The Duke's Cinderella Bride (5 page)

It would not—it
must
not!—happen again.

‘I have no interest in bedding any of the ladies now residing at Markham Park,’ he said disdainfully, knowing by the way Jane stiffened that she had heard his intended rejection of her own charms in that carefully worded dismissal. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I believe I will make my excuses to the Sulbys before retiring to my bedchamber for the night.’ He bowed abruptly before turning to leave.

‘Not without first making me an apology, Your Grace!’

Hawk turned slowly back to her, his narrowed gaze taking in the taut lines of her body and the challenge in her defiantly raised chin.

‘For almost kissing you…?’

She gave him a contemptuous glare. ‘For wrongly accusing me of encouraging Lord Tillton!’

Was it possible Hawk had mistaken the events he had witnessed earlier at the dinner table? Had Jane not been encouraging Tillton after all, but rather, as she claimed, fighting off the other man’s unwanted attentions? Attention towards a young woman about whom it was obvious her guardians did not care, let alone offer protection to?

‘If I was mistaken—’

‘You were!’

‘If I was mistaken then I apologise.’ Hawk nodded abruptly. ‘But in future I would advise you not to come here alone. You might find yourself in much graver danger another time than you have this evening.’

‘Until now these dunes have always been my place of refuge!’

Until Hawk had intruded.

Until he had held her in his arms and attempted to kiss her.

But that was a temptation she had not demanded apology for…

She was magnificent. Hawk could acknowledge that even with his inner determination not to initiate any further intimacy between them. Her unconfined hair blew in the wind, a thick curtain of flame, her eyes were wide and challenging, and those perfectly pouting lips were set defiantly.

All of those things told Hawk that she would be a formidable lover. That this woman was more than capable of matching the depths of his own passion, which he was always at such pains to hide from others and which Jane, instinctively, was able to touch and ignite.

Jane Smith, he decided determinedly, was a definite danger to the icy reserve of the Duke of Stourbridge.

Jane Smith was even more of a danger to the inner man that was still, at heart, the sensual Hawk St Claire.

‘They obviously no longer offer such refuge,’ he pointed out coldly, unpityingly. ‘I will bid you goodnight, Miss Smith.’ He turned away, and this time he did not look back, did not hesitate as he strode purposefully back to Markham Park.

Jane watched him go—a tall, forbidding shape that finally disappeared into the darkness—knowing that it wasn’t only the refuge of the dunes that the Duke of Stourbridge had invaded this evening. When he had touched her, when he had looked in danger of kissing her, he had awakened a hunger deep inside her, a desire she had never known before, which had caused her breasts
to swell and harden, and which had ignited a fiery warmth between her thighs that had made her want to forget all caution as she met and matched the passion she had been sure would be in his kiss. At that moment Jane knew she had wanted to lie down with him amongst the sand dunes, to strip away every vestige of the haughty coldness of the Duke of Stourbridge even as they stripped away their clothing, to explore, to kiss, to caress—

There Jane’s heated thoughts came to an abrupt halt. Because she had no idea what came after the kissing and caressing!

She did remember Lady Sulby’s cautions to Olivia at the start of her Season concerning her behaviour with the more roguish members of the ton—the main one being, ‘A lady may take as many lovers as she wishes after she is married, but not a single one before she has the wedding ring upon her finger.’

Did Jane’s wanton longings concerning the Duke of Stourbridge mean that she was not, after all, the lady she had always thought herself to be…?

‘You sent for me, Lady Sulby?’ Jane stood obediently in front of the other woman the following morning as Lady Sulby sat at the table in her private parlour, reading through the correspondence strewn across the table in front of her.

The blue gaze was ice-cold as Lady Sulby swept her a disparaging glance before answering. ‘You are completely recovered this morning from your headache, Jane?’

Her tone and demeanour were surprisingly mild. Instantly increasing Jane’s wariness. She had been expecting further retribution for what Olivia had warned her
Lady Sulby perceived as Jane’s ‘flirtatious behaviour’ with the Duke of Stourbridge the evening before. The mildness of the older woman’s tone now did not in the least deceive her into dropping her guard.

