The Gypsy Duchess (10 page)

He strode across the room and yanked open the door with a force that delineated more clearly than words the turmoil raging within him. Blindly, he pushed past the duchess, who stood on the threshold, and disappeared down the darkened hallway.

Halfway through dinner that evening, Moira had decided she had had all she could take of Elizabeth’s glowing looks and rapturous sighs. It was obvious the marquess was too courteous to rebuff her, but someone had to set the poor thing straight before she made a complete fool of herself. But how in the name of heaven did one go about such a thankless task?

Much as she hated the idea of taking the problem to her nemesis, the Earl of Langley, he was the only person who was a close friend to both Elizabeth and the marquess. Also, certain hints he had dropped this morning made her think he was already aware of the situation.

She gave a heartfelt sigh. If anyone could advise her how to discourage a foolish young woman’s romantic fantasies, he was surely that person. According to the London gossip mill, he had been pursued by enough amorous females to be an undisputed expert on the subject.

She had just reached the partially open door of the earl’s chamber and raised her hand to knock when she heard him say, “The duchess mentioned you have been spending a great deal of time with Elizabeth Kincaid.”

Moira’s breath caught in her throat. The ladylike thing to do would be to tiptoe away and accord her two guests their privacy. But one thing she had never been accused of being was a lady. She kicked off the hated shoes she had donned to face the earl, planted her feet firmly outside his door, and listened unabashedly to the balance of his conversation with the marquess.

Long after the sound of Stamden’s footsteps had died away down the hall, she stood in the doorway, her gaze locked with that of Devon St. Gwyre. She had been so touched by his compassionate words; she had felt sentimental tears mist in her eyes. “How is it, my lord, that always just when I think I know you all too well, you do something so unbelievable, I realize I do not know you at all?” she asked softly.

“Oddly enough, I had been thinking the same about you before Stamden joined me,” he said. “I take it you overheard our conversation.”

She nodded. “I heard enough to know you were already tackling the problem I had come to discuss with you.”

“But not with great success,” he said wearily. “I had hoped for a different outcome. I think Elizabeth is the ideal woman for my friend, Stamden. It is beyond me that he does not see it.”

Moira dabbed at her moist eyes with a handkerchief. “I am surprised you approve of the match, my lord. The disparity in their social stations is very great.”

“I doubt that would bother Stamden in the least. He has always been notoriously democratic in this thinking.” Devon searched her face. “Are you saying you are opposed to the alliance?”

“No, of course not. But until the marquess is certain of his own heart, it matters little what the rest of us think. We can only hope he comes to his senses in time to save them both from heartbreak.”

Moira smiled tentatively at the solemn-faced earl. “For what it is worth, I think you handled the situation admirably. You have shown yourself to be a good friend to both of them.”

Devon returned her smile with one of his own. “And they both admire you greatly. Then why is it, do you think, that you and I constantly rub sparks off each other?”

Moira watched him pick up the onyx queen and cradle her in his long sensitive fingers. “I do not know, my lord,” she managed in a hoarse whisper.

Idly, almost as if unaware of what he was doing, he caressed the diminutive queen, and the very stroke of his fingers sent ripples of awareness coursing through Moira as she recalled how those same fingers had felt touching her cheek, cupping her breast.

He raised his head and searched her face. “Has it occurred to you, your grace, that since Charles is only seven years old, we may well drive each other mad in the next fourteen years unless we find some basis for agreement?”

Moira released the breath she’d been holding with a sudden whoosh. “It has occurred to me, my lord.”

Ever so gently, he returned the queen to her place on the board. “Perhaps a good beginning would be to use a less formal address. ‘Moira’ and ‘Devon’ sound a great deal more friendly than ‘your grace’ and ‘my lord,’ don’t you agree?”

“I imagine so,” Moira said warily, her heart thudding heavily in her breast.

Devon heard the hesitation in her voice and decided it was time to play the hand Ned Bridges had dealt him. “My leg is much improved. I should like to join you for dinner tomorrow, if that is agreeable with you. That will give me a chance to meet your father—something I am most anxious to do since Charles seems so taken with him.”

“My father? Charles told you my father is here?” Moira said in a small strangled voice. “You wish to meet him?”

