The Ugly Duchess (27 page)

“I am. I’m back. But I didn’t come back a lapdog, Daisy. I can’t pretend to be some sort of lily-livered, bloodless version of myself anymore. I can’t be Trevelyan.”

“I don’t want you to be.”

“I need you to come back, too.” He had to be very clear about this. Everything depended on it.

Her brows drew together.

“I need you to find the courage you had when you were my Daisy.” He chose his words as precisely as he could. “I died to myself—and to you—for a few years, but part of you died as well. You won’t allow yourself to feel joy.”

“I feel joy,” she objected. “At times.”

“Life is messy. It’s messy and smelly and embarrassing. And desire is messy and smelly and embarrassing, too. There is nothing about your body that is distasteful to me. And I don’t give a damn what society thinks we should or shouldn’t be doing in our marriage bed.”

Her lips were trembling, and he didn’t know whether that was bad or good, but he kept going. “You can make love to me any way you please, and I will never, ever deny you. For my part, I want to kiss you everywhere. I always did, and it hasn’t gone away. It’s even stronger. We’ll be at dinner with the Regent himself, and I’m going to be looking at you and planning where and how I will kiss you.”

Her eyes shone with tears.

“Here,” he said, running a finger over her lower lip. “Here.” He shifted to the side and wrapped a possessive hand about one of her breasts. It plumped in his hand and a little sound broke from his lips. But he wasn’t finished. “Here.” Holding her gaze, he ran his fingers, fast and rough, over her belly and into the little tuft of amber hair between her legs. She was wet and warm and open.

But he didn’t stop.

“Here,” he said, his fingers sliding back to caress the most private place of all.

She gasped, but he could see a faint shadow of pleasure on her face even as she squirmed away from his touch.

“There is no place on your body that I don’t want to kiss, Daisy. That I don’t lust after. Because this is the most beautiful breast in the world.” He bent his head and gave her nipple a kiss and a warm lick. “And this is the most— ”

He started to head south, but she was laughing through her tears, and she pulled him back up.

But he wasn’t finished, still wasn’t finished. “I’ll kiss you in the Regent’s own dining room if you’ll let me. You’re the only one for me. I came back from the dead for you, Daisy. Twice.”

“I’m so glad you came back for me,” she whispered. A tear like liquid crystal ran down her cheek and disappeared into her hair.

“I never should have left you.”

More tears. He caressed her wet cheek with his thumb, pulling her tight against his chest.

“I love you,” he said, telling her hair because she had buried her face against him. “You haven’t told me the same,” he continued, “so I’ll say it for you. You love me too.” Then, because there are limits to how long even the most self-collected man can wait, and because he had reached his furthest limit, he reared over her, and said, “I shall now have my way with my duchess. Speak now, or hereafter hold your peace.”

He saw a kindling of pleasure in her eyes, which he took as her reply, so he pushed her knees farther apart and thrust.

She arched against him with a gasp, hands clenched on his forearms. “
Again,
please, James. Please.”

He gave her one more.

“Oh, that feels so good!”

He took a deep breath and fought for control. “I cannot be a proper gentleman all the time,” he growled, needing to make one last point. “I’m not tame like that. I can’t
be
tamed like that. I felt like an ass trying to be amused all the time, the way Trevelyan is.” His jaw clenched even saying the name.

Theo looked up at her husband and felt as if her heart was going to burst. James
wasn’t
at all like Geoffrey, but powerful and fierce and domineering. He had a tattoo under one eye, and he would never be at home in a drawing room. He was disorganized and untidy, and he threw newspapers on the floor. He wasn’t much good at making beds. He would always make fun of her Rules, even as he respected her. He meant to kiss her in all the wrong places.

He would not be delicate or, sometimes, even courteous.

Sure enough, at that moment he grabbed her hips and thrust forward deep and hard.

Her scream came from somewhere so hidden within her body that she hadn’t known it existed. His only response was to bend down, his nose to hers, and declare, “I have my
cock
buried in you, Daisy. That’s a word ladies don’t like, but you like it. Don’t you?”

Theo nodded. And then he flexed his hips, again.

She did. Scream again.

“This is not
amorous congress
or
carnal intercourse
,” James told her, his jaw clenched as he fought to regain control (though he never quite did). “This is the Act of Shame. And. We. Are. Not. Ashamed.”

After that the duke proceeded to demonstrate for his duchess almost all of the terms he knew for the sport of Venus. He was a pirate. He knew a lot.