‘I am quite recovered, thank you, Lady Sulby.’

The older woman gave a gracious inclination of her head. ‘You slept well?’

‘Fitfully.’ As expected, Jane had found her dreams full of images—not of the Duke of Stourbridge, but of the man who had held her in his arms and ordered her to call him Hawk. Those images had been so erotically arousing that she had awoken suddenly in the darkness, gasping, her body shaking, her nipples hard and aching to the touch, and an unaccustomed dampness between her thighs.

‘Indeed?’ Lady Sulby sat back in her chair, the once beautiful face hard and unyielding as she looked at Jane from between narrowed lids. ‘Could that possibly be because you failed to sleep alone…?’

Jane gasped at the accusation even as she felt the colour drain from her cheeks. Surely Lady Sulby had not misunderstood Jane’s response to Lord Tillton’s advances towards her the evening before in the same way the Duke had?

Or could Lady Sulby possibly be referring to the Duke himself…?

Coming so soon after the memory of Jane’s erotic dreams about him, the thought made her cheeks now suffuse with colour.

‘Do not trouble yourself to answer, Jane,’ Lady Sulby snapped, before Jane had recovered sufficiently to refute the accusation. ‘It will serve no purpose for me to hear any of the sordid details—’

Jane’s shocked gasp interrupted her. ‘But there
are
no sordid details—’

‘I said I did not wish to hear!’ The older woman looked at her with unguarded dislike. ‘It is enough that, despite all our efforts, all the guidance and care that Sulby and I have so generously given you these last twelve years, you have still grown into a woman exactly like your wantonly disgraceful mother!’

Every drop of blood seemed to drain from Jane’s head and she felt herself sway dizzily. ‘My—my mother…?’

Lady Sulby’s top lip curled back disgustedly. ‘Your mother, Jane. A woman much like yourself. That is, completely lacking in morals and—’

‘How dare you?’ Jane had known when the maid had informed her that Lady Sulby wished to see her that she was about to bear the brunt of that lady’s displeasure, but she had been in no way prepared for the vitriol of this attack on her mother and herself. ‘My mother was good and kind—’

‘And who told you
that
, Jane?’ The other woman eyed her with scorn. ‘That fool of a parson who married her?’ She shook her head contemptuously. ‘Joseph Smith—like every other red-blooded man, it seems!—never could see any fault in his beautiful Janette. But I knew. I always knew that she was nothing but a shameless wanton.’ Her eyes glittered fanatically. ‘And in the end was I not proved correct about her immoral character?’ Lady Sulby surged to her feet, her face twisted and ugly in her fury.

Jane staggered back from the attack, all the time shaking her head in denial of the dreadful things Lady Sulby was saying about the woman who had died
shortly after giving birth to her. ‘My mother was sweet and beautiful—’

‘Your mother was a harlot! A temptress and a whore!’

‘No…!’ Jane recoiled as if from a physical blow.

‘Oh yes.’ Lady Gwendoline glared at her contemptuously. ‘And you are exactly like her, Jane. I warned Sulby when he insisted we take you into our household. I told him what would happen—that you would only disgrace us as Janette disgraced us. And last night I was proved correct in my misgivings.’

‘But I did nothing last night of which I am ashamed!’ Jane attempted to defend herself, totally stunned at the things Lady Sulby was saying to her, and shocked to the core by the raw hatred she could clearly see in the other woman’s face.

‘Janette was not ashamed, either.’ Lady Sulby shook with rage, that wild glitter in her eyes intensifying. ‘She did not even apologise for being three months with child when she married her gullible parson!’

Jane really felt as if she were going to faint dead away at this last accusation. Her mother had been with child when she had married her father? With Jane herself?

