The Accidental Duchess (24 page)

Once on the street, he opened the scrap of paper to see where he could find the blackmailing rogue. He barely noticed the first two lines of the address because the last word riveted his attention thoroughly. Algernon Trilby’s family home was in Hampshire.

E
verything looked different. She could not help remarking on it each day. Fields appeared smaller, buildings less picturesque, light less golden, and paths more rocky.

Had she really experienced the nicer Hampshire, or had her mind prettied up the memories?

It occurred to her as she walked up the path to the cottage, that if Lakewood walked beside her now and she looked over at him, he might not match her memories either. His face survived in a golden glow too, didn’t it? Perhaps she would see faults she had never noticed. He might have ears that were too big, or eyes too close together. Her girlish love had made him an Adonis, but she doubted the truth had been even close to that.

She suspected the real Lakewood could not measure up to Penthurst, for example. The duke did not need some girl’s infatuation to make him more than he was. That was true in everything, not only his face and form. Even if he were not a duke, or even a peer, or even a man of property and wealth, he would be formidable. That was not a word that she recalled Lakewood evoking.

For a sane person, weighing things without emotion, there could be no competition between the two men. None at all. Except that Lakewood could beat the duke on one single point. There was the chance that he had loved Lydia Alfreton. It could be a major difference if Lydia Alfreton was your name.

Had he?

She had come here suspecting maybe not. She wondered, as she entered the cottage, if the question still remained open merely because the likely answer would leave her feeling like the worst fool.

She heard sounds coming from the kitchen. She called to Sarah while she removed her spencer and bonnet. “Did a letter from my aunt come in the post, Sarah?”

Sarah did not answer. Curious, she walked to the back of the house to see if Sarah had gone out to the garden.

She jumped with surprise when she entered the kitchen. The duke stood by the window in riding clothes.

In that startled instant when she first saw him there, she had all the answers she would ever need. The joy in her heart told her the truth. So did the stirring in her body.

The real question, she realized, was not who had loved whom in the past, but whom she loved now.

 • • • 

L
ydia jumped as if he had popped out of a hiding place to scare her. Then she did not move at all. He might have been a stranger from the way she examined him.

She looked beautiful and fresh. Her hair poured freely down her shoulders and back and her skin showed a flush from her walk. The contentment he experienced in seeing her astonished him even more than the anticipation had. Within that peace, however, a seed of nostalgia sent down tiny roots. If things went badly the next few days, he might never know this contentment again.

He expected she would upbraid him.
How dare you follow me, as if I need a nursemaid or guardian, after I told you this did not concern you at all. I would think it was clear I wanted to be alone here.

Instead she walked over, wrapped her arms around him, and laid her head on his chest. He embraced her closely and pressed a long kiss to her crown.

“How did you know how to find this place?” she asked.

“Your aunt was happy to tell me. Considering the rumors about your absence, the matrons of the ton would have forced her to if she had hesitated.”

“Rumors?”

“I will tell you later. Right now—” He kissed her. It had only been two weeks but it might have been a year from the way that kiss moved him. His essence sighed with relief and gratitude as her warm, soft lips accepted sweetly, then eagerly. He lifted her into it, closer, and she circled his neck with her arms.

Very soon the kiss was not enough for either of them. She looked at the window. “Sarah—”

“I sent her to the village to see if she could find some wine to buy.”

“That should take an hour at least. It is a bit of a walk.”

“Sarah is a smart woman. I think it will take at least two.”

She hung on him, and smiled up impishly. “You arranged that neatly. Did you ride all this way because you missed me as a lover?”

“That was one reason. The biggest one.” The other one was in his pocket, waiting for another day.

Her smile did not waiver, but her eyes turned serious and soulful. “I am flattered. I have missed you too. Badly. I am so glad you came. I need you to hold me. I need your friendship too.”