That night, they pounded the bed and danced in the sheets. They boffed and boinked and did the dirty deed. After a while they started making up their own descriptions for the sweaty, messy, joyful games they were playing.

Her Grace proved to have a knack for coming up with phrases all of her own, and they played the blanket hornpipe until they collapsed. The sheet had long ago migrated to the floor, but neither noticed.

They each did each other personal services of one kind or another, taking turns gulping air, crying out, and losing control, utterly. Sometimes they did it at the same moment.

A
s it turned out, the Duke and Duchess of Ashbrook did not leave that bedchamber for four days. They spent a good deal of their time in the bed. But they also made love in the bathtub, on the little stool, and on the floor.

One morning a chambermaid almost caught her master and mistress making love when she came to light the fire; His Grace threw a sheet over his wife, who was giggling so uncontrollably that the whole bed shook.

At some point the duke decided to make a point about just how beautiful his wife was, and before she could stop him, he tossed a Parisian-designed cape worth a small fortune out the window, where it fell into the garden and became stuck on a hedge, rosy silk lining shining in the sunshine.

“Just like it was before,” one of the footmen told Maydrop. “Her wedding dress went out that same window seven years ago.” Neither of them could make head nor tail of that.

Maydrop summoned back the staff, and the duke told him—
sotto voce
—that he could pay off all those extra men he’d bribed to act as journalists.

By the end of the week, the duchess was almost used to being disheveled and imperfectly groomed, at least part of the time. She had resigned herself to the fact that her husband stubbornly considered her to be just as beautiful now as she was at seventeen, as well as to the fact that James would never really understand what clothing did for a woman—or a man. Though he was an expert on the lack of clothing.

She was very, very happy.

She was still married.

A Rather Long Epilogue

The Regent’s Ball

May 1817

A
s every married couple in the history of married couples has discovered, married life is not always a bed of roses.

It was the afternoon on the day the Regent was to bestow the Order of the Bath on James. Hours earlier, Theo had screamed at him because he’d knocked over a jasperware fish, which had been delicately balanced on its tail in a positive marvel of Ashbrook Ceramics craftsmanship.

James had shouted back that positioning a slender marble column next to the library door was a daft thing to do, because someone might easily enter the room and then move to the side as he had done, with calamitous consequences. “My life was a damn sight easier when the only fish in view had scales!”

“Fine,” Theo had shouted in return. “Feel free to join your fishy friends once again!”

At the sound of raised voices, Maydrop had whisked his staff away from the library door. Experience had taught him that the duke and duchess sometimes required privacy outside the matrimonial bedchambers.

Sure enough, when the duchess had emerged an hour or so later, her hair was tousled rather than sleek, and the clasp of her necklace was hanging over her bosom. She didn’t emerge on her own two feet, either.

The duke loved to carry his wife about. “Putting those muscles of his to good use,” the maids whispered to each other, giggling madly.

Marriage was not easy, but neither was it unrewarding. In fact, James had grinned all afternoon following the demise of the china fish, even though he was dreading the evening. He was to receive a commendation for meritorious duties to the Crown in the unfortunate matter of the slave trade, and the ceremony was to be followed by a ball. He loathed that sort of occasion, but if putting on a sash and wearing an absurd costume for one evening would help him win the upcoming vote on abolishing slavery (rather than just the slave trade) throughout the British empire, it was the least he could do. At least they’d waived the ritual purification by bathing; that was something for which to be grateful.

Besides, Theo wanted him to accept it. And what Theo wanted, James gave her, to the best of his power. Even when it meant he felt as ridiculous as a peacock draped in a velvet stole.

Thus, he was now standing in his bedchamber while his valet, Gosffens, fussed over him. He had already put James in a doublet sewn all over with pearls, and then a surcoat of red tartarin, lined and edged with white sarcenet. That was followed by a white sash, which was bad enough, but now Gosffens had brought out boots adorned with huge golden spurs, practically as large as wagon wheels.

James peered down at them with distaste. “Where did that vulgar rubbish come from?”

“Specially made for the Knights of the Bath,” his valet stated.

James jammed his feet into the boots.

“And now the Mantle of the Order,” Gosffens said in a hushed voice. He reverently shook out a mantle of the same color as the surcoat and tied it around James’s neck with a length of white lace.

James glared at the mirror as if daring it to crack in two. “White lace, Gosffens? White
lace
? I look like a horse’s arse.”

Gosffens was lifting the lid from yet another box. James glanced over—and realized his valet was removing a red bonnet.
A bonnet?