“Of course I do. In fact, I insist upon it, since my ward thinks of the man as his grandfather.” He picked up the onyx bishop and held it poised above the board for a moment before moving it diagonally to the next square. “I look forward to hearing some of the hair-raising tales of pirates and smugglers with which he’s been entertaining Charles.”

Moira stared at him, a fearful, guarded look darkening her lovely eyes. It reminded him, somehow, of a young French soldier he had once trapped in a cave outside Salamanca. Wounded and unarmed, the boy had stared at him through eyes already resigned to imminent death. Devon had simply sheathed his sword, and walked away, unable to think of a frightened boy as his enemy.

All at once he felt sickened by this game of cat and mouse he had instigated with the beautiful Moira. What had begun as a simple battle of wits with a clever opponent had somehow turned deadly serious. But why? What had he said that struck such terror in her?

She faced him squarely, her eyes wide, pupils dilated. “Before we discuss this proposed friendship of ours, I must know…” She took a deep breath which made her generous bosom rise and fall provocatively. “Are you going to let me keep Charles with me?”

Ah, so that was it. The mother lioness protecting her cub
. Devon smiled. “I doubt I would have much success establishing a friendship with either you or Charles if I attempted to separate you. It is easy to see you are very fond of each other.”

Her bosom rose and fell again, this time in a sigh of relief. Devon tore his eyes away from the fascinating sight long enough to study her reaction to his next words. “And how could I hope to find better bodyguards for the lad than four of Cornwall’s ‘slipperiest gentlemen?’ Five actually, since it appears my batman was one of the crewmen on the
Lolita
. The poor fellow became rather embarrassingly emotional when he realized it was you who had saved him from the hangman’s noose.”

“So that was what Ned was rambling about when I met him on the staircase.” Her eyes, blank with terror just moments before, now flashed angrily. “What more have you learned of my past through your prying, my lord?”

“Not nearly enough, Moira. Not nearly enough. But I intend to learn all your secrets before I’m through. I consider it my duty as Charles’s guardian.”

“I supposed you could have me investigated by Bow Street,” she said in a voice thick with anger.

Devon chuckled. “Don’t think for a minute I haven’t considered it, Madame. Though I suspect I’d be wasting my blunt. I doubt even those accomplished spies could unravel all the mysteries of the scandalous Duchess of Sheffield, as you’ve been dubbed by the
quidnuncs
of the
ton
.”

“The same gossipmongers who’ve spread the rumor that the Earl of Langley is the most notorious rake in London, I assume,” Moira said. She sighed. “What a fine pair of scoundrels the duke named to raise his young son.”

“A fine pair indeed. Shall we drink to the friendship of scoundrels then, my lovely lady?” Devon glanced toward the tray containing a brandy decanter and glasses. “I cannot offer you the usual ladies’ drinks, such as ratafia or orgeat, but then I should imagine brandy would be the preferred drink of a smuggler’s daughter.”

“Mother’s milk,” she agreed, rising to pour two glasses. She handed one to Devon, who raised it in a toast. “To the friendship of scoundrels,” he said “and to secrets learned.”

Mystery and mischief glittered in her strange, almond-shaped eyes. “To secrets kept,” she responded, and promptly choked on her first gulp of the fiery liquid.

“I
am afraid you will find dinner at White Oaks somewhat informal, my lord,” Moira had said.

Too late, Devon realized he should have taken her seriously. He might then have been better prepared for one of the more unique dining experiences of his life.

It was not the early hour that he found so strange; he kept country hours himself when in residence at Langley Hall, and during the campaign on the Peninsula, he’d grown accustomed to eating whenever he was lucky enough to find something edible.

Nor was it the pleasant candlelit room Moira had already explained was not the formal banquet hall, but rather a smaller room reserved for family dining only.

Oddly enough, it was the seating arrangement that was the first real surprise that greeted him when he walked through the door with Moira on his arm. For instead of being spread out around the ten-foot mahogany table in the usual manner, the colorful Wedgewood jasperware serving plates were all set in a cozy huddle near the head, as if all the diners were expected to converse with each other instead of simply with the persons seated to their right and left.

And indeed, as he soon found out, that was exactly what they were expected to do. No sooner had they all been seated than everyone began talking to everyone else, even to those seated across the table—an unheard of breach of etiquette at any other table at which he had ever dined.

