A Duke's Temptation (22 page)

The enchanted night was over. What would the day after bring?

She made herself sit up. Her back ached faintly. Gooseflesh stirred her skin. Embers still glowed in the grate, but the two fire screens that guarded the hearth hindered whatever heat could warm the room. It crossed her mind that with books piled in every conceivable space, Samuel should be justifiably concerned that an errant spark would burn the place to cinders.

“Lily,” he said in a low undertone, “are you awake?”

“Yes. Where are you going?”

“I have to work.”

“You what? It’s not even dawn.”

“The seventh
Wickbury
book is overdue. I cannot ask Philbert for another extension. The series will be reprinted in a complete edition, if I finish the eighth by Christmas. But a satisfactory ending of Book Seven keeps eluding me. I think part of it is your fault.”

“My fault?”

“I don’t mean that the way it sounds. It is a compliment, in truth. You’ve forced me to look at Renwick in a different light with your attraction to the devil.”

She pursed her lips. What a romantic. So much for sweet nothings whispered in her ear. Or even a pat on the head.

“You do understand?” he asked. “I shall stay if you like. I only thought to write a little while you slept.”

Lily frowned up at him. His black hair framed his face in artless perfection. He still made her heart race standing across a room. “I understand,” she said in a thoughtful voice.

“I’ll make it up to you.”

He walked back to the bed, retrieving on his way the clothing he had indecorously removed from her a few hours before. “I will not leave your bedroom wearing that dress,” she said in chagrin. “In fact, I am ashamed to be seen leaving your room at all.”

“No one in this house will dare say a word against you,” he said with a touch of ducal arrogance.

“Well, I have my own standards, thank you,” she said. “Even if last night it did not show.”

He dragged a chair to the bed, propping himself on its edge with good-humored gravity. “It’s clear that you and I cannot continue to play master and servant.”

“Which suggests that we are to become master and mistress.”

“I suggested nothing of the kind.”

“What happened last night did.”

A slow grin crossed his face. Lily swallowed over the tight ache in her throat. “Say something,” she whispered crossly.

“What?”

“You are the writer, Samuel! Are you at a loss for words?”

His grin deepened. “I might be.”

He clasped his hands together. She noticed that there were ink smudges on his shirt. He looked once more like a warrior poet rather than a rake who assumed they could alter their arrangement on the basis of one beautiful act.

“Do you want to change the terms of our contract?” she asked, lifting the bedcover a little higher when she realized where his gaze had strayed.

He looked up, clearing his throat. “Yes. Absolutely. We’ll tear the damn thing to shreds. It’s unsuitable now.”

“Unsuitable?”

“There is another contract that I had drawn up for us in London.”

“Oh.” Her lips flattened. “So, in your celebrated imagination, I was your mistress-to-be at the masquerade. You were plotting more than the next
Wickbury
. You were scheming for my seduction on paper. And you sound proud of yourself, too.”

“That is
not
the kind of contract that I arranged,” he said in clear annoyance. “I had a formal proposal written to submit to your father. I intended a proper courtship and, after an appropriate interval, a marriage between us. I think you realize by now that I’m a man of extreme measures.”

A proper courtship.

A marriage.

And he thought he had unnerved her by revealing his identity. “Why didn’t you go to my father? He has always been in awe of the aristocracy.”

“Because the morning after the party, I found out that you were engaged to another man. Your first love. Who was I to snatch you from someone else? It seemed as if I had misread your reaction to me at the masquerade. You belonged to someone else, when I knew you were meant to be mine.”

“It was all a lie,” she said quickly. “You could have pursued me. I wish you had.”

“I did.” His lips thinned. “But even then I had to wait for the right moment to steal you completely. I could not give you up. But under the circumstances of your broken engagement, I was afraid I would only drag your name deeper into the mire.”

She breathed out a sigh. “I believe you could have persuaded me to leave him. I thought of you often afterward. I waited for a letter to follow the beautiful flowers you sent. I searched for your face in the theater boxes. But then everything came apart.”

His steady look made her shiver. “We’ll never know what I would have done had you actually met Grace at the altar. I had a few plots in progress, all of which would have made me look like a complete villain.”

“After your wild stint as a coachman, I don’t doubt your capacity for evil. You have a diabolical mind.”

“Thank you,” he said, his smile wry.

“I wasn’t giving you praise.”

“Yes. You were.”

She put her hand to her eyes. She was bared in every way possible. In body and spirit. She had lost her virtue to Lord Anonymous a short time ago, and now the duke was sitting at the bedside of that decadent scene, prying her hand from her face. This was a wonderful fate.

He dropped several delicious kisses on the inside of her wrist, stating matter-of-factly, “Lily, there is another thing that you have to know. I can’t do anything properly, let alone discuss our wedding, until after I produce ten decent pages for the day. When I’m finished, I will be clearheaded enough to propose to you over champagne, and you’ll have my entire attention.”

She shook her head. “But I made a vow to myself that I would never marry. Nor believe in romantic endings again.”

“You made those vows under duress. I shall decide such matters for you in the future.”

She held back a smile. “You are completely—”

“—yours. But not until later in the day. It’s turning light. I’ve lost the silent hours.”

“How am I supposed to act in front of the other servants?” she said after she could find her voice.

“I suspect this is not going to come as a surprise.”

“Who am I in the meanwhile? A housekeeper or—”

“That’s up to you. My sister is visiting at the end of the month. She is important to me. A fortnight after that there is a bookseller coming, a few Cambridge fellows, and friends I see only once a year.”

“Do they know who you are?” she asked.

“Two of them do. Nothing would please me more than introducing you to them as my future wife. We could be married by special license—the reverend knows how to go about obtaining one from the archbishop’s office. For propriety’s sake you might want to stay in your current room and keep your position until the banns are called.”

