What I Did For a Duke (2 page)

He tugged desperately, eyebrows raised plead-ingly.

She held on to it tenaciously, frowned, and gave her head a frantic little shake.

Oh, for God’s sake.

The duke ripped the sheet from Eversea’s hand.

Ian Eversea was stark naked in the lamplight, long white feet and hairy shins and all. To his credit, though he didn’t quite plant his hands nonchalantly on his hips, he didn’t uselessly overlap his hands over his penis. After all, everyone in the room knew he possessed one.

“Moncrieffe. We can settle this like men over the weapon of your choice. I welcome it. I deserve it. You’ve every right. Choose your weapon.”

Touching speech. Everseas were unfailingly polite.

Bastards and
rogues
, but polite.

A number of glib retorts occurred to Moncrieffe.
Well,
you
obviously fancy yourself a swordsman, Eversea,
sprang to mind. But he didn’t suffer fools or knaves. Ever. He was nearly forty years old, and the sands in his hourglass of patience were ever-dwindling.

He was sardonic even in his thoughts these days.

“Your punishment will fit the crime.” He stood back to allow Eversea a path to the window.

And Ian walked like a condemned prisoner to the guillotine.

The duke and Abigail silently watched Ian squeeze himself out. It wasn’t at all pretty, involving bending and contorting and the exposing of places Moncrieffe deeply regretted seeing even by lamplight. At last came what amounted to watching a moonset as his white hindquarters vanished, and then Ian shinnied back out onto that once-inviting, now perfidious branch.

They heard a grunt and a ripping sound as Ian yanked free his shirt from the branch, and came away with only half of it. Moncrieffe shut the window emphatically on Ian’s muttered heartfelt epithet and yanked the curtains closed.

When he yanked the curtains Abigail jumped a little and turned regretful, startled eyes on him, as though he’d just prematurely concluded a puppet show.

He weakened. Just a little. Somewhere in the icy clarity of his rage was an echo of what he’d once felt when he looked at her. Her hair was down, and she’d luscious piles of it, like doubloons spilled from a pirate chest. He
could
have had it down long before now. He could have had his hands tangling through it. He could have had her on her back, writhing beneath him. He knew very well how to seduce a woman, to persuade her she wanted him even if she wasn’t entirely convinced. Most of them wanted him.

Well, he supposed he should have known.

“Why?” he said finally.

“Why do you want to know?” she rejoindered.

Excellent point. He’d probably regret hearing it.

“Answer me,” he said anyway. Beneath the quiet words thrummed a threat that would have had a stalwart man taking a step backward.

She swallowed again. She licked her fear-parched lips. He watched her pink tongue running over their fine outline with a certain detached appreciation that swelled again into rage, like a tide.

“He’s delightful,” she said simply, faintly, plucking nervously at the sheet she clung to in one fist. Her voice was still weak from shock, but she shrugged, an attempt at arrogance. “And handsome. And young. And popular.” She paused. “And nobody likes you,” she couldn’t resist concluding with faint acid petulance.

Well. Succinct, he would give her that.

Women often
wanted
him. More than one man wanted to
be
him.

But it was true: nobody liked him.

Nobody that mattered to Lady Abigail Beasley, anyhow. And that meant most of the
ton
.

He gave a short laugh. “You think my armor impenetrable, Abigail? That I’m unwoundable? Not
all
of the rumors regarding my character are true.”

More of them than were decent
were
true, however.

Nevertheless.

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t known what she was getting into when she’d agreed to marry him, and it wasn’t as though she’d objected.

“That
is
your armor, Moncrieffe—the notion that nobody likes you. I do believe you revel in it.”

Well, of course he did. But it was such a remarkably astute thing to say, the first honest and true and genuinely intelligent thing she’d ever said directly to him, and he hated her for saying it with her beautiful shoulders bare and the blankets clutched up to her breasts and likely the scent of Ian Eversea lingering on the sheets next to her.

He
ought
to shoot her in principle.

He ought to care enough to do it.