Her declaration of need provoked a fierce arousal. He saw no sadness in her, but her words implied her mission was not done yet. Nor could he see it through for her, or change the truth to protect her. He could hold her the way she needed today, however, and be the friend she sought.

Not only a friend, of course. A lover too. Right now that part of their alliance refused to be denied any longer. He scooped her into his arms. “Where are the bedchambers?”

She laughed, and pointed to the ceiling.

She lost one shoe as he carried her out of the kitchen. Another fell on the stairs. Her arms remained circling his neck all the way up. She distracted him with a kiss on the landing. It did nothing for his control.

“That way.” She pointed.

It looked like a girl’s chamber, all white and frilled. He set her on her feet and began pulling off her clothes. She laughed again, and pushed his hands away. “A bit of patience, Your Grace. I did not bring much with me, and can ill afford to have you shred this dress.”

He left her to it and dropped his coats. While he untied his neckpiece and sleeves he noticed more of the chamber. The furniture was old-fashioned and simple. The bed had an iron headboard and footboard made up of wrought vertical rods, with four long ones at the corners holding up the canopy and the frame for drapes.

He sat down and pulled off his boots. Lydia’s own disrobing distracted him. She was down to her chemise and hose. She noticed him watching and teased a long time in removing the chemise. It inched up ever so slowly. She turned, pretending to be shy, and her soft round bottom was revealed first.

He reached for her and pulled her back so he could kiss the dimple at the small of her back, and luxuriate in the sensation of her skin against his caress.

“They think you left because all was not right between us in bed,” he said while he kissed her back and slid his hands down her legs.

“Who thinks that?”

“Everyone, I suppose. Perhaps even our friends. It seems husbands would only allow their wives to go away so soon if husbands have imposed so much that their wives are miserable about it.”

“Too often, you mean?”

“Too erotically is the thinking, I believe.”

She turned around. “I did not leave because of it, but you did say some of those things are not commonplace with married couples.”

He kissed her stomach, loving the sensation of her velvet skin on his lips. He watched his hands gloss around her breasts. “You would tell me if you did not like something, wouldn’t you? I do not want you to feel obligated.”

Desire had already transformed her expression. She leaned into his caresses the way she did when she wanted more. “Of course I would tell you. The
on dit
is wrong at least with me. But you already knew that.”

He flicked his tongue at her breasts. She tensed and gasped and stretched her fingers through his hair and held his head closer. “Have you been hinting that you want to show me something else extraordinary?”

“Many things. But not right now.” Despite the images crowding his head, he did not want to give erotic lessons now.

He stood, lifted her again, and set her on the bed. He shed his lower garments and settled on top of her so he could feel her totally all along his body. He used his hand to make sure she was ready, then entered slowly, making it last, soulfully grateful for every exquisite instant. Then he did not move for a long while, but lay there in her embrace with his kiss resting in the crook of her neck while he breathed in the reality of her.

 • • • 

S
ounds came from below. The light at the window showed the afternoon was waning. Lydia feared losing the poignant beauty if she moved, so she remained where she was, with Penthurst’s arm crossing her body in its gesture of protection and possession.

She would not have minded extraordinary in an erotic way if he had wanted that. She found those lessons exciting. She much preferred that he had sensed she needed something quite normal, however. She needed this slow pleasure, with its calmer explorations. It allowed her to never lose hold on the way her emotions gave the intimacy new depths. That had touched the pleasure before, but today had been about little else.

Had he felt it too? Perhaps men never did. Most likely men married under obligation did not.

His arm moved, to her regret. He sat up. “It is late in the day.”

“Sarah has started cooking. Will you stay here with us? I should warn you that there is only this chamber and my aunt’s that have beds, and I gave Sarah my aunt’s.”

“We both fit here. The cottage is simple, but pleasant. I will stay, but only if you do not mind.”

He got up and looked out the window. “A glorious sunset is forming. Let us walk out and enjoy it.”

They dressed and went below. Sarah came out from the kitchen and curtsied. “I’ve the wine, Your Grace. Dinner will be in an hour or so, milady. I just put the potted fowl on the hearth.”

