Desperate Duchesses (25 page)

One moment Roberta was chatting with Mrs. Grope about the feathers she had bought at the bazaar, and the next Vil iers had swept her away to the far side of the room.

“Surely one might keep a polite distance from women of her caliber?” he said.

She looked at him.

“I realize it is difficult under the circumstances.” And then, without pause: “I’ve never asked anyone to marry me.”

Unless Roberta was mistaken, the Duke of Vil iers was about to ask her to marry him. Was doing it at this very moment, as a matter of fact. She had an unnerving sense of watching a play rather than performing in it. “I trust that new experiences are not always unpleasant ones,” she said.

“I am surprised by my own pleasure in it.”

It flashed into her mind that he seemed remarkably unconcerned by the question of
her
pleasure, but it was a disloyal thought, so she put an expression of pleased acceptance on her face.

Somewhat to her surprise, he did it properly. In one smooth movement, Vil iers dropped to his right knee, took her hand and said, “Wil you do me the great honor of becoming my duchess, Lady Roberta?”

She swal owed nervously and said, “Yes,” and that was that.

He kissed her hand afterwards.

Of course it wasn’t a kiss like one of Damon’s wicked kisses. It was a perfectly respectable brush of his lips.

She shivered, and there was a ghost of a smile on his lips that made her feel a little vexed. The smile seemed to imply that young women always shivered when he kissed them.

“I asked your father for his permission this afternoon,” he said, rising to his feet with the lithe beauty of a large cat, like a tiger.

“Oh,” Roberta said, wondering how her father had managed to keep that a secret from her.

“I requested that he not inform you,” Vil iers said. “Although you can hardly have had doubts about my intentions.”

“Thank you for the painting of the mousetrap,” she said. And then added hastily: “That is, the picture of the mouse—the picture of the
girl,
holding the mousetrap!”

He laughed. “Wasn’t it a marvelous vignette, then?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Oh, come now. I know you already to be a creature of wit to match your beauty. Surely you have more to say than ‘Yes, indeed’?”

Roberta swal owed a flash of annoyance. “I gather you would like me to comment on your metaphor? I found it interesting that the mousetrap contained a mouse. In fact, given the presence of a very interested looking cat in the corner of the painting, one could say that she was saving the poor wee mouse from being eaten.”

He grinned at her and that smile fired desire in her heart again, for the man she’d glimpsed in the inn, for the deep weight of his silver coat, the reserve in his eyes, the sense—

She realized suddenly that she had never imagined him as domesticated. As truly married to her. She thought of him as a wild animal whom she planned to trap. And by walking straight to her hand, he seemed more docile and less—less wild somehow.

Perhaps she wanted the feral cat, and not the neat little mouse, sitting in a cage.

“So you are rescuing me, are you?” he said with a chuckle. “And what would the cat represent, do you think?”

“Age, perhaps,” she said, giving in to a wish to make him sorry for making her feel young and stupid.

“Alas, age is a predator from which none of us escape.”

But she knew herself to be young and he at least ten years older, and so she merely turned her head, as if it would be petty to respond. ’Twas impolite, but he made no comment.

It was better, she told herself, that he learn not to condescend to her. She was aware of a shocking urge to be rude to him, which was not proper behavior for a woman who has just accepted a gentleman’s hand in marriage.

On that thought she smiled up at him, as if he were a knight come to rescue her from a dour dragon. There was an answering spark in his eyes. As if he realized that she held the trap in her hand, and only she could operate the latch.

She gave him another melting smile. There was more than one way to bait a trap, after al .

D
amon was wel aware that he was consumed by lust. It was a dangerous state. He’d never before experienced it as a sort of waking fever dream, as the past few days when he walked the hal s of Beaumont House merely so that he could catch a whiff of Roberta’s perfume, or see the flutter of her dress retreat around a corner.

Of course she was a devil of a woman, and had gotten herself engaged to Vil iers, for God’s sake. He’d been talking to the Duchess of Berrow when Vil iers pul ed Roberta to the side of the room and dropped on one knee. There, in front of al of them, although no one seemed to notice except himself and Harriet, who’d fussed at him until he stopped staring and escorted her to a chair.