He’d tried to care. He’d in fact intended to try very hard once they were married, which had been the whole point of proposing. Because she’d fired his imagination more than any other woman had in so long. He liked her easy laugh, her rough-velvet voice, the shape of her lips, the color of her hair, the promising lushness of her body, her . . . simplicity. She wasn’t stupid; wasn’t complex. He’d enjoyed her company the way he did spring days and fine meals. She flirted effortlessly, sometimes provocatively, but never crassly. And he wasn’t a fool. He’d made a decision that she would be his next wife, knowing the conclusion of the courtship was as good as foregone, as he was a wealthy duke and she was the daughter of a titled but nearly penniless baron.

Still, he’d courted her like the gentleman he’d been raised to be, astounding everyone. But he didn’t want to know whether his future wife could be easily had, so he’d kissed her only once. But oh, he’d made it a thorough one. Thorough enough to know her lips could fire sparks along his nerve endings, and that he wanted her in his bed, and that she hadn’t at all minded kissing him. Marriages were made on much less promising starts all the time.

And what was love if not a certain pleasantly deluded familiarity built up over years? If not a set of personal attributes set fire by imagination, the way, for an instance, one can look up at a night sky and see not just a random scattering of bright stars, but an enormous Starry Plough?

Well, wasn’t it?

He was certain he’d known once what love meant. He didn’t know anymore.

But he
had
meant to try.

And this loss was the thing that fueled his rage. Among other things.
Cuckold
was a ridiculous word. It sounded like precisely what it was. He couldn’t pull from the mix of things he felt in the moment which was the truest emotion.

But she’d made a fool of him. As had Eversea.

Nobody ever did that twice. Nobody did it without suffering a consequence.

And revenge he understood.

“Like Mr. Eversea, I’m leaving the way I entered your house, Abigail. Through the front door, past your very alarmed footman, whose loyalty to your family proved no match for a duke with a pistol. Given your predilection for midnight visitors, you may consider hiring a servant with more intestinal fortitude. We shall both put it about that the end of our engagement was a mutual parting of the ways. You will inform your father he will need to see to another way to pay his debts. I will have nothing more to do with either of you. A timely trip to the Continent might be in order to allow things time to settle.”

It was more an order than a suggestion, and she knew this well.

And likely rumors about the reasons for her hasty departure would find fertile ground in her absence, and none of them would be charitable. She would likely be unmarriageable in the wake of them. At least to anyone of quality and rank.

It was only what she’d earned.

He watched in silence as the ramifications sank in.

“Alex . . . Ian and I didn’t actually . . .” Her voice was trembling now. Gone was arrogance. In its place was entreaty. “I never meant to . . .
I’ve
never actually . . .”

Even now her sensual rasp of a voice stealthily slipped past his sense and brushed against his senses, and even now they responded like a cat stroked awake from sleep.
We’re simple creatures, men
, he thought, with a bitter disdain for himself and Eversea and all other men who were used to taking what they wanted.
We think we’re so clever. And yet we’re always surprised to find ourselves entrapped or made fools of.

She’d been a . . . hope. If she were anything else, then his loss was greater, and he’d had enough of loss. His soul fair echoed with it.

She must have sensed the chink in his armor. And slowly, slowly she lowered the sheet, and he watched as a pair of lovely breasts came into view.

God.

He had a good look, as he was a man, after all. He could admire and be repelled at the same time. She would
sell
herself in this moment? He wasn’t
that
simple.

“I don’t care whether you
actually
. Cover yourself.”

He calmly locked his pistol and slid it into the band of his trousers, and with that motion he became aware of exhaustion. His hands felt weighted; his shoulders felt weighted, and now that the rage had ebbed he felt hollow and cold, as though a fever had broken.

Her shoulders dropped with an exhale. Had she really thought he might shoot her? Another man might have. He might have in fact been that other man . . . . ten years ago.

He turned to leave her. But she spoke again.

“What
do
you intend to do to him?”

