When the Duchess Said Yes (14 page)

“La, look at you down there,” she said with triumph, shaking her hair back over her shoulders. “Have your feet grown roots to that spot, sir?”

He shielded his eyes with his hand to stare up at her. She was something rare to see, like some sort of beautiful
pagan pirate-queen. “Where did you learn to climb walls like that?”

She grinned. “I told you before. I’m a lady of many qualities and accomplishments.”

“Pray can you warn me of others,” he said, “so that I may be prepared.”

“Oh, there are too many to enumerate,” she said grandly, swinging her legs. “It will be much more entertaining for you to discover them yourself, one at a time.”

“I can only imagine.” What he was imagining in particular after seeing her sitting astride that wall made him think of how fine she’d look astride
him
.

“Most likely you can’t,” she said cheerfully, turning to look on the garden side of the wall. “Just as you can’t enter this garden before I will.”

Without further warning she disappeared, dropping down the far side of the wall. Quickly Hawke thrust the key into the lock.

Of course it stuck and did not turn.

“Lizzie?” he shouted. “Lizzie, open the door from your side.”

He heard her laughing. “What manner of jest is that, Hawke?”

“It’s not a jest. It’s the truth,” he said crossly, wanting very much to be on the other side with her. It was his garden, not hers, and she’d no right to keep him out. “The lock is old and stuck, and will not open from this side.”

“Then perhaps you should follow my lead and breach the wall like a man,” she called, laughing still. “Boarders away!”

No man likes to be laughed at by a woman, and as a duke, Hawke liked it even less than his ordinary brother would. He ripped off his coat and dropped it, then felt for a foothold on the old bricks. His feet were much larger than Lizzie’s and the bricks were less accommodating,
but he persisted, pulling himself up to the top of the wall.

“You did it, Hawke!” exclaimed Lizzie. She was standing in the shadows of a large tree, watching him. She’d untucked her petticoats from their makeshift breeches, and she appeared to be hopping up and down with excitement. “Oh, you did it!”

But the way she said it made it clear that she hadn’t expected him to do anything of the sort, which in turn only made Hawke crosser still. Wives were supposed to believe in their husbands, even when they pursued foolishness such as climbing brick walls.

“Never doubt me, Lizzie,” he said, more gruffly than he’d intended, as he swung down from the wall. “Not in this or anything else.”

She heard that sternness as a warning, or perhaps a dare. Before he’d dropped from the wall to the grass, she’d taken off with a wild small whoop, bunching her skirts in her hands to free her legs in those yellow stocking and running as fast as she could.

Hawke followed. If he’d been asked earlier, he would have sworn that English ladies did not possess the ability to run. At least he’d never witnessed one moving through a garden at any pace beyond stately, or, if tested, a serene amble, without revealing the existence of limbs inside her petticoats.

But Lizzie ran. There was no other way to describe it. She ran, and ran fast, darting through his beautifully maintained formal gardens like a wild deer through the forest. She ran beneath stone arches, past beds of flowers, around a fountain, and through the allée of poplar trees. Doves fluttered up as she passed, disturbed from their nestings. Still Hawke followed, racing after her and determined to catch her, too. Just as she’d not behaved the way he’d imagined in the hackney, she wasn’t following his plan now, either, denying him that pretty
dream of them walking genteelly through the gardens while he pointed out this flower or that fruit.

It irritated him, this headstrong demonstration of unexpected athleticism. She’d no right to behave like this. It annoyed him. And, if he was honest, it excited him no end, and inspired him to run faster still.

He was closing the distance between them, and now he could hear her breathing hard, panting with exertion as she pushed onward. Her legs might be swift, but she did wear stays, and surely that cage of whalebone must be restricting her breath. Still she pressed on, her long hair streaming behind her.

But he’d another advantage, too. He’d spent his boyhood roaming this garden. He knew every tree and path, and she didn’t. When he saw her head for an arbor—a small marble folly built like a Roman temple, now overhung with grape vines—he knew he’d won. The end of the arbor was blocked with an ancient marble sarcophagus that his grandfather had brought (without its long-forgotten occupant) from Rome, and beyond that was a sharp drop to a false waterfall.

