian would have been scared off by how much he claimed to need her.

He clamped his lips shut. He vowed he would not make the moment any worse. After all, he had his answer now — she was afraid of who he might become, and he had as good as confirmed that he was already on that path.

So even though she didn’t give him the answer he wanted, he was supremely relieved when she finally spoke. “I cannot trust you yet,” she said, the misery in her voice mollifying just a bit of his wounded pride. “But I would not want to lose you either.”

She hadn’t accepted his proposal — but at least she had not written him off as a lunatic after his last speech. He could live with her answer. And he would use every moment she gave him to win her over.

He raised her gloved hand to his lips, brushing a kiss across her knuckles. He wanted to strip the glove off her hand, kiss each finger with the attention it deserved, nuzzle her wrist before moving up her arm to claim her mouth. But they were still in Hyde Park, and he was with Madeleine, not Marguerite.

So he dropped her hand and said, “I hope you shall trust me someday, and I will prove to you that I am worthy of it. At least we have two more weeks at the theatre — it would kill me to only see you at rout-parties and musicales.”

He could surely convince her by the time the play ended. With her passion and his desire to give her pleasure, he did not think she could outlast his efforts to seduce her. But she sighed at his words. “We cannot be alone after the theatre anymore. Alex caught me when I returned to Salford House last night, and he is furious at us.”

She shared what had happened in a quick, nearly toneless monologue, as though she could not stand to tell him without stripping the emotion out first. He could not imagine going straight from their bed to an inquisition in front of her relatives. When she finished the retelling, he did not know who he wished to skewer first — Amelia for betraying her, Augusta for planning to exile her to Bermuda, or Salford for threatening to force her into marriage.

“I told you Amelia was a harpy,” he said when she finished.

“She did what she thought best. I cannot fault her intentions, even if her actions lacked finesse.”

He knew better than to pursue that thread — even if she felt betrayed by her cousin, she would not tolerate someone else’s criticism. He also decided to leave the subject of Salford alone. It wasn’t a nice thought, but the knowledge that Salford might force an engagement suited Ferguson’s desires even if he preferred Madeleine’s consent.

Instead, he said, “We have to ensure that you are not forced to move to Bermuda. It would be harder for me to court you there, after all.”

She grinned, and he was glad to see she could still be amused. “Moving to Bermuda may have its benefits.”

He laughed. “If Bermuda is good enough for Lady Mad, it is good enough for me. Still, I believe we can survive the next two weeks without incident. Unless you decided to end the play early?”