He put up with a lot in the area of dress. His wife had decided opinions, and she loved nothing more than to dress him in velvet and silk, in colors not generally seen on men and sometimes embroidered with flowers; she said that the more extravagant his clothing, the more piratical he appeared. Once James discovered just how seductive his duchess found that piratical look, he had even been known to wear a coat in a subtle shade of pink.

But a bonnet was going too far. James held out his hand without a word. Gosffens handed it to him, and then watched with a tragic expression as James ripped it straight down the middle and tossed it out the window.

“Your ceremonial bonnet,” the valet wailed.

“I’ll let you put on a wig,” James said, by way of compromise.

Gosffens came at him next with a stickpin topped with a diamond the size of a large grape.

“Where did that monstrosity come from?” James said, waving it away.

His valet gave him a smug smile. “It is a gift from Her Grace, in honor of your investiture as a Knight of the Bath.”

James sighed, and Gosffens stabbed it into the crimson mantle. “After all, you are the pirate duke,” his man said. “We must not disappoint your followers.”

For his part, James would be perfectly happy to disappoint anyone stupid enough to give a hang about what he was wearing. “I suppose the duchess will be particularly magnificent this evening?”

“I believe they began the dressing process at one o’clock,” Gosffens affirmed. James’s valet received a good deal of his sense of self-worth from the fact that he lived under the roof of the most stylish woman in London. One o’clock was three hours ago, and James thought it likely that Daisy wouldn’t be ready for another hour.

I
n the end, the ceremony wasn’t too intolerable. The Regent was mercifully brief in bestowing the Order of the Bath. At the ball that followed, James accepted the congratulations of eleven fatuous knights who were convinced that the twelve of them were the cream of the kingdom. Successfully suppressing the impulse to laugh aloud, he used his new knightly influence to push Sir Flanner (knighted for service in the war) toward support of his anti-slavery bill, so that was a night’s—or
knight’s
—work well done.

By then James had long since lost track of his duchess. Theo was in high demand among the
ton.
The papers described her every opinion and new gown; he himself never seemed to be able to leave his own front door without brushing up against members of the penny press waiting to see his wife.

Far too often for his own taste, a bored reporter would amuse himself by writing up another description of the pirate duke, with his “brutal” tattoo. Those articles invariably ended with some variation on the same theme: no one could understand how the most elegant woman in London tolerated marriage to the most uncouth man in the peerage.

But at the same time, no one could argue with the fact Her Grace obviously adored her husband. The duchess didn’t smile often, but she smiled for the duke.

Personally, James thought her face in repose was lovely, but when she smiled—especially at him—it was extraordinary.

Thinking of that, he began to look for her with more purpose. They’d been here at least two and a half hours, and he and Theo had negotiated a three-hour limit for social occasions involving more than ten persons. (The duchess may have abandoned her Rules in the bedchamber, but she was still given to them in other aspects of her life. One of these days he was going to stop dropping the newspapers on the breakfast room floor.)

He poked his head into the drawing room, but there was no sign of his wife. He looked in the card rooms, and the ballroom, and she didn’t seem to be there, either. There was nothing for it but to extend his search to the floor above.

He was dawdling in the long gallery, looking at the portraits of pompous royalty, when he heard Geoffrey Trevelyan’s drawling voice around the corner. For all James despised the man, Theo insisted on dancing with him now and then. James was of the considered opinion that she did it because she knew that it drove him mad.

Just as he turned on his spurred heel to head in the other direction—he took the avoidance of Sir Geoffrey to the level of art—he made out what Trevelyan was saying in that arrogant manner of his.

“The Ugly Duchess might as well be wearing the Emperor’s new clothes.” This, with a snigger. “All the fine clothing in the world can’t give her the figure of a woman,
or
the profile of one. I really think that she might be a man. You know the reputation that pirates—”

At that precise moment James rounded the corner. Trevelyan, aghast, snapped his mouth shut.

Just because a man has learned to control his temper doesn’t mean that he isn’t capable of losing it when circumstances demand. James twisted his former schoolmate’s cravat around his hand, hoisted him into the air, and slammed him against the wall, bellowing at the top of his lungs. “How
dare
you say such a thing about my wife? You foul, malicious piece of garbage. You cur, unfit to be in her presence.”

Trevelyan’s face was turning an interesting color of plum, and he seemed disinclined to answer, possibly because the cravat was cutting off his air supply. That was all right: James’s question was rhetorical.