The odd collection of diners was the second surprise—the most vocal of which was Moira’s father, who turned out to be a remarkably handsome, aging Irishman, who was full of himself, but who had a certain vulgar charm and a knack for telling a story that kept young Charles begging for more. Devon had been prepared to hate the rogue who had been the cause, albeit inadvertently of Blaine’s death. But after half an hour in his company, he found him too preposterous to warrant anything but a mild disgust.

Then there were the two boys. To the best of his recollection, Devon had never before dined where there was a mixture of adults and children. It was never done in his family. Neither Blaine nor he had been seated at a table with their parents until after their first term at Eton. Nor, as far as he knew had any of their friends.

It was an odd experience, this dining with a mix of generations, and he wasn’t entirely sure he approved of it. He certainly had his reservations about a seven year old, even a duke, occupying the host’s seat at the head of the table. Yet there sat young Charles on a fat cushion, with his feet dangling at least six inches above the floor. Devon was given the seat on one side of him, Moira the other; and no one looked askance at the unusual arrangement.

Nor did anyone, other than he, appear to find anything amiss in seating a ten-year-old London street urchin next to an earl. Moira simply introduced the thin, freckle-faced boy on Devon’s right side as “Alfie Duggan, Charles’s companion,” and left it at that.

“Proud to meet you, guv’nor,” Alfie Duggan said, his gap-toothed grin spreading from ear to ear. Then dropping his voice to a whisper, he added, “You’re a brave man to my way of thinking, and that’s a fact.”

“I am not ashamed of my war record,” Devon replied stiffly, taken back by the boy’s odd comment. “But there are braver men than I who lie in unmarked graves on the Peninsula.”

“Don’t I know a bloomin’ thing about your war record, guv’nor,” Alfie said. “But any man wot’d keep her”—he jerked a thumb toward Moira—“biting her fingernails close to a fortnight is either mighty brave or mighty foolish, and you don’t look to be a fool.” He frowned. “Or didn’t nobody tell you the thing wot burns the duchess’s bacon faster’n anything else is being kept waiting?”

“As a matter of fact, nobody did,” Devon said, struggling to keep a sober face, since it was obvious the boy was deadly serious, “but I shall certainly keep it in mind in the future.”

He looked up to find Moira studying him intently across the table, probably to judge his reaction to the “somewhat informal” atmosphere in which he found himself. He smiled at her. If she thought to discompose him with her ramshackle way of managing a household, she was in for a disappointment. But he did find himself wondering why Stamden hadn’t warned him of what to expect. Surely he must have thought it an odd sort of setup as well.

Eventually two footmen arrived with serving platters of food—at least he assumed they were footmen since they were in livery. Though, truth to tell, they looked like a couple of cutthroats who would be more at home saying “stand and deliver” than “will you have a bit of mutton, my lord.” It occurred to Devon, as he helped himself to a generous portion, that if these were the young duke’s new bodyguards, the solution might well be more dangerous than the problem.

The duke, however, seemed perfectly at ease with the redheaded giants. “Don’t you look grand in your new uniform,” he said, beaming at the footman who hovered over him while Moira served him from the selection of food on the platter.

“I look like a bloomin’ blue jay at mating season and well you know it, so don’t be bamming me, your grace,” the giant grumbled, and the duke dissolved into giggles.

The giant peered over the duke’s shoulder. “And speaking of birds, there’s not more than what would feed one on your plate, so I’ll be expecting to find it clean as a baby’s bottom when I come back later to remove it.”

“I’ll try, Michael. I really will,” the duke promised. “But it’s hard ‘cause I never get hungry like Alfie does.”

“Humpf!” the giant said and moved on to serve Elizabeth Kincaid.

Devon shook his head. This madcap household was looking more like Bedlam every minute. Now a footman-cum-smuggler was giving orders to a duke. He really must lay down some rules on the proper rearing of a peer of the realm…and he would, but not tonight with the boy looking so much happier than the first time he’d met him. Maybe tomorrow if he could get Moira alone.

In the meantime, he tucked into his food. Despite her many deficiencies as a proper hostess, Moira did set an excellent table by his standards. His years in the army had cured him of a taste for the rich sauces and heavy desserts to which most London hostesses appeared addicted. He’d choked down so many lobster patties and truffles in champagne sauce during his stay in London he would count himself lucky if he never saw either of the delicacies again.

