When the Duchess Said Yes (13 page)

“I should ask the same of you, Lady Elizabeth.” He wasn’t even breathing hard as he leaned over her, which infuriated her all the more. “Do you wish to see me dragged before a magistrate instead of the bishop?”

“Before a magistrate is where you belong, sir, on account of how you’re treating me,” she declared. “Not that they’d do anything so grievous to a peer.”

“You say that,” he said, “as if you wish to see if it is true or not.”

With his face so close over hers, she’d no choice but to look at him, squarely and without flinching. For the sake of his disguise, he hadn’t been shaved this day, and a fine black prickle of new beard peppered his jaw. If he’d wanted to look like a perfect rogue and rascal, then he’d succeeded admirably, what with the stubble and his tousled hair and that open-necked shirt.

And he really must be very strong, to hold her as effortlessly as he was.

He might not be breathing hard from exertion, but blast him,
she
was.

“We’re not married yet, you know.” She’d mislaid her lace kerchief, and her breasts now felt both shamefully bare and shamelessly quivering above the stiffened bones of her stays. Beneath her hip, she could also feel the crumpled straw of her hat, the pins poking into her like more little jabs of humiliation. “I’m not your wife yet. I could still bear witness against you in a court of law.”

“For what purpose?” he said. “So that you might wizen and waste as a spinster while I am sent to seven years’ bondage in some forsaken tobacco colony?”

She didn’t want that, not one bit, especially not when explained in that fashion, but she was still too angry with him to admit it.

“You would deserve it,” she said, as tartly as she could under the circumstances, and under him. “You have behaved like—like a
cur
!”

“A cur,” he said, and for the first time she heard an answering anger in his voice, too. “Damnation, Lizzie, don’t you know why I contrived this whole ridiculous business? Haven’t you guessed?”

“I have not, sir,” she said. “How could I? You have as good as abandoned me this past fortnight, until this—”

“Lizzie, each day I have tried to call on you,” he interrupted, “and each day I have been denied.”

Abruptly Lizzie went still. “Denied? I never denied you, not once.”

“Perhaps you didn’t,” he said, “but your family and their servants did. I wrote to you, and my letters were returned unopened, with the advice that you were too distracted to receive them. I couldn’t find even one of
March’s house servants willing to be bought to carry a message to you.”

“You did that?” She stared up at him, perplexed and frowning, and thinking of how both her aunt and sister had assured her that it was for the best that she not see Hawke again until the wedding. They hadn’t out-and-out lied and told her he’d shown no interest in her, but they hadn’t exactly confessed everything, either. She’d been all too willing to believe that he was being neglectful. She’d never imagined that her family could be to blame, even if now it all made sense.

“I did do that,” he said. “At least I tried to.”

“Now you’ve done this,” she said. “Abducting me, I mean.”

He smiled crookedly. “I could not conceive of a better way to see you alone. I thought you’d be amused. I’d no notion you’d be frightened.”

“Or angry.” She could say that because she’d realized she wasn’t either angry or frightened any longer. She wasn’t exactly sure when both had faded away, but they had, which made her present ungainly position with him atop her entirely unnecessary. She wasn’t going to fight him, or try to jump from the cab. She didn’t need restraining at all. So why, then, was neither of them making an effort to rise? “What you did made me monstrously angry, Hawke.”

“Or angry, then,” he said. “I didn’t intend to do that, either. But I’d every intention of doing this.”

He lowered himself to kiss her, and to make it easier for them both she raised her lips to meet his. She liked kissing him this way, lying on her back with her hands still held over her head, almost as if she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she couldn’t. She kissed him eagerly, with all the longing and uncertainty of this last fortnight coalescing into a feverish edge that she hadn’t expected.
Kissing him made her happy, and she couldn’t keep back a low chuckle, just from sheer delight.

He felt it, too. She could see it in his eyes when he finally broke away: desire, yes, but surprise that bordered on wonder.