As Hawke watched, she reached the sarcophagus and leaned over it, realizing too late that there was no way to cross it. Swiftly she turned, looking for another outlet. Then, at last, she looked at Hawke. Her breasts were rising and falling rapidly above her bodice, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted. Wearier than she wished to admit, she leaned against the sarcophagus, tossed back her hair, and slowly, slowly smiled at him.

“I won,” she said breathlessly. “I outran you.”

“The hell you did,” he said, coming to stand before her. “Don’t ever run from me again.”

“No,” she said, slipping her arms around his shoulders. “No.”

For a fraction of a second he wondered whether she meant no, she wouldn’t agree, or no, she’d never run
from him. But then all logical thoughts fled from his brain, leaving nothing but the blood-thumping perfection of her kissing him.

Of course he kissed her in return. She parted her lips at once for him to deepen the kiss, and at once it seemed they were back where they’d left off in the hackney. She was a-simmer again (and so was he, really), this time not from anger but from the running, warm and willing, only this was better, much better, because they weren’t wrestling in a tiny space.

Here he could run his hands down her sides, following the narrowing of her waist to the swell of her hips beneath her silk skirts and below the stiffened tabs of her stays, then up again to her breasts. How fortunate that she’d mislaid her kerchief, and there was nothing to keep him from her warm, satiny flesh, thrust up high by her stays for him. He touched her, lightly stroking the top of her breast. She arched against him, pressing herself against his fingers, and it was easy enough to lift her breast free of her stays. He filled his hand with her, relishing the incredible softness, and gently flicked his thumb over her nipple. At once it stiffened, and she made that same delighted, surprised chuckle of eagerness.

That was all the encouragement—or was it permission?—that he needed. He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her onto the edge of the sarcophagus, her feet dangling and her legs apart. He kissed her again with growing intensity, and leaned between her legs into the mass of her petticoats. His cock was thick and ready in his breeches, pressing hard against his fall. If he pushed aside her skirts, there’d be nothing else to stop him. He could take her now, here. She’d be his wife soon enough. What would a few days either way matter, when—

“Hawke!”
Abruptly she froze in his arms, her eyes wide and full of panic. “Oh, no, oh, my, look,
look
!”

He’d no wish to look at anything other than her loveliness, but reluctantly he followed her gaze and turned.

Hell. How had he become so intent on her that he had forgotten the rest of his plans? There on the other side of the arbor was the refreshment he’d ordered, precisely arranged beside the goldfish pond: a table with a drifting white cloth, crystal decanters with wine and two goblets, a silver plate of sweet biscuits, a porcelain bowl overflowing with roses, a pair of cushioned chairs. If that were all, then there’d have been nothing to disturb her.

But because he was a duke and she was going to be a duchess, there were also three footmen in white-powdered wigs and his gold-laced livery, standing at attention as they waited to serve, and a French violin player, also waiting with his instrument in hand. Four men who, though they were pretending otherwise, had just been granted a most excellent view of the next Duchess of Hawkesworth’s legs, and worse, her right tit.

Hell, hell,
hell
.

Lizzie was already wriggling herself free of him, and he obliged by stepping back and blocking the servants’ view while she put herself back to rights. He’d lived his entire life in the view of servants and didn’t give their presence any thought. But he gathered that Lizzie’s upbringing had been different, without much of a staff, and he could understand her discomfiture. Ladies could turn shy over the strangest things.

“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly, and he was, too, though not quite for the things that he needed to apologize to her for. “Everything will be all right. They won’t repeat what they’ve seen.”

“The devil they won’t!” She glared at him as she tucked her breast back into her bodice, clearly furious and embarrassed at the same time. Now that he’d seen how her anger could lead so conveniently to arousal, he
was doubly sorry that their little game here was done. “I dare you to show me a single servant in any house, in any country, who wouldn’t tattle what he’d just seen. And a fiddler!”

“He’s a violinist, not a fiddler,” Hawke said, not helping but not knowing what else to say under the circumstances. “A Frenchman.”

“A
Frenchman
!” She made a low shriek of frustration. “How wondrous fine, Hawke. Now my good name will be tattered not only in London but in Paris, too.”

