My American Duchess (30 page)

“My brother and I weren’t supposed to go to her boudoir, of course. As far as I knew, my mother showed absolutely no interest in us, except on rare occasions when we were summoned to the drawing room before tea.”

Merry nodded.

“I wanted to give her the flowers before they wilted, so I knocked on her door, and she called ‘Enter,’ likely thinking I was her maid.”

“And?”

“She was sitting on a low chair, with her back to me. She didn’t turn around, but Cedric looked over her shoulder. He was sitting on her lap.”

“You hadn’t known that your brother was there?” There was a steely disapproval in her voice.

“No. I’d had no idea.”

“I gather you had not been invited to visit her chamber.”

“Never.”

“That must have been a deeply painful moment.” Merry’s hand tightened around his. “Please don’t tell me that Cedric looked triumphant.”

“No, no, he was sorry. I knew immediately that he’d been to our mother’s room many times, but had never mentioned it because he didn’t want to hurt me.”

“What did you do?”

“I just stood there. He said, ‘Mama, Jack brought you some flowers.’ I was Jack in those days because my father was still alive.”

“What did your mother say?” Merry prompted.

“She gave Cedric a kiss on the top of his head, ruffled his hair, and put him on his feet. She thanked me for the flowers and sent us both back to the nursery.”

For a while, neither spoke, and the only sound Trent could hear was Merry’s soft breathing.

“I’m sorry to say this because she has passed away, but I rather hate your mother,” she said, finally.

“She had every reason to favor Cedric, believe me. I was the sort of boy who was always dirty and often bleeding, with smudges all over my face, no doubt. Thoroughly unattractive.”

She twisted about until she was sitting astride his lap, able to give him a kiss. “No wonder you don’t want me to call you Jack. I won’t do it again, I promise.”

He shrugged. “That’s not important. I learned something that afternoon, something valuable. I had thought that I could buy the emotion she showed Cedric by being more like him.”

“More flowery?”

He nodded, meeting her eyes, wanting her to understand. “A useless gesture. That’s why I have no more trust in empty words and gifts of jewels than you do. But the fact that we’re friends, Merry? That is something very rare, and it means so much more than empty trifles.”

“Friends?” she whispered, so quietly he barely heard.

He began pulling out her hairpins and tossing them to the floor.

“Yes, friends,” he repeated, his voice gone gravelly with lust.

She pushed back ever so slightly, her hand on his arm. “I want to be more than your friend, Jack.”

He felt his thoughts go still as he watched her gather her courage.

“I love you, Jack. I’m in love with you.” She cupped his face in her hands. “I love you more than I could have imagined possible.”

Trent’s heart stopped for a moment. Merry loved him . . . and she was looking at him expectantly. For one searing moment he felt a stab of pure happiness.

But on the heels of that came something else. Something darker. How many times had she felt exactly what she was feeling at this moment—attached to the laundry list of men she had been betrothed to?

Another man would tell her what she wanted to hear. That he loved her, too. As much as she did, if not more.

But he wasn’t that man. He wouldn’t lie to her.

He didn’t love her. No, he wouldn’t
let
himself love her.

Love, romantic love, simply wasn’t something he would allow to cloud his judgment.

Instead of speaking, he swept her into his arms and carried her upstairs to bed. Ravishing her would have to be answer enough, sliding into her tight heat with a sigh of pure relief. He thrust wordlessly, over and over, drinking the expression in her eyes. Letting her whimpers and moans drive him and waiting, waiting . . .

Merry’s sleek thighs tightened around him and her head jerked back. She cried out, words falling disjointedly from her lips, “Deeper, now,
yes
. . .”

And then, “Love you.”

Despite himself, the words had a primal, raw effect on him, driving the air from his lungs. Deep pleasure thrummed in his bones. He wove his fingers into Merry’s and lost himself, bliss rolling through him like the tide, leaving him clean and fresh, beached on some foreign shore.