It was typical of Vil iers. He had no need, apparently, no wish to make his marital arrangements in private.

It was the first time in Damon’s life that he had ever felt homicidal. And yet it wasn’t Vil iers whose life trembled in the balance. It was hers. He had to have her. And yet…

Her eyes glowed as she smiled up at Vil iers, that roué who would doubtless give her disease, and surely despair. She had ignored his bastards, the mistress he flaunted at the opera, the meaningless liaisons in which he had so freely engaged.

There was something about him that had shattered her brain.

And that—
that
—made Damon feel deranged.

He’d never felt this emotion for a woman. He wasn’t that sort of man. He had a clear sense of himself. He loved Teddy more than was seemly; he knew that. He should leave Teddy to the care of servants, and he couldn’t seem to do so, and yet he was probably ruining his son in the process.

A child is like a good horse, he told himself. You should always leave a horse to be broken by a stable master. And yet somehow that was just what he was afraid of—that a nursemaid would break Teddy’s spirit behind his back, when he wasn’t looking.

But to return to the subject: he was a decent enough fel ow. He’d never kil ed anyone in a duel, though he’d had reason and opportunity. He had far more money than people thought, given that Jemma played games of strategy on a board and he preferred to move his Bil s of Exchange and Bil s of Goods through the markets, as adroitly as any rook.

So why was he maddened—absolutely maddened—by the fact that a young woman had fal en in love and promised to marry another? Roberta thought he was al light and laughter, with no dark streak. She had no idea how furious she made him.

She wasn’t his. She belonged to Vil iers, and that was al there was to it. The fact that the very sound of Vil iers’s name made his stomach roil, made him think of the exquisite weight of a fencing steel…that was beside the point. If Roberta wanted Vil iers, and not him, there was nothing he could do about it.

He had lost.

Unfortunately, he had suddenly realized that Roberta was the first thing in his life that he had ever truly wanted.

He would simply have to get used to it. Likely he only wanted her because she didn’t want him.

Like a magnet to the true north, he strol ed toward her and Vil iers. “I believe congratulations are in order,” he said, making a leg to the duke.

“The honor is al mine,” Vil iers responded, languid as always.

The butler announced the arrival of a young lady, Miss Charlotte Tatlock. Vil iers glanced over his shoulder. “One must suppose Her Grace has marked this young lady for your companionship, Gryffyn.” He said it politely enough, but Damon could see the No Poaching signs going up. Roberta belonged to Vil iers now.

Damon walked off with a bright smile and a discovery.

The moment he knew of Teddy’s existence, he understood that his life was about to change. The fact that Teddy’s mother wanted nothing to do with her child did not particularly influence his decision. Teddy was his.

He just discovered a great, second truth.

Vil iers could post al the signs he wished, but Damon was going to take exactly what he wanted.

Roberta.

He didn’t give a damn what she thought about it, or what Vil iers thought about it. She was wrong.

She was his.

C
harlotte found herself seated at the right hand of her host, which was a signal honor. The duchess had placed Lady Roberta at the other end of the table in celebration of her engagement to the Duke of Vil iers, between her future husband and her father, the Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury. On Charlotte’s right was a gentleman named Lord Corbin. Across from her was another duchess, whose name Charlotte didn’t quite catch. Berrow, perhaps? But she wasn’t at al terrifying for someone so noble. In fact, she reminded Charlotte of a nice moorhen, although perhaps she was more of a mourning dove, dressed in soft gray. She smiled at Charlotte very kindly, though she said nothing to her directly.

In truth, the group was so smal that conversations flared everywhere, in disregard of al the rules she had learned regarding proper etiquette at the dining table.

Her end of the table was quickly embroiled in a political battle. May had begged her to stay away from politics, but it wasn’t her fault. No sooner had she sat down than the duke informed the Earl of Gryffyn, the duchess’s brother, that she was one of his staunchest opponents.

