The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (48 page)

After that her mind ceased making a running commentary of what happened. It was only afterward when she thought about it—she spent all night thinking of nothing else—that she remembered sucking inward on
his tongue until he moaned. And his mouth against her throat and her breasts, which his thumbs had bared by drawing her dress down beneath them. And his hands spread firmly over her buttocks, holding her against masculine hardness. It was only afterward that she thought to feel shock—and shame.

He was breathing hard, his face turned in against her hair, when his hands covered her breasts with her gown again. He held her by the shoulders for a few moments and then put her away from him and turned his back on her.

“The music has stopped,” he said, his voice sounding quite normal, if a trifle breathless. “Thank God. Miss Gray, did your mother never warn you against situations like this? Or my mother?”

A pail of cold water flung in her face could not have more effectively brought her back to the present.

“Yes,” she said. “And experience has taught me how to handle situations like this. A governess is often prey to lascivious attempts at seduction, Your Grace. I thought this was different. I thought I need not fight. You are my betrothed.” If truth were known, she had not even considered fighting.

“We are not married,” he said. “It would be folly indeed to anticipate the marriage bed, Miss Gray. What if I should die before the day? What if I should leave you with child? Even failing that, what if I should leave you a fallen woman?”

Hurt and anger—and shame—warred in her. And confusion about which was uppermost held her silent.

He turned to look at her. “I am sorry,” he said. “Deeply sorry. The fault was all mine. I asked a kiss of my betrothed and then proceeded to use you as I would a—” He stopped to inhale deeply. “Forgive me. Please forgive me. It will not happen again.”

“No.” She brushed past him on the way to the door.
“It will not, Your Grace. It seems I have more to learn than I have realized. It seems I have more in common with a whore—that
is
the word you stopped yourself from saying, is it not?—than a true lady. But I will learn. By the time I am your duchess, I will behave like a duchess. I will remember that kisses are meant to be brief and decorous.”

“Stephanie—” he said, coming after her.

“We must return, Your Grace,” she said, “before the next set begins. If we leave it longer, the
ton
will no longer think that you have been stealing a kiss. They will think you have been tumbling me, and my reputation will never recover. You and your mother will be disgraced.”

“Stephanie,” he said again, drawing her arm through his even though she tried to resist, and leading her out through the garden door she had been unable to find earlier. “What I said was unpardonable. I was horrified by my own lack of control and blamed you. I seem to have done nothing but insult you this evening. It was unpardonable. I will not even ask your pardon. I will bear the burden of my own guilt. But please do not blame yourself. Not in any way. When you look back later, as you surely will, you must take none of the blame on yourself.”

He was leading her quickly up the steps onto the balcony and across it to the French doors into the ballroom. Almost without thinking she smiled. She was on view again.

The point was, she thought, that she would not have considered their embrace in terms of guilt or shame if he had not made her see that both were needed. It had felt right. They were betrothed, soon to be married. Attraction—physical attraction—between them had seemed desirable. Without ever thinking of it in verbal terms, she knew that she had embraced him with a feeling
close to love. She had believed, naive as she was, that he had felt the same. There had been no question—surely there had not—of anything happening that might have left her ruined or with child. That was for the marriage bed. They had been standing in the conservatory.

But it seemed that there was guilt and there was shame. Such things as physical attraction and passion were quite inappropriate between a duke and his duchess—they were acceptable only between a duke and his mistress. And of course the word “love” was probably not even in the ducal vocabulary.

Well, then, she thought almost viciously as His Grace led her toward his mother and they all smiled as if nothing untoward had happened all evening—well, then, she would learn.

If it was the last thing she ever did in life, she would learn.

S
HE SEEMED LESS
shy today, he thought. Less shy with other people, that was. He was driving her in his curricle in Hyde Park during the fashionable hour, and she seemed in no way intimidated by the crush of people that the sunshine had brought out—not that the
ton
needed sunshine in order to gather for the daily ride or stroll and for the polite gossiping and ogling. Only a downpour of rain would keep them away.

She was looking extremely lovely in a pale blue muslin dress of simple, elegant design and a cornflower-trimmed straw bonnet. Her blue parasol was the only article that was in any way fussy. She twirled it above her head as they drove along. She smiled.

In the park she spoke to everyone who stopped to pay their respects. Unlike last evening she did not merely listen and encourage more talk with her smiles. Today she participated fully in the conversations. He knew that
she was succeeding in charming the gentlemen and perhaps making the ladies faintly envious. She was far more lovely than anyone else there, after all. He did not even pause to wonder if it was partiality that led him to such a decisive conclusion.

He had been foolish to worry that she would just not be able to learn in time what she would need to know to be his duchess. There would be a great deal more, of course, than merely to look fashionable and to converse with ease and charm. But those things certainly helped. And if she could learn those so quickly and so thoroughly, then surely she could learn everything else too, given a little more time.

He was pleased with her. He was proud of her.

And he was uncomfortable with her and still ashamed of himself. He had scarcely slept during what had remained of the night after he took her and his mother home from the ball.

If the cessation of the music in the ballroom had not somehow penetrated his consciousness when it had, he thought, he might not have brought that embrace to an end until it had reached its logical conclusion. He had been drawing up the skirt of her gown, bunching it in handfuls about her hips when he had realized what was happening—and what had already happened.