F
or once, Merry woke up earlier than Trent. He was lying on his back, arms flung out, taking up most of the bed. She looked over every inch of him, heart aching.

It was awful, this love.

She had always been happy to see one of her fiancés. But when she looked at her husband, she felt raw and vulnerable.

This kind of love was different. It was complex, and made up of a million strands of emotion. It hurt to feel it alone. She knew exactly why her father had commissioned poems from his sister, and sang tunelessly, and showered her mother in jewels.

She would do anything to persuade Trent to love her. He was her missing piece; he made her complete.

With him, she wasn’t American, or a duchess, or even Merry.

She was home.

With that thought, she bent her head and brushed her lips on his. “I love you,” she breathed, kissing him again, her tongue sliding inside his mouth.

He didn’t kiss her back. In fact, when she opened her eyes and looked at him, he was just waiting for her to finish.

He put her gently to the side and sat up. “We have to talk, Merry.”

“You sound like Aunt Bess,” she said. “I didn’t mean to demand that you respond in kind, Jack. I truly didn’t.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, “The truth is that I had hoped not to join that particular club: to wit, Bertie, Dermot, and Cedric.”

Merry took a deep breath. Of course, Trent didn’t understand. She had been infatuated with her former fiancés, an emotion as thin as a grape skin. The love she felt now was woven deep in her bones and her heart. “It’s different this time,” she tried to explain.

His eyes flashed with a hint of emotion that chilled her as effectively as an ice bath. “Those are the precise words you used at the Portmeadow ball—while talking of my brother. You assured me that your feelings for him were ‘different.’”

“It
is
different this time.” Merry faltered at the look on her husband’s face. Naturally, Trent didn’t like the reminder that she’d been in love with his brother—not that she had ever truly loved Cedric. “I never felt anything for him that is close to what I feel for you.”

She should have kept her love to herself, allowed it to grow while both of them got used to it. But the words and emotions had spilled out without warning. And she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take them back.

The fact was, everything she felt for him had been growing more and more powerful every day. If she found herself
in a room with her husband, she leaned toward him as if he were the true North. If she glanced up at the dinner table and merely caught sight of his dark eyes and deep bottom lip, her heart skipped a beat and her knees turned weak.

Even when she was in the gardens, her thoughts constantly strayed back to him. She missed him when he was as close as the next room.

“It feels different to you because we are physically intimate,” he said flatly. “You didn’t sleep with your fiancés; if you had, you would understand how powerful desire can be.”

Merry did understand desire. If truth be told, she lived for the moments when they climbed the stairs together in the evening. Her breath came faster with each step, a heady sensuality slamming over her like a tidal wave. By the time they entered the room, she was frantic to feel his skin against hers, to have his cock in her hand, or her mouth, or herself.

But that madness wasn’t love.

Love was something more tender and quiet. It made her pop into Trent’s study and drag him away from his work. It made her rack her brain to come up with intelligent and engaging subjects of conversation. It made her want to sleep in the curve of his body, their fingers interlocked.

“Love is not a disease!” she said, finding words to defend herself. “You’d think that I was confessing to having the pox.”

Trent swung his legs off the bed and walked to the window, stark naked as he was. Without turning around, he said, “I am uncomfortable with extremes of emotion. In my experience—
and
in yours—people fall in and out of love with startling regularity.”

Merry knew with perfect certainty that she would never fall out of love with Trent. He was her missing half, the
only man in the world for her. What they shared felt as true as hunger and cold. As joy.

Still, dread soured her stomach: the fear that she wasn’t beautiful enough, that she wasn’t ladylike. That she was unlovable. Cedric and Dermot obviously hadn’t loved her, and Trent had taken her in his brother’s stead. He hadn’t wooed her.

She couldn’t expect that he would love her the way she loved him.

“Don’t be angry,” she said, hating that she sounded needy. “Please come back to bed.”

“Of course I’m not angry.” He sighed and turned, coming back, sitting on the edge of the bed. To her relief, his face had softened. “My only concern is that when you fall out of love with me, Merry, you will be disinclined to be my wife, in all meanings of the word.”