He slammed Trevelyan against the wall again. “She is the most beautiful”—
slam!
—“exquisite”—
slam!
—“woman in all of London.”

By now James could hear people rushing up the stairs, but he didn’t care. “I never saw a woman more beautiful, not in China,”—
slam!
—“not in the Indies,”—
slam!
—“and certainly not in the British Isles. Even more important, she is incredibly kind. Witness the time she wastes talking to you, you spiteful, shriveled worm.”
Slam, slam, slam!

A hand touched his sleeve, and he turned, teeth bared. It was Theo.

“Dear heart,” she said, and with just those two words, the rage drained from him and he dropped Trevelyan like a piece of discarded laundry.

The spiteful worm instantly began to crawl away. “
You!
” James said, in precisely the same voice with which he used to roar some version of “
Time to die!
” as he leapt over a ship’s rail.

Trevelyan heard and understood; he froze.

“If you ever utter a word about my wife that is less than complimentary, I will not slam you against the wall again. I will instead send you through a window. And not on the ground floor, either.”

James didn’t wait for an answer; who expects garbage to answer back? Instead, he held out his arm to his wife.

When they turned, they saw that the gallery was now crammed with people.

“My duchess,” James stated, his eyes sweeping the crowd with the air of a man who has ruled the waves. “She is not a swan, because that would imply she had once been an ugly duckling.”

He glanced down at Theo. Her eyes were painted with an exotic tilt at the corners. Her cheekbones were regal and her bottom lip was colored a perfect red that made it more kissable than it already was. Small but lush breasts, skin the color of clear moonlight, rose above a waist the size of a man’s hand.

But none of that mattered compared to the innate kindness in her eyes, the joyful turn of her lip, the wild intelligence with which she greeted every day.

That
was beautiful.

Without another word, they walked down the long gallery, Theo’s fingers poised on his sleeve, the crowd parting like the Red Sea as they approached. James saw approval on their faces, and then someone began to clap. It may even have been the Regent himself.

Two hands clapping became several, and then more, and finally they descended the stairs to the sound of a ballroom full of peers applauding.

S
afe in the carriage while being driven home, Theo managed to stop herself from crying. James asked her if she was all right, but words were so bundled in her heart that she couldn’t utter them, and she just nodded and held his hand very, very tightly.

Once inside the house, she handed her cape to Maydrop, caught James’s hand before he had removed his greatcoat, and wordlessly led him to the foot of the staircase. He followed her up, his coat still on, with a bellow of laughter.

She remained silent when they were in her bedchamber, and the door was closed behind them. For a precious moment she allowed herself to just look at her pirate. James’s elegant features were still there. His tattoo only emphasized the sweep of his lashes, the curve of his lip, the arch of his cheekbones.

As he shrugged off his greatcoat, she reached up to pull off his wig, then tossed it aside. He was huge, and beautiful, with a contained power about him that had made a shipful of pirates—and a crowded room of lords—acquiesce to whatever he proposed.

He was
hers.

“Are you angry that I slammed Trevelyan about a bit?” James asked, even though in this one matter he obviously didn’t give a damn what she thought, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

She took a moment to find the right words. “You told the whole world that I was beautiful to you.”

“You are,” he said simply. “Not just to me, either.”

Tears threatened to fall again, but again she willed them away. James was lounging back against the door like the pirate king he was, his expression wicked and tender, both at once.

“I always thought,” she said haltingly, “that you started loving me when you were blind, when you were twelve. Because you couldn’t see me.”

His eyebrow shot up. “Rubbish. I loved you long before.”

“You did?”

“The year before, when my mother died. You came to me that night. Don’t you remember? You were still in a small bed in the nursery, and I had graduated to a larger bed next door. You came to my room without a word, after Nurse retired for the night, and you crawled in bed with me. I started crying then, and I sobbed until I didn’t have another tear in me.”

“I’d forgotten that,” Theo said, remembering now.

“But do you know
why
I fell in love with you?”

There was a shining glint of impious laughter in his eyes. She shook her head.

“Because you brought eight handkerchiefs to my bed with you. Eight. And precisely eight starched handkerchiefs later, I felt able to live another day.”

She couldn’t stop her smile. “I like to be prepared.”

“You
knew
me.” His eyes were naked and vulnerable. “All through my life, you’ve been my lodestone, the key to my heart. I lost you for a while, Daisy.” He straightened and went to her. “I couldn’t bear it if I lost you again.”

“You won’t,” she whispered, pulling his head down to hers.