Her question was excellent. He’d ruined more than one man who had crossed him or betrayed him or had otherwise dealt other than honestly with him. He would destroy a man’s fortune with the cold, subtle, thorough determination of a plague of termites in order to make a point. He’d done things of which he was not proud but which he did not regret, and rumor and reputation comprised what was known about him now. It had made him outrageously wealthy and feared.

He was not a kind man. He did not forgive.

And it was true: nobody liked him.

“What makes you think I intend to do anything?” he said softly.

He left her to ponder that as he slipped back down the stairs.

Chapter 2

T
here’s just the one left up there. Wonder why it won’t just give up and join its brothers here on the ground? Such
fortitude
!”

Genevieve dutifully peered in the direction Lord Harry Osborne was pointing, which was up. They were standing on the long, tree-flanked lane that led to the Eversea house. Above them the sky was an eye-searing rain-washed blue. Below them the ground was a mosaic of picturesquely dying leaves, red and gold and brown and noisy as they shuffled through them. It was autumn, and all of the trees now looked stripped and vulnerable.

All save one. And trust Harry to notice it.

That single dangling leaf either epitomized suspense or fortitude, depending upon whether one was Genevieve or Harry.

Take the plunge, for God’s sake,
she willed it.

She stared up at it with all the concentrated force of her deep blue Eversea eyes. But she’d never been able to will things into being with silence, or by wishing upon blown dandelions or stars, and goodness knows she’d tried.

Lord Harry Osborne would be Viscount Garland once his father cocked up his toes. Now he was just a young lord with splendid hair—a dozen shades of gold, artfully waving, pushed away from his high pale forehead—and a profile Genevieve Eversea could have sculpted in marble in the dark from memory and installed atop the pianoforte, if she hadn’t feared her brothers would choke to death on their mirth.

Perhaps it was for the best that she didn’t know how to sculpt.

She did draw and paint and did both diligently, but possessed modest talent. She didn’t mind. Her gift and passion lay in the observation and recognition of talent and beauty, whether it was found in the work of an Italian master or the profile of a viscount-to-be.

Three years ago they’d met. He was the cousin of a cousin of her friend Lady Millicent Blenkenship, and he’d been invited to a house party. Harry was clever, sunny, confident, often gregarious to the point of obliviousness and prone to impassioned expression, for the whole world was a safe and welcoming delight to a handsome young aristocrat. Genevieve was quick, precise, and quiet; she always swiftly sieved her own thoughts through layers of care and propriety before they left her mouth.
Her
proverbial still waters ran very deep. And while Harry’s cheery obliviousness often mortified him, not to mention other people, it charmed her to her toes and she excelled at smoothing ruffled feathers. They were both enchanted by beauty; they were both aficionados of art and poetry and fiction; they found each other immeasurably witty. For three years, the two of them, along with the cheerful and open and lovely Lady Millicent, who Genevieve adored but secretly viewed as something of their pet, had been so nearly inseparable that they practically shared a name in the mouths of their other acquaintances:
HarryGenevieveMillicent.

They’d never spoken of their attachment. But surely it was obvious. Surely everything she felt for Harry pulsed around her, visible as those halos painted around saints in medieval paintings.

And she had waited for three years for Harry to muster nerve to say the words that would make her his wife. The only impediment she could see to their marriage was his lack of funds. Harry would inherit a title—but everybody knew he was in want of an heiress to keep the ancestral lands flourishing. Her father had been indulgent when it came to her brothers’ wives; her mother had put her foot down when it came to her girls. She wanted her daughters to marry money and titles.

But they loved Harry.
Everybody
loved Harry. She would win them around to the idea, she knew it.

The guests for the Eversea house party would arrive over several days, on horseback and carriages; Harry yesterday evening. Millicent late last night. Rubbing fists into sleepy eyes, she had promptly tumbled into the bed assigned her and was likely still snoring upstairs or pushing her dark blond mop out of her face in order to get at her sipping chocolate. Millicent was not an early riser. She liked to be among the last to leave a ball at night and the last to leave her bed in the morning. But Genevieve usually sprang out of bed with the sun, helpless not to, as if she were part bird. Harry was another early riser, as he possessed an excess of vigor and needed long days in which to expend it, as he hadn’t yet developed a fondness for gaming hells or climbing up the trellises of married countesses or all of those other things that kept a young man out late and in bed all morning snoring and hurling boots or any other available objects at anyone who dared tap at their bedchamber doors before noon.