“No!” she cried fiercely. “How can you say such a thing? I will never fall out of love with you.”

“I’m brutally rational. How long did you experience feelings for the infamous Bertie?”

Merry swallowed hard before answering. “Two months.” This was so humiliating, being diagnosed as if she were suffering from a case of the measles. She blurted out the sorry tally rather than endure more questions. “Six weeks for Dermot, and a mere week or two for Cedric.”

That wasn’t the truth. She had met Trent shortly after accepting Cedric’s proposal, and in her heart of hearts, she would put the demise of her infatuation at the moment she met a stranger on the balcony.

“Summing that up makes me feel as shallow as a puddle,” Merry said, trying to make a joke of it and not succeeding.

No wonder Trent wouldn’t even consider the possibility that he might come to love her someday. Who could
love someone like that? No one in his right mind would risk it.

Trent leaned over and pressed a kiss on her lips. “I think you’re in love with love itself,” he said kindly. “You wouldn’t be my American duchess if you weren’t exuberant and emotional.”

“Flighty, you mean.” Her heart ached, not knowing how she could ever convince him of her feelings, given her well-deserved reputation. “What I feel for you truly is not the same.”

He was silent for a moment. “I do not wish to lie to you, Merry.”

“Please don’t,” she replied. But her stomach clenched. She didn’t want to hear the truth.

“I don’t feel that emotion for you. For anyone. It is not an emotion I believe has merits.”

The words hit her like a blow, and for a moment she struggled to breathe. He was staring down at his hands, choosing his words carefully.

“I value you, and respect you as my duchess. You have become my closest friend in the world. But love, romantic love . . .” He shrugged. “That isn’t going to happen.”

“How can you be so certain?” Merry asked, knowing she sounded like a whimpering fool. “What if I wanted to turn this into a real marriage, in all senses of the word?” Tears stung her eyes, but she refused to allow them to fall.

“Then you’d be disappointed,” he said bluntly.

She pressed her eyes closed, telling herself to accept it.

But she
couldn’t
; the stubbornness that was her strength was also her weakness. The ache in her heart drove her, the one that was whispering that Trent could have loved a different woman, someone more ladylike than she. She refused to accept that.

“Why? Why is it not even a possibility?” she persisted.

Trent had a beleaguered look on his face. “I’m a
duke
, Merry. I do not engage in excesses of emotion.”

She frowned. “Your title precludes tender feelings?” Anger came to her aid, making her braver. Anger and love together. “I don’t agree. Why couldn’t you fall in love with me? Am I so objectionable? Too talkative? Excessively emotional? Too
American
?”

“None of that is relevant,” he retorted.

“The heck it isn’t.” Merry jumped off the bed and put her hands on her hips. “I am standing in front of you, Trent. I’ve just told you that I love you, and you have responded by telling me that you could never feel the same for me. Why not?”

Irritation began to burn up Trent’s spine. This wasn’t the way they had agreed their marriage would go. They had arrived at a rational agreement that precluded just this sort of hysterics, and now she was ignoring it.

“Bloody hell, Merry,” he said, standing up. “I’m the fourth in a line of men you’ve fallen in love with.”

“And the last,” she said defiantly.

“One can only hope. At this rate, I’d expect you to be infatuated with another fifteen in my lifetime.”

She turned pale, but he kept going because he never wanted to have this conversation again. They had to get all this clear between them, for once and for all.

“You’ll have to accept that I won’t fall in love with you. I doubt it’s in me.” He paused and then forced the words out. “I don’t love you, Merry, not that way, and I never will.”

“Because of who I am,” his wife said with a little gasp. Her eyes were shiny with tears.

“No, because of who
I
am.” Trent felt a wave of guilt but damn it, she had brought up the subject. “This is just what our conversation in the carriage was supposed to prevent,” he growled.

“I must have misunderstood what you meant by marriage.”

