Never Deceive a Duke (22 page)

“Heavens,” said Kemble. “Do you think the duchess was addicted?”

Laudrey shook his head. “Who’s to say?” he answered. “A hundred babes a month die up in Middlesex parish alone from ingesting too much black drop—no one really admits that, of course. But that’s what it is. Soothe your troubles—or someone else’s—with a touch of opiate.”

Kemble looked at him curiously. “What, precisely, are you saying, Mr. Laudrey? Was Dr. Osborne overprescribing his tonics?”

“No more so than any of his kind,” the justice admitted. “We took an account of his medicine chest, of course. A bottle of tincture of opium was found to be missing, but then his mother remembered knocking something off the windowsill and breaking it as she watered her violets. She never bothered to see what it was. Frankly, I find this every time I have call to go through a doctor’s chemicals and records. They leave things sitting around their clinic, they keep shoddy notes.”

Kemble tried to turn the subject back to the dead duchess. “Could this young lady have suffered from melancholia?”

Laudrey nodded a little sadly. “Everyone later said she was downcast over her childlessness—and they were married a good many years. The duke was terribly disappointed by it. I am sure she knew it, too. Frankly, the lady looked outright sick to me when last I saw her.”

“Sick as in how?” asked Kemble.

The justice looked uncomfortable. “I hardly know,” he admitted. “I wondered if she was eating, to be honest. But she never struck me as a suicide. She was too devout. But what good would my pressing forward with an inquiry have done?”

“I understand,” Kemble murmured. “One would not wish to inconvenience the duke in any way when his barren wife had so conveniently obliged him by dying.”

Ire flashed in Laudrey’s eyes. “Now you may wait just a moment, sir!” he countered. “I do my job—insomuch as I am able. I thought the death ought to have been looked into, and I told the duke so.”

“Did you indeed?”

“Most certainly!” Laudrey narrowed his gaze. “But the duke said he didn’t want the gossip, and he threatened my job if I pursued it. I got the impression that since the girl was of no more use to him, he wished her buried, literally and figuratively. I thought it chilling, myself.”

Kemble was beginning to agree with him.

“And that is one reason I have not bestirred myself too thoroughly over
his
death, if you must know,” Laudrey went on. “Perhaps the duchess did do him in. But I wonder if perhaps he simply got what was coming to him?”

Kemble smiled thinly and rose. “Perhaps he did, Mr. Laudrey,” he said pensively. “Perhaps he did at that.”

Laudrey, too, got up from his chair. “Well, there you have it, sir. That’s the whole of what I know.”

Kemble bowed stiffly. “Thank you, Mr. Laudrey,” he said. “The new duke is most grateful for your kind assistance.”

Late that evening, Mr. Statton’s weather prediction came true in a flash of light and a low, distant rumble from the sky. Unable to sleep, Gareth lay in bed to the sound of the rain, this time a steady downpour instead of lashing, wind-driven sheets. Good Lord, they scarcely needed more rain, he considered, as the time for harvest neared.

Unaccountably restless, Gareth got out of bed, put on his dressing gown, and lit a lamp by his reading chair. He picked up one of Watson’s agricultural magazines and flipped randomly through it. Some of it actually made sense to him now. He was gaining his sea legs, he thought, where this business of growing things was concerned.

While he had not wanted to return to Selsdon—and still had not faced a great many of his demons—Gareth was beginning to appreciate the importance of the place. He had meant his stay here to be but a short one, but now he was not so sure. The estate needed a great deal of oversight, and Gareth was beginning to feel pride in his ability to comprehend and to make good decisions. Pride in Selsdon itself. The work was not as tangible, perhaps, as sending ships and commodities flying around the world, but managing a large estate, he had discovered, was not so very different from managing a large shipping company.

Mr. Watson seemed surprised at Gareth’s hands-on approach and his easy grasp of the accounting. Warneham had done no more than plow in enough cash to keep crops in the ground and the income stream flowing. Long-term improvements such as Knollwood had been let go for decades save for the threshing machine, which Watson had pressed for. Gareth felt a growing eagerness to see just what could be done when the place was treated as the piece of real business capital it was.