“Propriety? It’s a little late in the game for us to consider that. Wedding ceremony notwithstanding, how, I ask, am I supposed to sneak from this room wearing the dress everyone saw me in last night?”

He kissed her hand again, as if the gesture forgave a multitude of sins, and rose. “Rummage through my closet. There’s a blue cloak inside that will cover your dress. Put it on and walk from this room as if you had every right.”

She sat up, aghast at his admission. “You keep clothes in your closet for the women you entertain in this bed?”

“Of course I don’t,” he said in amusement, releasing her hand to rise from the chair. “That is Juliette’s cloak. I have costumes for all the characters in
Wickbury
. It enables me to see them more clearly.”

She shook her head, staring speechlessly at his retreating figure.

“There is one more thing I ought to warn you about,” he said as he unbolted the door.

“Good heavens. More?”

“This is
not
an ordinary manor house.”

“Incredible as it may seem, Samuel, I gathered that on my own.”

“The rhythm of the household revolves around my writing. There will be times when it appears that my brain has absented my body. At others what you perceive to be outlandish behavior may be my means of overcoming a stumbling stone in the story.”

“Oh.” Lily tried not to look utterly enraptured.

“I may ask your opinion from time to time. It is helpful that you were one of my readers before we met.”

That said, he disappeared with all of Lord Wickbury’s legendary aplomb, leaving Lily to wonder what would happen when she gathered her wits sufficiently to turn the next page.

H
ow had she not guessed who he was?

The question haunted her through the early hours after she had escaped the east wing and returned to her room.

Samuel had given her clues from the night of their first kiss. How shallow she must have seemed, so impressed by society’s glitter that she had not glimpsed through his false armor.

The duke had deceived her again. Lily more than forgave him.

Everything about him was an illusion. He had covered himself with a shield so that nobody could see who he was underneath—the ultimate protector. How could she not love him? Why would she ever want to leave this house?

She understood everything now. If he had confided his identity to her at the literary masquerade, she would not have been able to keep it to herself. She would have confessed to Chloe that same night. And, although the thought made her ill, she would likely have told Jonathan, too.

Still, Samuel wasn’t the only one in the house who had something to hide. That same morning she began to discover that nearly every member of his staff had been ruined by a scandal of one sort or another. Society had judged them all unworthy.

But how would they judge Lily?

She was neither fish nor fowl, unsure of her place. The other servants had to be aware of what had happened last night. If she was indeed to be a duchess, shouldn’t she place distance between them? Or would they draw a line for her?

She would find out once she reached the kitchen.

She walked down the stairs, noting how quiet the house seemed. And then she detected whispering from the upper gallery. Her face burned. They were already talking about her. She looked up in hesitation—prepared for anything but bedsheets dropping from the sky, or rather from the railing.

“What in—”

She threw up her arms in defense and dodged the onslaught by half an inch. Marie-Elaine and two of the chambermaids admitted between hoots of laughter that they had placed bets on which of them could bomb Lily dead center.

“What if I had been a guest wandering lost through the halls?” Lily asked indignantly.

“Your reaction would have been faster,” Marie-Elaine replied with uncompromising candor. “Any guest given the run of St. Aldwyn House expects to be entertained during his visit.”

So much for disdain or false respect.

Lily bent to roll the bedding into a huge ball. She could only be grateful that she had stripped Samuel’s bed before leaving his chamber and hidden the covers in her room. The mingled scents of her soap, his light cologne, and a rigorous bout of lovemaking combined to create a fragrance too incriminating to elude notice.

But laundry was the least of her worries. She still had to face the rest of the staff. And act as if she hadn’t spent hours in the master’s bed.

She had to behave with what dignity she could summon. At Bickerstaff’s customary bow, she felt a wave of relief. She would carry on as she had before last night. And so, fortunately, would the staff. No airs.

“Now, Miss Boscastle,” the butler said with a solemnity that made the scullery maid at the sink roll her eyes. “You are one of us.”

Marie-Elaine bustled down the steps, snorting at this announcement. “No, she isn’t. She never was.”

“Yes, I am,” Lily said in her firm housekeeper’s voice.

“This should be discussed over breakfast in your parlor,” Marie-Elaine said.

It was Marie-Elaine, as she already knew, who was her strongest ally in the house. Lily found out over tea and toast that Marie-Elaine had been seduced by her former master and left to raise their love child alone. The duke had employed her just after she had given birth to the impudent daughter who had greeted Lily with beheaded flowers on the day of her arrival.

Emmett and Ernest had run away from an orphanage at thirteen and had been homeless for five years before Bickerstaff had hired them. Bickerstaff had spent four years in prison, a young bank clerk who took the blame when his manager had embezzled funds. Mrs. Halford had managed a hotel in Sussex until she caught her husband in bed with a married guest. She had knocked the fool senseless with the long-handled copper griddle that held a place of honor above the kitchen fire.

Lily shook her head. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat one of her pancakes quite as enthusiastically after this,” she admitted.

Marie-Elaine poured her another cup of tea. “He is in love with you. And soon you’ll be above us all. We shall never talk this openly again.”

“He might just be in love with romance,” Lily said absently. “Think of his stories.”

Marie-Elaine merely shrugged. “I don’t have much romance left in me, but I might have a story to tell.”

Lily smiled. “His head is in the clouds.”

“But it is a pretty head.” Marie-Elaine sighed. “Although he does the strangest things for his art.”

“Such as?”

“I shouldn’t be talking like this at all.”

“You have to tell me now.”

Marie-Elaine straightened her cap. “Once he dipped his pen in poison and pricked his thumb to study the effect.”

“He didn’t?” Lily asked, laughing. “How extreme.”

“He isn’t a man of half measures.”