He shoved his hand through his hair. “Must you be so dramatic? I feel tremendous regard and affection for you, Merry. I lust after you as if I were a boy of fifteen. Isn’t that enough, for God’s sake?”

Trent prayed that she didn’t start crying. He hated crying women. It had ripped him apart when Merry had wept at the Vereker ball, and now, all these weeks later, he was much more fond of her. He treasured her.

Frustration ripped words out of him. “Marriage isn’t about a veil or a gown; it’s about ordinary days spent together. Our marriage will not survive if you dish up emotional nonsense.”

“By ‘nonsense,’ do you mean my hope that you will love me someday? Or do you mean my loving you? Which is it?” Damn it, a tear was rolling down her cheek. Even so, her voice came out with angry force. “What do you want from our marriage?”

The one thing Trent wanted was to get out of the bloody room. His words came out like the hailstones she was throwing at him. “I refer only to the nonsense about love which you brought up. I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

She flinched. “Yes,” she said faintly. “I see.”

Trent was willing Merry to understand him. “I have infinite regard and respect for you, as my duchess and as a woman. Our marriage has been about as damned near perfect as I could have imagined. Could we simply put this to the side, Merry?”

“Of course.” She straightened her back and nodded. “I will do my best.” Her voice wavered but she visibly pulled herself together. “I won’t bring up the topic again.”

“I think that’s better than discussing the precise moment
when you fall
out
of love, don’t you? I think we’d better act as if this never happened. I certainly don’t want to be informed when your feelings change, as they will.”

“Right,” she said. “I understand. I really do.”

He nodded, inwardly surprised that her promise didn’t prompt a sense of triumph. He’d won the argument, hadn’t he?

A couple of hours later, Trent found himself in his study, staring at the green brocade lining the windows. Snowdrop had managed to rip the hem off two panels and she was working on a third, filling the study with the sound of little growls.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Kestril, the neighbor who was violently in love with Merry. He was well on the way to detesting the man, never more so than when he showed up at dinner with that piece about gardening, from some book Trent had never heard of.

There were likely many such books in the library downstairs. He could start sprouting hoary facts about walnut trees, except everyone would know what he was doing. If he so much as opened his mouth in a discussion of horticulture, everyone would guess he was competing with Kestril for his wife’s attention.

He’d be damned if he did that.

The man didn’t even know Merry. How could he claim to love her?

Trent himself might be incapable of romantic love, at least as people defined it, but he wasn’t incapable of possessiveness.

Merry was his. His for life. He should have dodged the question of love, telling her how much he wanted her, emphasizing the fact that he wanted her so badly it made him weak.

The truth of that made his stomach lurch. If he wasn’t
careful, he’d find himself bringing her bouquets of flowers just to make her happy.

They got through dinner that night by being exquisitely polite with each other. Merry didn’t say a word about the report in the papers that Napoleon was preparing to invade the English coast, even though they’d had lively discussions of it every evening. Instead Merry excused herself after only two courses and said she was going to bed early.

A few hours later Trent walked through the door that connected their rooms. Embers on Merry’s hearth still smoldered, lending her chamber a rosy glow.

His wife was a dark lump on the bed, curled on her side. If she fell asleep after making love, her hair would tangle in curls that felt like corn silk.

Tonight she wore her hair in a thick braid.

Trent drew back the covers as carefully as he could and slipped between the sheets, hoping she wouldn’t wake.

Hoping she would.

She didn’t stir, even when he carefully undid her braid and set her hair free, tucking her into the curve of his body with one leg over hers, pinning her down.

No, keeping her safe.

It hardly mattered. The tight feeling in his chest eased as soon as he had his arms around her, when Merry sighed in her sleep and snuggled her bottom against him.

Trent stifled a groan and pushed away the idea that he should roll her onto her stomach . . . Slip his hands under her nightdress.

No.

Merry was a will-o’-the-wisp, but she would return to him. Bees slipped from flower to flower, but they flew home at night.