My American Duchess (29 page)

She taught Trent about the intricacies of hothouses, and he taught her that a woman’s time of the month was no reason to avoid intimacy, after which Merry taught her husband that laughter makes the most awkward of situations more easily borne.

There were moments to treasure: the time when his wife appeared in the study and asked him to spare a few minutes in the greenhouse to consult about new plantings. Or the evening when the bedroom door closed and Merry dropped to her knees and ripped open his placket.

It was mildly humiliating to realize that he wanted more than her body. A man’s worth is measured by his sense of self. Or by his title. Never by what his wife thinks of him. Yet he went to the greenhouse in search of Merry when he came up with a new scheme to make the local gravel pit into a going concern.

Of course, they were friends, which explained it. Trent actually found himself wondering if he’d had a true friend before Merry; he even told her about the uncertain years after he inherited the dukedom, when he had been forced to leave Oxford and fight to return the estate to profitability.

For Merry, as far as Trent could tell, lighthearted behavior came naturally. One day they took a blanket and pony cart and went just far enough away from the house to be
out of sight—which turned out to be in the middle of field of flax blooms, as blue as the sky.

As blue as the violet in his wife’s eyes.

He spread the blanket and devoted himself to worshipping her body. He tried to memorize the sultry curve of her hip, the low rise of her back above her arse, the perfectly shaped bones of her feet.

“Your ankles are as beautiful and fragile as ivory,” he told her, lying on that blanket later in a haze of sun and satisfaction. He was tucking periwinkle-blue flax blossoms between her toes.

“That tickles!” she protested. And then, “Did you know that we think of ivory as coming from an elephant, but the same word refers to the tusks of a walrus? Or a wild boar?”

“I did not,” Trent said. He was having trouble concentrating, because her slim hand had slipped below his waist.

She leaned closer. “If
you
were an elephant, you would have a magnificent tusk.”

That was life with Merry: one moment they were laughing, and then next they were kissing, starved for each other, fumbling, panting with the need to come together.

T
hat evening, Merry lay in her bath staring at her toes. For the last few days, she’d been in the grip of a horribly unsettling feeling.

In the first few weeks of marriage, she’d found herself thinking a lot about the moments when Trent would pull her through the bedchamber door, into his arms, and crush her mouth under his. Frolicking, as Aunt Bess called it, was a brand-new activity and had quickly become her favorite.

Sometimes it was more interesting than the raised beds Boothby was constructing in the kitchen gardens, though it felt like betrayal to admit it, even to herself.

But these days she didn’t think merely about bedding her husband; she thought about
him
.

All the time.

A few days ago, he had taken her down to the kitchen in
the middle of the night. They had sat at the kitchen table and ate rough brown bread that tasted even better than Mrs. Morresey’s crumpets, along with a cheddar cheese that bit the tongue.

She had even drunk some of his ale. It frothed and went up her nose and tasted like liquid bread. But she loved it because he loved it.

That was the problem.

She had the odd feeling that she was falling off a precipice, turning into someone else. A new person.

The next morning she woke up early, though not as early as Trent, and watched him work at the desk in his chamber. She knew perfectly well why he was sitting there, writing in his smalls.

He was waiting for her to wake up. His mouth would soften when he saw she was awake, and he’d push away from the table as if whatever he was working on was irrelevant. He wouldn’t even finish the sentence.

Then he would say in a growling, morning voice, “Good morning, Beautiful.” By the time he got to the bed, she would be already tingling behind her knees.

Testing her hypothesis, she sat up, pushing a mop of curls behind her shoulder.

Sure enough, Trent’s quill dropped, and then he was striding toward her. His body . . .

She could write a thousand lines about the way his stomach rippled when he tore off his smalls, the way he was doing now. About the way he wrapped her up in his heat and passion so that she couldn’t do anything but moan.

A half hour later, he rolled over and ran a finger down her sweaty, undoubtedly red face, and asked her how she was.

As if
that
wasn’t obvious.

“I am very well.” She grinned at him. “You?” She peered
down his body. “Do you realize that I almost never get to see you looking tired? It’s so much smaller in this state.”

“Smaller?” He looked taken aback. As she watched, that part of him surged with life again.

“Do you call it your lance?” she asked. “Aunt Bess made a joke about that once. Or would you prefer poker? I heard that word in the stables.”

Trent snorted, and Merry poked him in the chest. “Young women are never taught about a man’s body, you know.”

“I can teach you,” he said. The look in his eyes was pure wickedness, designed to make a woman weak at the knees. “What would you call these?” He curled his hand around himself. Two parts of himself.