And so he’d found her this morning, and he’d eaten his eggs with a distracted air. After breakfast, he’d been so diffident he was nearly toeing the ground. She’d never seen him diffident.

After much throat clearing he’d said, “I’ve something I wish to discuss with you, Genevieve. Will you go for a stroll with me?”

He hadn’t made mention at all of Millicent.

Normally such strolls would have waited until Millicent was awake.

And Genevieve had
known
.

Oh,
at last, at last, at last.

Thump. Thump. Thump.
Her heart beat in time with their footsteps, until one seemed like an echo of the other. Anticipation was a shard in her chest. Eversea land stretched all around them, beloved, vast, familiar in all its seasonal incarnations, bit by bit going dormant for the autumn, waiting for winter to have its way with it.

They talked a little of general things. But the farther from the house the quieter Harry grew, until there were more silences than sentences.

And then they’d stopped beneath the tree.

It seemed he couldn’t yet speak. He bent to pluck up a leaf. A crimson one. He laid it gently in his palm and studied it as though it were alive.

He looked at her. His eyes were pale blue. Full of glints like sun on the sea when he was contemplating some mischief, clear as a spring sky when he was solemn. She knew his eyes in every emotional weather.

He cleared his throat. “Genevieve, I’ve something important to say.”

Thump, thump, thump
. “Yes, Harry?”

I love you, too, Harry.

It seemed as though a fine layer of crystal suddenly enclosed the day. Everything glowed with supernatural brilliance. Even her nerves were spun glass. She would
ping
if he touched her.

Would
he touch her after he proposed? Would he . . . kiss her?

Because she had imagined that kiss from the moment he’d first kissed her hand, just the once, in a garden at a ball. She’d memorized the shape of his lips long ago and imagined how they would fit against hers. And over and over she’d relived the brush of his lips against her skin, and knew, she
knew
, that if an impulsively given kiss like that could set fire to her blood, then a proper kiss . . . a proper kiss . . .

Dear God, she was
more
than ready for a proper kiss.

Heat rushed her limbs, flooded her cheeks.
Please, please, please, please.

“Yes?” The word was barely more than a breath.

“Genevieve, I would very much like to . . .”

He swallowed hard. Beads of sweat appeared at his hairline.

“Yes, Harry?” she coaxed on a whisper. She leaned in. She wanted to remember every detail to include in the story she would tell their grandchildren. He was so close she could see a few largeish pores she hadn’t known he’d possessed, and the golden-fair tips of his eyelashes, and the hairs in his nose, though it hardly seemed romantic to think of the hairs in his nose at a moment like this. But there they were and they were part of him and therefore beloved.

And then he filled his lungs with a long, long breath, like a man drawing back a bow, and his words rode out on an exhale that nearly blew back her hair. “I-should-very-much-like-to-marry—”

“Yes!”

“—Millicent.”

He smiled at her, relieved to have finally said it.

“Whew,” he added softly. And fished out a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow.

Genevieve didn’t precisely stagger. But her lips parted on an
oh
of breath, as though he’d jammed his walking stick hard between her ribs.

Silence of the howling sort ensued.

“My father thinks it’s time I take a wife, and so do I. I intend to propose to her during the house party. I wanted you to know first.”

Surely . . . surely she’d heard him incorrectly. Surely he was jesting. But he was blushing in that blotchy, shamed way men blushed. He looked desperately uncomfortable and as vulnerable as those stripped trees. He looked shy and full of entreaty.

And suddenly she couldn’t feel her limbs.

“Ah, Millicent . . .” He paused and smiled fondly, and his eyes warmed. Suddenly she hated
everything
about his smile, and wished she didn’t know so much about what made him smile. “Well, she’s so unlike the two of us, who are so
sensible
, and she needs a husband like me.”

