I Married the Duke (16 page)

“Is he an elderly man?”

“He is Lord Bedwyr’s age, only a few years younger than Reiner, I believe. Why do you ask?”

“He walked slowly into the house, attended by hovering servants.” Arabella drew the curtain aside and looked at the opulent coach disappearing into the carriage house.

“He has been ill, apparently,” the princess said, “and is only now convalescing. We are unlikely to enjoy his company for several days. But how lovely when he is fully recovered it will be to augment our little party by a gentleman. It almost makes one wish my mother will never return with the rest of the court. Oh, but I wished that already, didn’t I?” Her hazel eyes twinkled.

A
S THE FOLLOWING
afternoon was fine and warm, Arabella suggested that Jacqueline practice the English art of taking high tea. The servants set out the repast on the terrace that jutted out from the castle on the bank of the river overlooking the formal gardens.

Jacqueline accepted a cup from Arabella and turned her head to Prince Reiner sitting over a chessboard with Lord Bedwyr.

“Tell us about the
comte,
brother. Is he handsome?”

“How should I be able to say one way or the other, Jackie?” He leaned over the game. “I am not a lady.”

Two of Jacqueline’s waiting ladies giggled. They had taken the lesson in tea as cause for dressing in their smartest frocks, no doubt for the earl’s benefit.

Arabella poured a cup for herself and walked to the balustrade. The queen’s chosen companions for her daughter had not accepted her in their circle, and after three weeks still looked at her with mildly veiled suspicion. She did not begrudge them. After years on the edge of society, she was accustomed to it.

“Is the
comte
handsome, Lord Bedwyr?” Jacqueline had finally managed to leave off stammering and blushing in the earl’s presence. It seemed to have no effect whatsoever on him. He treated her and her waiting ladies with the same easy amusement.

Lord Bedwyr leaned back in his chair, awaiting his opponent’s next move. “I regret to report, your highness, that he is a great beast of a man. Not a’tall to ladies’ tastes.”

Jacqueline’s lips twisted. “He owns this chateau and the vineyards, and a house in England, I understand. He must at least be very rich.”

“What sort of a thing is that to say, Jackie?” her brother said. “Miss Caulfield, you are remiss. You must take your charge in hand and teach her manners.” He smiled.

“I beg your highness’s pardon.” Arabella’s fingers tapped on her teacup, paper thin porcelain with gold ribs. It was a cup fit for a princess, like her sumptuous bedchamber and the gardens she stared out at now without a scrap of feeling. “I shall endeavor to improve my methods of instruction.”

“I expect you to.” Prince Reiner grinned and returned his attention to the chessboard. He was a kind man, pleasant to all, and generous and affectionate with his sister. He stirred in Arabella no interest whatsoever.

“Well, is he rich, my lord?” Jacqueline said.

“If I had half of the
comte
’s funds, Princess,” Lord Bedwyr replied, “I should be swimming in horses, carriages, houses, and jewels.”

“You know, brother,” Jacqueline said, “you should not fault me for wondering about a gentleman’s worldly characteristics. It is what Maman has taught me to consider most important in all men since I was six.”

“How tragic that in ladies’ estimation a man’s courage, heart, and nobility of character should fall behind his fortune and appearance.” The earl sighed theatrically and moved his white knight.

“You needn’t worry over that, my lord,” the princess said, looking directly at him, her gaze perfectly clear.

He lifted a brow. “Ah, but my fortune is far from enviable, Princess.”

A smile tweaked the corner of her mouth. “Lord Bedwyr, you are outrageously conceited.”

“Jackie!”

“Princess!”

The earl cast the princess an oddly knowing sideways glance then returned his attention to the board. “Your sister is frightfully honest, Reiner. You ought not to have sent her to a convent for schooling. Girls learn all the worst sorts of morals from nuns, you know.”

Jacqueline’s cheeks were pink but her eyes were serene. Perhaps she had taken the earl’s measure after all.

The door onto the terrace opened and a footman announced, “His lordship,
le comte de
Rallis.”