Merry could feel herself turning pink, which was ridiculous, considering what they had just done. But she was discovering that talking could actually be more intimate than intimacy itself, a fact that seemed to surprise Trent as well. “Gooseberries.”

“You must be joking.” Laughter rumbled from his chest. She shook her head. “There might be other words, but the only one I know of is gooseberries.”

“I have a problem with that,” Trent observed. “I am neither green nor pea-sized.”

“But you
are
hairy,” she said with a giggle.

He rolled his eyes.

“What word do you use?” she prompted.

“Testicles, if you want to be precise. Stones. Or bollocks.”

“Bollocks!” she cried. “I knew that was a naughty word, but I could hardly ask someone what it referred to.”

Trent moved his hand. “Penis. Cock. Shaft.” Watching that big male hand circling, pulling at himself, was one of
the most erotic things she’d ever seen. “There’s nothing feminine about the word because there’s nothing feminine about
this
.”

Merry rolled her eyes, and he tipped her onto her back, cupping one of her breasts. “So am I holding some sort of fruit?”

“You will laugh.”

“Probably.”

Making her husband laugh had become one of Merry’s happiest activities. “My governess used to call my bosom the Milky Way.”

That did it; he let out a bellow of laughter. “That’s got to be one of the silliest names for breasts that I’ve ever heard. How about your nipples?”

Merry wrinkled her nose. “It’s an odd word, nip-nip-nipple. Not romantic.”

“If I were the poetic sort, I would write odes to your honeyberries.” He bent his head and dropped a kiss on her.

“Honeyberries? How is that better than gooseberries?”

“You are as sweet as honey, and not green. If I were that sort of man, I could rival your aunt with three hundred rhymed couplets, and bring you bunches of flowers to boot.”

The idea made her feel dizzy, though not because she wanted flowers or a poem or anything like that.

What she was thinking—

She couldn’t be thinking that again.

But she was.

Love was like canary wine: it fizzed in her veins and made the world a sweeter place. With a grimace she threw an arm over her eyes.

“Merry?”

She felt Trent drop another kiss on the curve of her
breast, but for the moment she just concentrated on keeping those three words from bursting out of her mouth. He didn’t want to hear them.
She
didn’t want to hear them.

She’d said them before, too many times. She’d cheapened them with overuse, because she hadn’t even understood the emotion.

He kissed her lips this time. “Are you all right, Merry mine?”

Trent called her that sometimes. Because he was possessive. Because she was
his
, mind and body and soul.

Merry actually groaned, realizing what she’d just said to herself. Her eyes popped open. “Cedric thought I was an easy woman because I had been betrothed so many times.”

“Why are you thinking about him?” There was an edge to Trent’s voice that she found thrilling. Her duke disliked thinking about any of her suitors; every time Mr. Kestril sidled over to her, Trent’s jaw would tighten.

“I wasn’t thinking about Cedric. I was wondering whether you thought I was a strumpet for the same reason.”

“Absolutely not.”

His answer was prompt and should have satisfied, but it didn’t. “I don’t mean in terms of bedding,” she said, struggling to find the right words. Finally, she just blurted out the truth. “I have told three different men that I was in love. Do you think that I misled myself? That I never was in love at all?”

She knew the answer. She had had no idea what love was . . . until now.

“You are an emotional person,” Trent said, running his finger down her nose. “I don’t think you misled yourself any more than other humans who run about making rash promises.”

Merry sat up, pulling the sheet up around her because she wasn’t as comfortable unclothed as Trent was; he was
leaning back against the headboard, naked as the day he was born. “Love is a fickle emotion,” he said. “Here today, gone tomorrow. You just had the bad luck to discover that truth while in the public eye.”

“I don’t entirely agree,” Merry said, feeling her way through it. “Mothers love their children. My father loved me. Aunt Bess and Uncle Thaddeus love me.
I’m
the fickle one.”

“You’re talking about a different emotion than romantic love.”

“I don’t see why the distinction is relevant.”

“When a man tells a woman ‘I love you,’ he generally wants something from her. Most of those exchanges lead to bed, which means they’re really about desire, not love.”

Merry bit her lip. “You think desire is the only emotion between a man and woman?”

“No, not at all. Look at us.” His grin eased the bleakness in her heart. “You’re my friend, Merry. Bloody hell, I never imagined anything like it. You’re my friend
and
you make me never want to leave this bed.” His voice dropped with the last few words, and then he pulled down her sheet.

She forgot what they were talking about.

But it came up again the next night.

Trent had asked about her father at dinner, and she had come up with story after story about her father’s quirky brilliance as an inventor and politician.

Trent said all the right things in response, but Merry had been making a study of her husband. Something changed when she told him about the very prim lady—Merry’s mother—who had arrived from England and won her father’s heart.