And then, when she turned red with embarrassment and started to explain herself, the earl just laughed and started to egg her on. “I’m a great supporter of Fox,” he said. “And I like the Prince of Wales. What’s not to like in a man who boasts of eating twenty-four hens’ eggs at one sitting? If I haven’t taken my seat in the House, it’s only because I’d hate to rub my brother-in-law’s nose in his own foolishness.”

She couldn’t go along with that, so she switched sides and defended the duke’s recent speech to the House about the lunacy of providing the Prince with an al owance of 100,000 pounds per year. But when the duke’s eyes lit up, she felt it only fair to point out the reverse as wel , that as the Duke of Cornwal , the Prince was entitled to duchy revenues as wel as money from the Civil List.

The duke groaned. The Duchess of Berrow changed the subject with a comment about the need for parliamentary reforms in Ireland, and before she knew it, the meal flew by.

The other end of the table was having a far more sedate conversation. Most of the time the marquess seemed to be reciting poetry. The verses sounded rather awful, but then they al started quoting snippets of verse at each other. She happened to meet the duke’s eyes during a pause in their conversation and saw perfect comprehension there.

“I haven’t read a book of poetry in years,” he said, leaning over to her.

“We ought to have,” she said, feeling laughter bubbling up at the pure pleasure of it. “We are very il -prepared for a cultural conversation. Not even Thomas Gray, Your Grace?”

“Not even!” he said cheerful y.

“O ye pens and O ye pencils,”
declaimed the marquess from the other end of the table,
“And all ye scribbling utensils,
say in what words and in what meter, shall unfeigned admiration greet her!”

“I can deduce that was a couplet,” the duke said, his eyes dancing. He was so beautiful, Charlotte thought dimly. And so bril iant.

His duchess was apparently enjoying this poetry; she was clapping her hands.

“I just figured out that it rhymes,” the duke said to her.
“In what meter
and
greet her.”
His raised eyebrow was enough to send her into a storm of giggles. Luckily, Lord Corbin intervened to ask about Wil iam Whitehead, who was the current Poet Laureate but had refused to write poetry that conformed to government policy.

She turned away from the duke with a palpable pang. This wil never do, she told herself. He’s married and he’s a duke.

You’re nothing more than an old maid, for al you somehow found yourself at this party. But she knew…

She knew how she found herself at the party.

Beaumont had asked to have her. The fact was like a warm blanket on a chil y night. For the first time in her life, a man was claiming her presence.

He was married, that was true.

His wife was one of the most beautiful women in Europe—and yet he had asked her to supper.

The duchess doesn’t understand the political life, Charlotte told herself.

She liked paltry poetry, with terrible rhymes.

She doesn’t understand him.

On the other end of the table, the Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury was enjoying himself just as much as was Charlotte, though for rather different reasons. For one thing, he had his beloved daughter to his right, and his beloved Mrs. Grope to his left. He knew himself to be a rather simple man, at heart. He expressed himself in dense rhyme and eloquent meter…but inside he knew that the subjects of his poetry sprang from his heart. His daughter, his beloved, his cat, cream pastries now and then.

It wasn’t in his nature to keep emotions to himself. “I am not sure that I am ready to give you up,” he told Roberta. She was so terrifyingly beautiful, this daughter of his: far more Margaret’s than his, and yet poor Margaret had not lived to see her grow to the blossom of her womanhood. “When you were a baby, I wrote an ode to the fold of your eyelid. What wil I do without your eyelids to look at every day?”

“Oh, Papa,” she said, looking fussed, as she always did when he praised her.

“You’l see what I mean when you have a child of your own,” he told her. Now he saw, of course, that he couldn’t have kept her in the country forever. How could he think to deny his darling girl the pleasure of having her own children? Stil …he looked across the table at her chosen husband. A duke. One could hardly complain about that. And yet there was something old and degenerate about Vil iers, something of a tired soul, that the marquess did not like. He couldn’t imagine how to say it to Roberta.

If only Margaret had lived. Mrs. Grope, much though he loved her flamboyant ways, had none of Margaret’s subtlety. And she wasn’t Roberta’s mother either. In fact…