A gentleman stepped into the sun—a tall, broad-shouldered man with impeccably tailored clothes, gleaming top boots, and a black slash of a kerchief about his brow that covered his right eye and part of a horrible scar.

The teacup slipped from Arabella’s fingers and shattered on the stones at her feet.

Chapter 11

La Comtesse

L
uc watched the color flood back into her cheeks, which had gone pale as parchment, and he nearly marched over to his cousin and strangled him. When Cam last sent word to the
Victory
, he said that she now knew his true identity. Unwisely, Luc had believed him.

A girl with the tall, dark appearance of Reiner rushed to her. “Arabella!”

Arabella
.

“Bella, are you ill?”

“No,” he barely heard her say. “No, I am well.” Her chin ticked up as she met his gaze, but the cornflowers swam with confusion.

“Ah, Luc!” Reiner clasped his hand. “Bedwyr promised you were to come, but I never believe a thing he says.”

“I would be well advised to follow your example.” He looked over Reiner’s shoulder to her.

“My friend,” Reiner said, turning to the others. “Allow me to make you acquainted with your guests, my sister and her ladies-in-waiting.”

The women came forward. He was trapped, acting the gallant host to the party while the single person who most deserved his attention stole away down the terrace steps to the garden. No one seemed to notice. She still wore the plain governess’s gown. It seemed that neither Cam nor she had told Reiner or anybody else of the events at Saint-Nazaire.

He would remedy that swiftly. But not before he spoke with her alone.

“Your lordship,” one of the ladies said, “will you take tea?”

“I should think he might wish something a bit stronger. Don’t you, Rallis?” Cam said with a lifted brow.

“Wine it is, then,” Reiner said.

Luc bowed to the ladies, sent his cousin a silent command, and followed the prince inside. With a wave he dismissed the footman and turned to his cousin.

“Damn you, Cam.”

Bedwyr leaned against the sideboard negligently. “I don’t suppose you recall damning me when you were shedding your life’s force in the sand. Really, Lucien, you are repeating yourself tiresomely.”

“You deserve every moment of damnation you are wished.”

“Probably, but that is hardly to the point. When did it become my responsibility to negotiate your tortured love affairs for you?”

“Goddammit, Cam. Have you no conscience?”

Reiner poured a glass of burgundy. “The two of you still argue like you did when you were eighteen.”

“Then, he was merely a careless hedonist. Now he is a liar and a manipulator. Why did you lead me to believe you had told her?”

“Tell me, Lucien,” Cam said as though Luc had not spoken, “during your convalescence did you by chance flirt with trading in the old blindness for the new? Or are you simply doubly blind now?” Cam gestured with his glass to the terrace doors. “But I think I have my answer already.”

Reiner pushed a glass of wine into Luc’s hand. “Drink this, my friend. It seems you need it.”

Luc set down the glass. “Did he tell you?”

“That I was to ensure the safety of the stunning governess but not step within ten yards of her? Yes. He failed to mention it had anything to do with you, though.”

“It was not my news to share, of course.” Cam flicked an imaginary speck of lint off his coat sleeve. Finally he met Luc’s gaze squarely. “From the beginning. As you wished.”

Cam was right. Luc knew he should have told her the truth the moment she first asked his name. He could have told her at any moment since then. He hadn’t because in hiding his identity he imagined he would be able to remain aloof from her.

But Cam had known. Somehow the rakehell swiftly understood what he had indeed been too blind to see.

He started toward the door.

“Now, wait here a moment, Luc,” Reiner said to his back. “Have you installed your mistress in this house as my sister’s governess?”

“She is not my mistress.” He yanked open the door. “She is my
comtesse
.”

A
RABELLA WENT BLINDLY
through the garden, no tears in her eyes but a cyclone of relief and joy and pure, titanic anger crowding her senses as she hurried along the hedgerow toward the wooded paths.

He was
alive
.

She needed a moment alone to think, to collect her thoughts, to understand.

To
revel
.

He was alive
. Alive and well and able to smile and bow handsomely to the princess’s silly waiting ladies.

Alive
.

Alive enough to have told her that he had not in fact died before she discovered it in this manner.