Trent’s shoulders had gone stiff, and later that evening, for the first time since they married, he didn’t follow her out of the drawing room and up the stairs.

Instead, he gave her a kiss and said that he had work to do. Ten o’clock came and went; the house became still and quiet.

Finally, she climbed out of bed, pulled on a wrapper, and headed down the stairs, her bare toes curling against the silky wood of the great staircase.

She expected to see Trent at one of the three big tables in his study, but instead he was in a sofa at the far end of the room, staring at embers burning down in the fireplace. She padded over to him and sat down.

He wasn’t holding papers, a book, or even a drink. Merry slid closer and rubbed her head against his shoulder. “Hello,” she said softly.

Trent put an arm around her, and gave her a lopsided grin. “You needn’t have come down; I was on my way to bed.”

“Every once in a while, a lady can ‘fetch’ a man,” she said, stretching up to kiss his chin.

He pulled her into his lap, but he didn’t kiss her, just held her and put his chin on her head.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Your father.”

“I wish you had known him. You are very similar.”

“I hardly think so.”

She leaned back against his arm so that she could see his face. “You are. All the investments you’ve made and the way you’ve made your estate profitable? My father would have done that as well.”

“As would any man of sense.”

“Any man with the capability, and those are far and few between. I know that you fought in the House of Lords for the Quaker anti-slavery bill, because Cedric told me so, and Father would have done that. What’s more, you built the wing on that charity hospital.”

“Cedric’s project, not mine.”

“Without your money—the money you
made
, not inherited—that wing wouldn’t exist.” She sounded proud, because she was proud.

More and more Merry realized that she could never have been truly happy with someone like Cedric, a man who inherited some money and married into more. She wouldn’t have developed the deep respect that she felt for Trent.

“I don’t agree, but it’s not relevant. I was comparing your father to mine.”

“Your father might well have been a different man had he been tested,” Merry suggested. “My father
had
to succeed, as did you.”

“I was actually thinking about the way your father wooed your mother.”

She smiled, leaning back against his chest. “He was a bit of a madman, wasn’t he?”

“Love poems—”

“All written by Bess, may I point out. He didn’t confess that to my mother for over a year.”

“Flowers, jewelry, even a serenade. It makes me wish for your sake that I was a different man.”

“Well, excuse me, if I don’t agree with you,” Merry said, laughing. “I am happy with you just as you are. A different man might not have your lance.”

Trent groaned at her jest, but then he lapsed into silence again.

He was in a bloody bad mood and he should probably just take his wife up to bed.

“Or your gooseberries,” Merry added, with a mischievous twinkle.

“Listening to your uncle’s stories, I felt as if you were cheated.”

“Because no one has recited poetry that was actually
written by his sister-in-law? Or from Shakespeare, pretending the sentiments were his? Gave me a ring made from his own hair?”

He winced. “I see your point.”

“Three men wooed me. Diamonds have so little meaning that Cedric didn’t even bother to buy me one.” They had tacitly agreed to leave the late duchess’s diamond ring in the safe in Trent’s study; it was snarled in too many emotions for Merry to wear it.

His wife didn’t sound bitter, but all the same . . . Didn’t every woman want those things—not to mention a proper marriage proposal? Merry hadn’t even known whom she was marrying. Sometimes he was haunted by that in the middle of the night.

“I suppose that’s one reason why we are such good friends,” he said. “We understand the emptiness of those gestures.”

He had the uneasy feeling that he was trying to reassure himself.

“I know why I dislike gifts of poetry and jewelry,” Merry said, “but why do you?”

Trent’s hand slid down the curve of her side. “I brought flowers to my mother once,” he said, the memory coming from nowhere.

“How old were you?”

“Around six or seven.” He hadn’t thought about that afternoon in years. He’d been old enough to suspect that his mother didn’t care for him, young enough to feel hopeful that he could change her mind.

“What happened?” Merry asked.

“Nothing much. I brought them to her chamber.”

“She wasn’t pleased by them?”

“I suppose she was. She was fond of roses and I had carefully chosen all the fattest ones I could find.”

She frowned. “Something happened.”

An acid taste came into his mouth. He’d been so young.

“I asked a maid to tie a ribbon around the posy,” he said, turning back to Merry, wanting a distraction. He watched his fingers run over the dip of her waist so that he didn’t meet her sympathetic eyes. “After which, I went to my mother’s room.”

“Oh dear! I can imagine several scenarios that could go wrong after that sentence. We’ll have to put a lock on our door once we have children.”

“It wasn’t as bad as that.”

She interlaced her fingers with his and brought his hand to her mouth for a kiss.