Sensible!
Sensible?
Surely not. She was an Eversea.

Apparently he wasn’t finished rhapsodizing. “No. She’s so lighthearted and
spontaneous
—”

His words felt like an indictment. It wasn’t as though Genevieve’s heart was encased in
lead
. Though she considered it would be in better condition at the moment if it had been.

“And she’s lively and unafraid and forthright and good company—”

He made it sound as though Millicent was a spaniel.

“Where the two of us, well, we’re wiser and more mature, yes?”

She was just past twenty years old! Mature?
Wise?

“And as I know you love her, too—”

Clearly not the way you do.

“—I needed to tell you, as I couldn’t keep it inside any longer. And I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping a secret from
you
, the dearest of all my friends.”

Friend.
At the moment she would rather have been called anything else. A wolverine.

He twirled the leaf between his fingers. It throbbed before her eyes, as though he’d plucked her heart bleeding from her chest and was now toying with it.

“I wanted you to know first, Genevieve. And to hear your opinion of it. If you would be so kind,” he added awkwardly. “You are so kind. You’re
always
. . . so kind.”

If you would be so
kind
? He’d never been . . .
polite
to her. Or formal. Everything was terribly, terribly, hideously wrong. Up was down, black was white, rivers ran backward, all the Everseas deeply loved the Redmonds . . .

“And I wanted your blessing, as we are all such good friends.”

He stopped talking.

Apparently she was expected to say something now.

“Friends,” she parroted faintly. As if she could use only words he dealt out to her. She’d forgotten all of her own words. She scarcely knew who she was anymore. Harry had irrevocably just altered the physics of her life. For three years, her love for him had been . . . her own personal gravity. It gave shape to her days and momentum to her dreams of the future. She could envision no world without him.

“Yes!” He seized upon this as though it were actual conversation. “The
dearest
of friends.”

She was sinking, sinking, sinking. She knew very clearly somehow that she would forever go on falling. Her brother Chase had told her that some men who came home from the war lived with a constant ringing in their ears caused by cannon fire.
She
would just have to live forever with the vertigo of heartbreak.

She stared at him for so long without blinking that her eyes began to burn and he began to look just a trifle uneasy.

He wanted her blessing?

Blessing
, her arse.

The pain was a late arrival—the numbness had to finish its turn with her first—but it was nasty. She wanted to buckle, lie on her side and gasp like an eviscerated fish. She held her breath against it, but her mouth parted.
She
cared naught for living in the moment, but apparently her body was
sensible
. It wanted to breathe.

And when she did, she breathed in wood smoke.

She gagged. She never wanted to smell wood smoke again. It was the smell of heartbreak.

Harry, her . . . her . . . .
murderer
. . . was fussing idly with one of the silver buttons on his coat, but peering at her intently. And for the first time since she’d known him, she couldn’t read his thoughts.

“Will you . . . will you be happy for me, Genevieve?”

Was
he peering at her as intently as she thought? Perhaps it was just that shock had turned the world convex. He looked almost distorted, preserved under glass, already untouchable and forever out of reach.

“Happy,” she parroted after a moment. She had trouble with the
P
s. Her lips were rubbery and incompetent. But somehow she got the corners of her mouth up. Because when one was
happy,
one smiled.

This response seemed to satisfy him. He turned slowly away from her and thrust his hands deep into his pockets, hunching his shoulders self-consciously, and then sighed, looking back toward the house, perhaps pondering the wonderment of impending matrimony.

“And once Millicent and I are wed, should I be so fortunate as to be accepted by her, we shall all of course
continue
to be such great friends. There will be parties and picnics and children and—”

That’s when Genevieve spun on her heel abruptly.

She didn’t precisely run. She wanted to. Still, she made good time for a woman with legs of lead. The distance back to the house stretched like taffy. Her eyes were burning, burning, and she wasn’t certain whether it was anguish or blazing fury or some nasty combination that was causing it.
I’ll never reach it. I’ll never outrace this feeling, because it’ll be everywhere I go from now on, Harry on my heels, yammering on about his future without me
.