For weeks she had shed tears for him.
Weeks
. While he had lied to her. For what reason, she could not fathom. Had he thought that if she knew the truth she would try to entrap him into marriage? But she had held him off more than once. She had objected until the very last moment. He had entrapped
her
.

The hedgerow ended in a long stone wall that stretched alongside a field of rows of pruned grape vines. She halted. Her steps had not taken her to the woods. She was lost. But certainly she had not walked so far to stray from the estate.
His
estate. The
comte
’s estate.

He was alive. And he was a titled nobleman. The heir to a dukedom.

She should have known. Men had lied to her before.

Never like this.
Of course
.

Her breaths came shallow. She reached out a hand, grabbed the wall and held tight to a rock while incomprehensible reality settled upon her. Then she continued walking until she came to a building. Low-roofed, long, and dark, she recognized it at once as a wine press. No one was about. The harvest was over, the sun low, and the building and naked vines cast long shadows across the grass.

She leaned up against the stone wall and closed her eyes. She would return and confront him and try not to hurl herself into his arms and breathe him in while she told him exactly what she thought of how he had treated her.

Perhaps it had all been a game to him. And his cousin. Lord Bedwyr, must have been part of it. But the men who attacked him, and his wound, had not been make-believe.

Why had he done it?

She pushed away from the wall and turned in the direction she had come.

She heard the dogs barking first, then hoofbeats. Rounding a corner of the high stone wall that bordered the nearest field, four of them scampered around her, tongues lolling, bearing friendly welcome.

A whistle cut the air and the beasts leaped away from her and back across the field.

He cantered toward her upon a great black horse like a man out of her dreams. He wore a dark green coat of superb cut and a black duster, buckskins that stretched over his thighs to extraordinary advantage, and a tall-crowned hat. Even with the kerchief and scar, he looked like a lord.

She did not wish to hide. That her hands shook and her throat closed should not matter. But as he came down from the horse, with the dogs cavorting about his boots, she drank in the sight of him.

“Good day, madam.” He came toward her.

She backed up. “Should you be riding?”

“Probably not. But according to the footman, who had it from the gardener, you set off in this direction at quite a pace and I could not imagine how I was to find you before dusk if I made the attempt on foot. The grounds are extensive.” He smiled ever so slightly. “So if my wound should open from the ride and I die from it, rest assured it will be your fault.”

“How could you—” Her voice failed. He stood there so tall and handsome, yet lighter of flesh than before and somewhat taut about the mouth. She wished he was in vile pain and prayed that he was not. “You are cruel.”

“Ah. We come directly to the point. No fond reunion kisses first.” He sighed. “I should have expected it after the shattered teacup, yet I held out hope.”

“How could you not tell me?”

“I thought Bedwyr did. He said that he had.”

“He had not.” Her voice wavered. She forced it to steadiness. “I was obliged to learn it abruptly when you walked through that door.”

Luc reveled in the luxury of seeing her face. Her cheeks were touched with pink, her cornflower eyes were wide, and her lips were perfect, as always, soft and pink as raspberries and ample. He wanted his on them. He wanted a reunion kiss that would end up with them in the grass and half dressed, as they’d been on that beach too many miserable weeks earlier for him to contemplate.

But she looked sick to her stomach.

He halted at a distance from her. “I am sorry I failed to tell you the entire truth about myself.” He bowed deeply. The cutting pain in his side had not been so acute in a sennight, but this was worth it. “I beg your forgiveness.”

The cornflowers opened wide. “You are sorry you did not tell me the
entire truth
? What sort of partial truth could you have told, I wonder?”

“Partial truth?” Luc’s impatience got the best of him. “Are my title and position so abhorrent to you?”

“Your
title
and
position
?”

He shook his head, befuddled. Then the reason for her astonishment struck him in his sore gut like another cold knife.

“Bedwyr did not tell you that I was alive.”
Not possible
. “Did he?”

“He did not.” Her throat worked against emotion.

“Dear God.” He stepped forward. “I never imagined he would not. He did it to punish me rather than you, undoubtedly. But I should kill him for it. I was unable to travel until yesterday, but if I had known, I would have written to you.”