But that did not make her mother a harlot or a whore. It only meant that, like many couples before them, her parents had precipitated their marriage vows. Jane was far from the first child to be born only six months after the wedding…

She shook her head. ‘The only person that should concern is me, and I—’

‘You
would
think that.’ Lady Sulby glared at her. ‘You who are just like her. With never a thought for the disgrace you bring on this family with your wanton actions.’

‘But I have done nothing—’

‘You have most certainly done
something!’
Lady Sulby’s hands were clenched at her sides. ‘The Duke’s valet has informed Brown, the butler, that they are leaving this morning, and—’

‘The Duke is leaving…?’ Jane repeated hollowly, surprised at how much this knowledge managed to distress her when the rest of her world appeared to be falling apart—when she already felt as if she were in the middle of a nightmare without end.

‘Do not pretend innocence with me, Jane Smith,’ Lady Sulby told her sneeringly. ‘We all witnessed the way in which you deliberately set out to attract the Duke yesterday evening—to tempt him to your bed, no doubt with the intention of trapping him into marriage. But if that was your hope then his hasty departure this morning must tell you that it was a wasted effort. The Duke is not a man to be trapped into anything—least of all marriage to a wanton chit like you. Oh, you are a wicked, hateful girl, Jane Smith!’ Lady Sulby’s voice rose hysterically. ‘A veritable viper in our midst! But I see from your rebellious expression that it bothers you not at all that you have totally ruined any chance of Olivia becoming the Duchess of Stourbridge!’

Jane very much doubted, after the Duke’s comments yesterday evening concerning Lady Sulby, that there had ever been the remotest possibility of Olivia finding herself married to the Duke, and was sure that any hope that Olivia would do so had only ever been Lady Sulby’s own misguided fantasy after Lord Sebastian St Claire had failed to arrive.

‘I want you out of this house today, Jane,’ Lady Sulby told her shrilly. ‘Today—do you hear?’

‘I have every intention of going.’ After this conversation, and the things Lady Sulby had said about her mother, Jane knew that she could not stay here a day, an hour, a moment longer than absolutely necessary.

‘And do not imagine you can come crawling back here if, like your mother, you find yourself with child!’ Lady Sulby scorned. ‘There is no convenient parson here for you to marry, Jane. No besotted fool you can beguile into marrying you in order to give your bastard a name!’

Jane became very still, all the pain she had felt at the unfairness of Lady Sulby’s accusations concerning the Duke fading, all emotion leaving her as she stared at the other woman as if down a long grey tunnel.

Lady Sulby’s eyes narrowed with spite as she saw the shocked disbelief Jane was too stunned to even attempt to hide. ‘You did not know?’ She trilled her triumph at having shaken Jane’s composure at last. ‘Even after she died giving birth to you Joseph Smith could not bear to sully the memory of his beloved Janette by telling you he was not your real father!’

‘He
was
my father!’ Jane’s hands had clenched at her sides. ‘He was…’ Tears of anger blurred her vision at the terrible things this dreadful woman was saying about her mother and father.

She had never known her mother, but her father had been everything that was gentle and kind. Jane did not believe he could have been that way with her if he had not been her real father.

Could he…?

‘He most certainly was not.’ The older woman looked
at her with triumphant pity. ‘Your mother seduced your real father, a rich and titled gentleman, into her bed, hoping that he would become so besotted with her he would discard the woman who was already his wife. Something he refused to do even when Janette found herself with child!’

‘I do not believe you!’ Jane shook her head in desperate denial. ‘You are simply trying to hurt me—’

‘And
am
I hurting you, Jane? I hope that I am,’ Lady Sulby crowed triumphantly. ‘You look very like Janette, you know. She had that same wild beauty. That same un-tam spirit.’

And suddenly Jane saw with sickening clarity that Lady Sulby had spent these last twelve years trying to break that spirit in Janette’s daughter. She had belittled the physical likeness she perceived to Janette by dressing Jane in gowns that did absolutely nothing to complement her. Lady Sulby hated Jane as fiercely as she had hated her mother before her…