Despite all this eagerness, however, Watson’s agricultural magazine could not hold Gareth’s interest. His mind was elsewhere, really. It was still on the path to Knollwood, in the little folly by the pond. In talking with Antonia today, it had frightened him a little, the rage he still held inside. The seething resentment toward Warneham. A part of his youth had been stripped from him—and his grandmother’s life quite likely shortened—by a selfish, vindictive man. A man who had then spinelessly lied to his friends and his family about the truth of what he had done.

Even now, if he closed his eyes, the sound of the rain could take him back to his life aboard ship. He could still smell the filth, the heat and stench of leering, unwashed sailors. He remembered what it had been like to go hungry, and to gratefully eat food so rancid and wormriddled that it had not been fit for human consumption. He remembered storms so vile they could make a man pray for a painless death. He remembered weeping like the child he had been with longing for his grandmother, and his old life in London. A life among people he had trusted and understood. Had his grandfather lived, Gareth would likely have been a prosperous merchant or a goldsmith by now. Perhaps even a money lender. All, even the latter, were honorable professions so far as Gareth was concerned.

As if driven by Gareth’s thoughts, another low rumble passed over the house, this one very near. Unable to stop himself, he went to the window and looked out over the curtain wall. Just to make sure. He did not have to wait long for the next flash of lightning. This time, his eyes were quick. This time, he knew just what—and who—to look for. The rampart was empty, thank God.

But that did not necessarily mean that Antonia was not frightened, did it? He did not know her habits. Perhaps even as he stood here with his hand pressed to the cold glass, she was wandering the house, trapped in that dreamlike state between wakefulness and sleep, grieving for her children. And tonight there would be no Mrs. Waters to depend upon—she was likely lying in her bed upstairs with her throat wrapped in flannel and her cough soothed by some of Osborne’s infamous laudanum.

Gareth left the window and paced across the room, one hand on his hip. He had to restrain himself from giving in to the impulse to go to her. It was not his place to do so, was it? They were becoming too close. A friendship—no, much more than that—had sprung up between them, two lost and damaged souls. It might be all too easy for Antonia to come to lean on him, to depend on him, when what she should be doing was moving in the opposite direction. Away from Selsdon, and all the whispers and memories. Sometimes he wondered if even Knollwood would be far enough.

Suddenly thunder sounded again, this time loud enough to rattle the windows. As before, Gareth was out the door and halfway down the corridor before he realized what he intended. But by the time he reached the turn which would take him to the ducal apartments, there was no chance of his forcing himself to turn back. He plunged ahead heedlessly, as he had done from the very first. Antonia was alone, and if she was awake, quite likely terrified. Gareth went in through the sitting room, which was shrouded in darkness. Gingerly he made his way to her bedchamber door, then hesitated. Should he knock so that she might put on a robe? Or simply slip in, in the hope that she slept soundly? It was not as if they hadn’t already seen one another in a state of undress.

He pushed open the door to see that in the depths of the room, a lone candle burned. Antonia stood by the window, draperies thrown wide, her arms crossed tight over her chest. Her shoulders were bent, as if she wished to somehow draw inside herself, and her feet were bare. Her long hair hung in heavy waves to her waist, making her look like a wraith in the gloom—an agonizingly beautiful figment of his imagination.

He whispered her name, and she turned at once. Her face was contorted into a mask of grief, but when she saw him, her gaze softened until her eyes were but limpid pools. “Gabriel,” she whispered, darting straight into his arms. “Gabriel. My angel.”

He pulled her hard against his chest and drew a deep, steadying breath. And suddenly he wondered precisely who was comforting whom. Antonia felt so small and so right against his chest. So reassuring and so…innocent. It was as if his worry for her was transcended by his need for her—a need which ran deeper than the sensual and was more insidious than ordinary lust. But perhaps he simply needed her to need him. Perhaps when she no longer did so, when she was well and strong again, she would be able to use him for whatever she needed and move on, as so many others had done.

He should have set her away once the moment had passed; should have murmured something blandly reassuring in her ear. But instead, he buried his face in her hair. “Antonia,” he whispered. “Antonia, I was worried. The storm…”

She trembled a little in his arms. “Gabriel, I feel so foolish,” she answered. “Why must I be this way? It’s just rain—and this is England, after all. It is not apt to quit, is it? I just want to be normal again.”