With a squaring of her shoulders, she seemed to make a decision. “Why didn’t you tell me before who you really were?”

“I would have.” He rubbed his jaw. “I intended to.”

She looked away. “Men deceive as a rule.”

“I intended less to deceive than to—”

“It matters nothing to me. You are nothing to me.”

“Yet your eyes were bright with relief when you saw me at the house. You deceive yourself, duchess.”

“Do
not
call me that.”

“That you care at all what I call you is instructive.” He moved closer. Her shoulders seemed to flatten against the wall behind her. He traced her lovely profile, and his fingers itched to play in the coppery strands that dangled from the heavy knot of hair at her neck. “You care for me,” he said.

“I cared for you when I believed you dead.” Her voice quivered. “You were more interesting then.”

A constriction in his chest loosened. “If it will hold your attention, I shall gladly die again. Name the date and time.”

“You are outrageously amusing, my lord. You ought to gather a theater troupe and put on a traveling show.” Still she would not look at him. “Perhaps invite Lord Bedwyr to join you. The two of you would make money hand over fist.”

“I have enough money already. And I simply cannot hear you call me ‘my lord’ in that disgusted tone. It makes me want to write the king and tell him I won’t have the title after all.”

Finally her lips twitched. Then she seemed to lose the battle within her entirely; her brow softened and she turned her face to him. Luc thought he could die now indeed. To have her gaze upon him with such grace and charity was the blessing of heaven.

“I am . . .” She seemed to struggle for words. “I am glad you are well.”

“Glad? Is that all I am to have from you?” He reached for her and curved his hand around her cheek. Arabella jerked away.

Anger flashed in his eye. “You will not let me touch you? You let Bedwyr touch you.”

“I did not.”

“He said you embraced him. Did he lie about that too?”

“I—” She sought in her memory. In the garden the earl had held her. “I did—”

“You allowed that raking libertine cad of a—”

“It was an embrace of comfort only, the briefest—” She cut off her justification. “I needn’t defend myself to you.”

“You jolly well do.”

“I wept! Don’t you see? I wept for you, for your death that I caused, and he comforted me. That is all. Mere momentary comfort. Now here you are, having lied to me and made me grieve, and you expect me to fall into your arms?”

“Yes.”

She gaped. “Your arrogance seems to have survived along with your body.”

He flattened his palm to the wall behind her head and leaned in. “My body survived, indeed, and it remembers the touch of yours. Quite well.”

Now her body betrayed her. His teasing she could withstand. His closeness she could not.

“My cousin says that you intend to marry Reiner,” he said.

“He told you
that
, but he neglected to tell me you were alive?”

“He is a contrary fellow,” he said a bit grimly. “Too much untrammeled adulation, I think.” He leaned in to the side of her face and seemed to breathe in deeply. “But by God, what seeing you does to me. All else fades away.” His lips brushed her earlobe, stirring soft pleasure deep in her. “What are your intentions toward Reiner?”

He was alive, well, and he was touching her. She had dreamed of this. She had wept through entire nights dreaming of this.

She must make herself form sensible words. “I haven’t any intentions toward him. I hadn’t any since the moment I allowed you to touch me on that beach.”
Days before that
.

“Good,” he murmured. The tip of his tongue traveled the tender dip beneath her ear, then his mouth found her neck. “Because I would have to call him out for marrying my wife. As I am the better shot, he would perish, then his country would be left leaderless and there would be a whole international incident. It wouldn’t be pretty. It is far better this way.”

She dragged herself from pleasure and sidestepped out from under him. “I am not truly your wife.”

His arm fell to his side. “The priest said, ‘You have declared your consent to be man and wife.’ I believe you are.”

“I did not hear him say that.”

“The moment must have overcome you. I understand that is common with brides.”

“It was not a legal wedding.”

“You signed a marriage contract.”

“I signed a blank page.”

“It is no longer blank. Friendly elves that I encountered whilst convalescing in the woods revealed the invisible ink on that page that now makes it quite clear you are wed to me. Isn’t magic remarkable?”