“Are you going to take me to Gretna Green?” she asked in a breathless whisper. “So we can be married there by the blacksmith?”

“Gretna?” he said, that wonder changing to abject horror. “I wouldn’t wish dreary Scotland on a dog.”

“Or a cur?” she asked, faintly disappointed. She couldn’t imagine traveling all the way to Scotland in a hackney, but the
idea
of eloping had been exciting.

“Especially not on a cur.” He kissed her again, an excellent way to put Gretna Green from her head. He was kissing her still when they both realized that the hackney had stopped, and likely had been stopped for a while. The cab swayed as the driver climbed down, just warning enough for Lizzie to wriggle free and sit upright. Her hair was a tangled mess, her kerchief was gone, and her skirts were crushed and rumpled, and when the driver unlatched the door, she was sure her cheeks were red with shame, too.

“Where are we, Hawke?” she asked warily. She could see a brick wall overgrown with greenery, and a blue-painted arched door. “What place is this?”

“The place where we’re meant to be.” He climbed down and turned to offer his hand to her. “Come with me, sweeting, and I’ll show you.”

When Hawke had first conceived of this little adventure to carry off Lizzie, he’d been carousing very late with friends at his club, and perhaps had had too much inspirational brandy. As a consequence, he had planned parts of it very well, and other parts not at all. He hadn’t thought of it exactly as an abduction, since he meant to return her after a few hours. An abduction did sound far more exciting than a borrowing, however, and arranging the hackney, the hurdy-gurdy player and his monkey, and his own costume, all with the goal of Lizzie’s astonishment, had entertained him and reminded him, too, of certain midnight larks he’d survived in Italy.

Rattling away through London in a hackney in the middle of the day, however, wasn’t exactly the same as pretending to be a masked
bandito
from the mountains, racing into town to steal a perfectly willing young harlot from some brothel or another. He hadn’t expected to frighten Lizzie (though in hindsight he contritely understood why she must have been terrified), and he hadn’t expected her to be so angry with him that she’d bite his hand, either. He thought she’d find it all to be just a grand, romantic gesture, the way he’d meant it to be.

But then Lizzie wasn’t a wine-sodden strumpet from
Naples. She was an English lady, soon to be his wife and his duchess and, with luck and application, the mother of his children, too. All of which made what had happened next completely inexplicable.

He’d kissed her. He’d meant to do that. What he hadn’t planned was how she’d kissed him back. With her arms still over her head, she’d
undulated
beneath him, arching as luxuriantly as a cat. The fiery temper that she’d launched at him before had somehow magically transformed into passion. She’d been simmering when she’d kissed him, opening her mouth with greedy anticipation for more, even chuckling deep in her throat with pleasure as they’d kissed.

How a virgin lady—and he’d never doubted that she was both—could be so innocently, so wickedly seductive, was beyond his reason. It made no sense. The only thing he knew for certain was that she had made him half mad with lust and as hard as a ramrod in his breeches, and if their journey had been five minutes longer, he would have taken her then and there, on the seat of a hackney cab.

How the devil had she done that to him, anyway?

He smiled at Lizzie now as he handed her down, thankful that she couldn’t read his thoughts as he struggled to regain his composure so that he could continue the rest of this afternoon. At least he could see that she wasn’t in a much better state than he: her cheeks were charmingly flushed and her mouth swollen from kissing him. Her clothes were wrinkled and mussed, and her hair was tumbled down around her shoulders, with loose pins sticking out every which way. If ever there was a portrait of a lady in beautiful, lustful disarray, here it was.

“My hat,” she said suddenly, clasping the top of her head where it should have been. “I can’t go without a hat.”

She climbed back into the cab long enough to return with a doleful expression and the crumpled remains of her hat in her hands. Already handsomely paid, the driver closed the door, climbed back on the box, and drove off, leaving them alone together beside the wall.

“Look what you did, Hawke,” Lizzie said sadly, more to the broken straw and crushed satin than to him. “Even to be decent, I can’t wear it now, not like this. It’s quite ruined.”