“I think perhaps you are normal, Antonia,” he whispered. “Besides, what would be the alternative? To feel less? To love less? Would you rather have a life half lived?”

She shook her head, her hair scrubbing against his dressing gown. “No,” she said, her voice a little tremulous. “No, I wouldn’t. I never thought of it like that.”

“I think, Antonia, that when you love someone, you love deeply and immeasurably,” he said quietly. “But even the deepest of affections cannot save us from losing what we love. And then we must go on. That is what you are doing. You are going on. You are coping the best way you know how. Don’t be harsh with yourself, my dear, for the world is harsh enough as it is.”

She looked up at him then with a tremulous smile. “Thank you for that,” she said. “You are a man of great common sense, I think. I—I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you these past weeks.”

Gareth tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and felt his chest go tight with the aching need to protect her. He had just slipped another inch down that black, bottomless well of unrequited love.
Falling in love.
It was an apt description of the awful thing which was happening to him. Antonia needed a friend, not a lover. Not another set of expectations which might crush her just as she was beginning, perhaps, to find herself again.

But he continued drawing his fingers down through her hair. “Have you not slept at all?”

She shook her head. “No, I was unable—well, actually
afraid—
to go to sleep once I heard the thunder. Tonight I cannot depend on poor Nellie to come fish me out of the fountain or drag me down off the roof, can I?”

He led her with one hand to the bed, where the covers were already thrown back and the pillows were in disarray. “Here,” he said, laying his dressing gown aside, “I shall lie down with you until the storm has passed.”

She looked at him hesitantly. “Please don’t do anything for me that you will later regret,” she said. “I know how you feel about me, Gareth. You feel a duty—”

“Shh,” he said, pulling her nearer. “Don’t talk—isn’t that what you always say? Don’t talk. Don’t think.”

“But we won’t just lie down, will we?” she said softly, as if reading his mind. “I will beg you for more. And you will give in to me.”

Gareth knew she was right, and he hadn’t the strength to simply walk out of the room—the room which smelled of gardenias and of temptation. Of
her
. “Do you want me to make love to you, Antonia?” he rasped. “Is that what will help you forget?”

Her tongue came out to lightly touch the corner of her mouth. “Yes,” she said swiftly. “You have a gift for it, I think.”

“God, Antonia,” he whispered. “I have a gift for making a muddle of things, too.”

But he kissed her, long and deep, cradling her face delicately between his hands as his tongue plumbed the sweet depths of her mouth. In response, Antonia moaned and opened fully, twining her tongue silkily with his and rising onto her tiptoes.

Gareth plunged his fingers into her hair, stroking over her temples. He told himself he had meant only to comfort her, but he knew in his heart it was a lie. He could feel Antonia’s breathing ratcheting up and his groin pooling with heat and blood. As if emboldened, Antonia delved into his mouth with her tongue, and to his shock, he shivered like an eager stallion. This was wrong. It was another step in the direction neither of them should take. But Antonia pressed her lithe, warm body fully against his, and Gareth gave in. The mess could be sorted out tomorrow. Or another day. This day—this
night
—was for loving her.

He drew her higher against him and kept kissing her. Antonia’s hands slid up his back as her tongue teased at his, sending another wave of lust shuddering through him. He wanted her so desperately. And she wanted him—for the pleasure and the comfort he could give her, of course. It was nothing more.

Deliberately, he set his hands on her waist and lifted her against the straining weight of his erection. He wanted her to know what he felt; what she did to him. Perhaps he hoped to warn her off. It did not work.

Antonia lifted her lips from his. “Take me to bed, Gabriel,” she pleaded.

He followed her onto the mattress, then drew her firmly against him so that she lay with her back against his chest. After wrapping both arms firmly about her, he set his lips to the back of her head. “There,” he said. “You see? The storm cannot get you now.”

She wiggled back against him, her derriere doing delightful things to his cock. Gareth tried not to think about that, and to merely listen to the sound of her breathing. Tried to remember his purpose in coming here. But it was too late. She had addled his brain with her touch. He was not strong enough to keep his hand from sliding up to cup the warm weight of her breast. He felt Antonia make a sound of pleasure, a little vibration in the back of her throat.