She led him to a path that would snake through the fields of a neighboring farm. As their legs strode in unity, she thought of another man who had paced beside her on the same ground. There would not be a single place she could take Penthurst that she had not already been with Lakewood.

“You are very quiet, Lydia.”

“I am just lost in my thoughts.”

“I hope I have not interfered with your plans here, or tainted the nostalgia no matter what you concluded about its source.”

Her heart ached. He knew. How like him now to say in his oblique way that if she wanted to keep Lakewood in her heart forever, he would understand.

He deserved better. She did too.

“I have not drawn many conclusions. I see the time I spent here one early spring very differently than my memories had, however. Less golden, and far less perfect. Even my emotions. I was not a young girl, but my head had been turned for the first time, and that can be a powerful creator of illusions. I have spent the last fortnight looking back with more mature eyes. I can see how I might have been manipulated, and how his insistence we keep our alliance a secret probably reflects his dishonorable intentions.”

He did not say anything, but after a few more steps he took her hand in his. They strolled toward the west in the crisp autumn air. Red streaks had formed in the sky as the sun hung low. Suddenly all of the light changed as if an artist had added some pink to the tint of the atmosphere.

They stopped and watched while it lasted. Eventually the sun disappeared behind the horizon and deep twilight fell. She turned to him. “I want you to know that all of this, the time and place and person, had been shut in the past. I did not think about him when we—when you—”

“Were intimate?”

“Yes.”

“You would have found the word yourself, after you accommodated how bold you were being in looking for one in the first place.”

She laughed.

He pulled her so she snapped into his embrace. “That is good to know, Lydia.” He kissed her. “I am almost as relieved to hear it as I was when I learned it had not been his naked bum you saw that day.”

For all the humor, a stirring bond held them in that embrace. She had spoken the truth when she said she had needed a friend. Not Emma or Cassandra or Sarah either. This one, who now looked at her as the light faded.

Perhaps it was knowing her face became obscured. Maybe it only grew out of the closeness she felt to him, and the mood her confidences had created. She thought, however, that what she next wanted to say might not be so bold as it would have been even a week ago.

She touched his face, then his mouth. “I think that I may have cruelly misjudged you about that duel. Will you tell me about it?”

The lights in his eyes could still be seen. They flashed anger, pride, and even, she thought, some pain. He took her hand from his face, kissed it, and they walked on.

Only when the cottage came into view did he speak again.

 • • • 

H
e never spoke of it. He did not know why he did now. Perhaps because of the allusions she had once made to how dukes can murder friends and escape judgment. He wanted her to know it had not been so black-and-white.

Maybe suspecting that the days ahead would tear open the wound anyway compelled him to prepare her with this other story too.

He would have spared her the tale of Lakewood’s dishonesty with the commissions, but that was bound to come out soon anyway. He kept it brief, but that hardly changed the truth. What was left of that infatuated girl might not want to hear it, but the duchess took it in stride.

Talking about the actual duel came harder.

“I thought once he calmed, he would stand down from his challenge. Your brother was his second, and tried to talk sense to him. And to me, but he did not know what I had learned. Lakewood seemed to think that if he killed me, his good name would survive. And if he did not, it might survive too. I did not realize how determined he was to go through with it, fully, until I saw him that morning.”

“Did he say as much?”

“He said he would silence me. I told him that others knew. That one of his commissions had revealed too much, which was how I learned the truth. He changed then. The belligerence left him.” The memory of that change haunted him. More than the urge to fight and kill had left Lakewood in that moment. He had emptied of will right there, and his gaze had turned inward and haunted. “Then he walked away, to await the call to position.”

“If killing you would not stop the scandal, why not stand down then?”

Because he decided to walk into the ball from my pistol
. “Pride, perhaps.”

She took his arm and pressed against his side. “Yet his reputation was spared, despite what you said, about others knowing.”