“Then don’t,” he said. He took the hat from her, and before she could stop him, he sailed it over the wall and into the bushes and trees on the other side. “I’ll buy you a hundred more when we’re wed.”

She made a small shrieking wail of grief for the sake of the lost hat.

“I can’t go about London with my head bare,” she protested, spreading her fingers over her head as a makeshift covering.

“Why not?” he said, unable to keep from reaching out and curling a lock of her long, lustrous hair around his finger. He hadn’t realized how long it was until now, falling nearly to her waist and thick with rippling waves. “You have beautiful hair. If it were up to me, you’d always wear it loose, and never let a pin near your head again.”

“Wear my hair loose!” Her eyes widened, scandalized, but she didn’t pull away the lock that he held. “Faith, no lady would ever dare show herself like that.”

He pressed the lock to his lips, then let it spring free to fall against her breast, a situation he rather envied.

“You will be a duchess, Lizzie.” His gaze still lingered on the dark curl against the swell of her breast. “
My
duchess. You can set the fashions as you please, and not be bound to follow any others.”

“It’s not a question of following a fashion,” she said. “No respectable woman steps out-of-doors with her
head uncovered and her hair loose. It’s shameless and slatternly.”

She shook her hair back over her shoulders and, with her fingers as combs, briskly began to section it for braiding.

“Don’t,” he said softly. “Leave it down for me.”

She blushed again, but froze with her arms raised and her hands behind her head.

“It
is
shameless, Hawke,” she protested weakly. “You shouldn’t see me with it down until we are wed.”

“We shouldn’t have kissed like that until we are wed, either, but we did.” He smiled slyly, coaxing her. “Besides, no one will see you here.”

She dropped her hands, silently agreeing to his wish, and looked about her. “You still have not told me where you have brought us.”

They stood in a narrow alley between two high walls of weathered old Flemish-bond brickwork, with no clues beyond the tall, overhanging trees as to what might lie on either side. Of course he knew exactly where he and Lizzie were standing, because everything within sight and a good deal beyond belonged to him—not that he’d wanted to tell her so just yet. He’d lost face in the hackney, and he meant to regain it.

“I vow you’ll find no fault with our destination,” he said. “Beyond that door, you’ll find a veritable garden of delights.”

Skeptical, she went to the blue-painted door and tried the latch.

“It’s locked,” she said, pressing her shoulder against the door to be sure. “Unless you have the key, Your Grace.”

He grinned and drew the old-fashioned iron key from his pocket with a flourish.

“I do in fact possess such an article,” he said, dangling the key before her, “for a price.”

She looked at the key, then back to him.

“As a duchess, I believe I must be above price,” she said, “just as I must be above fashion. A duchess should be more resourceful than to pay out whatever any blaggard demands.”

Not waiting for him to answer—or to ask his price for the key—she turned to face the wall. She bent down and pulled the back of her skirts forward between her legs, tucking the hems into the waist strings of her petticoats. She’d created a pair of voluminous, makeshift breeches, the sides billowing out over her hips and backside and her slender legs sticking out from the bottoms in yellow clocked stockings.

It was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud.

“For a lady with concerns for her propriety, Lady Elizabeth,” he called, “that’s the silliest rig I’ve ever seen. The key will only cost you a kiss.”

“Keep your key, sirrah,” she said over her shoulder. “I wager I’ll be in that garden soon enough without it.”

She reached up to one of the protruding bricks, then set her feet on another as if the bricks were small, shallow steps. That was how she used them, too, clambering nimbly up the wall with a
shush
of her petticoat-breeches. The wall was at least twelve feet high and meant to keep out intruders, but she scaled it with a rope dancer’s ease. At the top she slung one leg over the wall as if she were riding a horse, then perched there, displaying a fine length of her leg in her yellow stockings and red garters, her feet in heeled, flowered shoes with glittering buckles.