If one thing had characterized his life for the past eleven years, and even longer, it was control. He had always felt fully in control of other people and events and—most important—of himself. Last evening had bewildered him. He had insulted her right at the start in a way that was inexcusable, especially since he had not even realized it until she had pointed it out. And later, he had insulted her in such an unpardonable manner that he had shuddered over it all night and all morning—he had blamed her for his own loss of control.

The trouble was that his dream—his long abandoned
dream—had leapt to life for a few mindless minutes while he held her and kissed her. For those few minutes she had been that dream of love. She had felt like the other half of his soul—the half he had always known was missing, the half he had always yearned to find.

It had been a ridiculous feeling. All that had happened was that he had lusted after her, his own betrothed. He had behaved unpardonably.

And so today he was uncomfortable with her. And today her bright charm seemed more like a shield than anything else. She talked to him incessantly on the way to and from the park—about the weather, about the flowers she had received from various gentlemen who had danced with her last evening, including his orchids, about the kindness Lady Francis Kneller had shown her last evening and the amusement she had provided, about a hundred and one topics that held back the silence between them.

Silence, when there had been silence between them in his carriage during that journey, had been a comfortable thing. No longer. Not that either of them put it to the test today.

“Miss Gray,” he said when he had lifted her down from his curricle and led her inside and refused his mother’s invitation to come upstairs for tea, “I told you last evening that I would not ask your pardon for what was unpardonable. I have changed my mind.
Will
you forgive me?”

“Of course, Your Grace,” she said, smiling warmly. “I believe you were right to put at least part of the blame on me, though you were gallant enough to retract what you had said. I am gradually learning the rules, you see. I hope to have them all by heart by the time of our nuptials.”

She offered him her gloved hand, and he took it and raised it to his lips.

“Until this evening, then,” he said, “and the theater.”

“I am looking forward to it,” she said.

He knew what was wrong as soon as he stepped out of the house and climbed back to the high seat of his curricle. Although she had smiled and although her voice had been warm, there had been no gold flecks in her eyes. Strange, ridiculous notion. How could eyes change?

But hers had. There had been a certain blankness in their smiling depths.

HE HAD BECOME TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE—SHE WAS
uncomfortably aware of that realization during the three weeks leading up to her wedding—two quite distinct people.

When she was alone—but how rarely she was alone during those weeks—and during her dreams at night she was Stephanie Gray, vicar’s daughter. She was the girl and young woman who had kept house for her father. She was the general favorite of the villagers and even of the squire’s family. She visited everyone and was a friend of everyone, young and old, rich and poor alike. She took gifts of baking and needlework to the sick and elderly. She refused a marriage offer from Tom Reaves, the squire’s only son, though they had been playmates all through their childhood and friends in more recent years. She refused because she knew he had offered out of pity, for her father had died and left her poor and she was compelled to seek employment elsewhere. Friendship seemed not a strong enough basis for marriage.

When she was alone and when she dreamed, her life at the vicarage became idealized. It was always summer there. The sun always shone. The flowers in the garden always bloomed. The villagers always smiled. Tom always seemed a little dearer than just a friend. And his sisters seemed more like her sisters too.

When she was alone, she liked who she was. She was the woman her parents had raised her to be. She was the woman she wanted to be. She was herself.

But when she was not alone—most of the time during those weeks—she was the betrothed of the Duke of Bridgwater. She dressed the part, always expensively elegant. And she lived the part, every word, every action, every reaction consciously chosen. There was no spontaneity at all in this Stephanie. She seldom made a mistake. After the gentle scolding meted out by the duchess following that first ball—“Everyone feels the occasional need for solitude, Stephanie. But a duchess recognizes that she is a public person. She learns to live without solitude.” —after that there were no more scoldings and only the occasional reminder. Like the time she apologized and smiled too warmly at a milliner’s assistant who had patiently taken out more than a dozen bonnets from their hat boxes only to find that she had not after all made a single sale—“A duchess
never
apologizes for giving a servant work, Stephanie.”

With her betrothed she behaved as a future wife should behave. Never again would he have cause to compare her to a whore—though he had stopped himself from using that word at the Marquess of Hayden’s ball, she knew it was the word he had almost said. She conversed with him when they were alone together on any genteel topic that leapt to mind. When they were not alone, she gave her attention to other people. No one would ever accuse her of clinging to the coattails of her husband.

He did not kiss her again during those weeks, except for her hand. Had he asked for another kiss, she would have offered her lips while keeping her hands and her body—and her emotions—to herself. When they were married, she would offer her body. But only as a genteel wife would. She would offer herself for his pleasure—never
her own—though she knew that he would probably get most of that elsewhere. Most important, she would offer herself as a bearer for his legitimate offspring. She would give him his heir. Her Grace had already told her that this would be her primary duty.

She would give him a son, God willing, she thought. A life in exchange for a life. She would give him a son and heir, and perhaps then she would feel it possible to take back her own life. Perhaps she would feel that she had repaid the huge debt she owed him.

Perhaps … Oh, perhaps one day she could be herself again. Or was self always lost in marriage? Even when one did not owe one’s life to one’s husband, one became his property after marriage. All that one possessed became his.