“No, it won’t, Lizzie,” he said, trying to placate her. “And what does it matter now, anyway? Once you’re my wife, nothing’s scandalous between us.”

She made a low, grumbling sound to show she didn’t agree. She was bending over to retie her garters, and he saw nearly as much of her breasts as when he’d pulled her bodice down.

“Who are those men, anyway?” she said as she stood upright, settling her stays around her waist. “Do you know them? Whose servants, to be in this park?”

“It’s not a park,” Hawke said. “These are my gardens. My house is there. You can just see the chimneys through the trees. Hawkesworth Chase.”

“This is all yours?”

“Mine,” he said, nodding. “I’ve another house, too, Halsbury Abbey in Somerset, along with one more in Scotland somewhere that I’ve never visited. But they’ll all be yours as well as mine. Ours.”

“Ours,” she repeated softly. “Then those footmen will be mine as well. Oh, Hawke, I’ll have no respect at all from the staff after this!”

She buried her face in her hands, and he put his arms around her, drawing her close.

“They’ll respect you, Lizzie, I’m sure of it,” he said. It was odd to comfort her like this, and he felt awkward doing it, patting her shoulders. His experiences with
women seldom involved comforting, but he supposed it must be expected with a wife. “Now come with me, and act as if there’s nothing amiss. If you can do that, then they will, too.”

She heaved a shuddering sigh, then lifted her head from his shoulder.

“You are perfectly, perfectly right, Hawke,” she said, visibly laboring to compose herself. “So long as I act like their duchess and their mistress, then they’ve no choice but to treat me as such.”

“True enough,” he said heartily, relieved.

“It is true,” she said, raising her chin with resolve. “Life is much like a game of cards. Bluffing
is
everything, isn’t it?”

He smiled, and tried not to think of how many other ways she fell back on bluffing. “There are cherry tarts on that table.”

She gasped, her attempts at a peeress’s composure gone as her face lit with girlish delight. “Cherry tarts! Do you know, Hawke, that those are my very favorite thing in all the world?”

“I do know,” he said as he offered her his arm. “I made inquiries.”

He had, too, sending a maid from his kitchen to the cook at Marchbourne House to discover Lady Elizabeth’s fancy.

“You did?” she asked, her eyes melting appreciatively when she looked at him. “For me?”

“All of this is for you, my own Lizzie,” he said gallantly. Most women would have squealed with delight over the prospect of owning this garden and house, but Lizzie seemed to care more for the tarts. It was oddly endearing, and he liked her all the more for it. But then he was on familiar ground here, giving women gifts they desired after he’d kissed them. “Every last bit of it.”

His confidence continued as he led Lizzie to the table
and seated her himself. Likely the footmen (being men) did wish to ogle her further, but instead they served with their usual decorum, and that, too, put her at her ease. The French violinist played the romantic Albinoni adagios that Hawke had chosen, which also made Lizzie sigh with enjoyment. She sipped her sherry and tossed crumbs to the goldfish, and the way she savored the cherry tarts, licking the sugary syrup from her fingers, could only make Hawke smile.

“One more, my dear,” he said, motioning to one of the footmen. “Because they are your favorites.”

“You spoil me, Hawke,” she said cheerfully as the footman set a fresh porcelain plate with another tart before her. “I vow I’ll—faith, Hawke, what is this? Oh, my. Oh,
my
!”

Carefully she uncurled the ruby and diamond bracelet from around the base of the tart where Hawke had placed it. She held it up, the stones glittering in the late afternoon sun, and stared at him incredulously.

“For me?” she whispered. “You would give such a thing to me?”

He laughed, his happiness a match for hers. “I told you everything here was for you,” he said. “Here, let me help you with the clasp.”

She held her wrist out to him. “How vastly, vastly beautiful,” she murmured, still in awe. “It’s not real, is it?”

He laughed again. “The Duchess of Hawkesworth will never wear paste stones,” he said. “Rubies and diamonds are what you deserve.”

She stared down at the bracelet, overwhelmed. Then she left her chair and came to perch on his lap, looping her arms around his shoulders.

“Rubies and diamonds and cherries,” she said shyly. “Cherries! However can I thank you, Hawke?”