Moira served the simplest kind of fare, more what one would expect to find at one of the better wayside inns than on a ducal sideboard: roasted leg of mutton, steamed vegetables, buttered potatoes, and fresh fruit—the same sort of meal he had enjoyed in the sickroom each day. Evidently her taste in food was as plain as her taste in clothing.

He smiled to himself, thinking how he had lain in his tent on the Peninsula picturing her covered with jewels and reigning as the queen of London society. If there was any truth in the
ton
gossip, she had never accepted any of the hundreds of invitations she’d received during her tenure as the Duchess of Sheffield.

Nor had she ever been seen at Rundell and Bridges or any of the fashionable Bond Street shops. Hatchard’s Book Store, on the other hand, had counted her as one of its most frequent customers. As a result, she had earned herself a reputation as a bluestocking and a dangerous recluse who kept the old duke under her spell by dabbling in the occult. Devon wondered if she knew or cared about what was being whispered of her in the fashionable salons of London—and if he would ever learn the whole truth about the perplexing woman.

“My lord, may I ask you a question?” Elizabeth’s plaintive voice roused him from his ruminations and he smiled across the table at her, determined to play the proper guest for the balance of the meal.

“Ask away, dear lady,” he said, then took a good look at her and lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. She was ghostly pale and he could see, from her red-rimmed eyes, she had been crying. No one had to tell him why. Stamden had bid him goodbye shortly after dawn and Devon had cursed himself ever since for his infernal meddling. Maybe, left to their own devices, the lonely marquess and the equally lonely vicar’s daughter might have found a way to give each other the comfort they both so sorely needed.

“Why did the marquess have to leave so suddenly?” she asked, her lip trembling noticeably.

The sad little query stabbed at Devon’s conscience like the thrust of a knife blade. He swallowed hard. “Stamden said there was some trouble at his estate in Northumberland which needed his immediate attention,” he said in a flat voice. It was not exactly a lie, but neither was it entirely the truth.

Elizabeth grasped at it like a drowning person who’d just spied a life raft. A light turned on in her soft, brown eyes. “Then, of course, he had to go, for he is the most conscientious of men, but mayhap he’ll return once his task is completed,” she said, one word tripping over another in breathless confusion. Devon felt more guilty than ever to have raised her hopes.

“I suppose he might,” he murmured. “Who can know what a man like Stamden may do.” Devil take it, one expected a woman of five and twenty to have a bit more starch in her backbone and a few less feathers between her ears. Had Elizabeth learned nothing while serving as the duchess’s companion? No man would ever reduce that lady to tears.

He stared across the table at the fiery black-haired beauty, who neither asked for nor gave quarter to any man, and realized that the hatred he had once held toward her had slowly evolved into a grudging respect. He could understand why the duke had chosen her to raise his son. She was the strongest, most independent woman he had ever known—and as ferociously maternal as any she-wolf where young Charles was concerned.

How could his naïve young brother have imagined he could take such a woman to wife and keep her content as a simple farmer’s wife? There was a passion in her, a fire so hot it burned like the raging inferno Devon had once seen sweep through a tinder-dry forest in the mountains of Spain. Blaine could never have tamed such a fire to crackle merrily on a cottage hearth.

But could any man tame such fire? Or was she, as Stamden had judged, a law unto herself—a mysterious, exotic creature no man could ever call his own. For the first time Devon admitted to himself that his desire for Moira was far deeper and more profound than simple lust.

She was a fire in his blood, a madness in his soul. He had kissed her but twice—once in anger, once in a dream. Yet the touch of her lips had burned the memory of every other woman from his brain.

He must know more of her and if the knowing should destroy him, as it had destroyed Blaine, then so be it. He had always been a risk-taker and this was the greatest risk he had ever been tempted to take. Heretofore he had only gambled his life; now he stood to gamble his heart.

Surreptitiously, Moira studied the face of the man across the table from her, startled by the myriad emotions reflected on his handsome countenance. She had heard the ambivalence in his answer to Elizabeth’s question and sensed he was stretching the truth in order to give the poor woman a brief respite from the heartbreak she was suffering. It was not the first compassionate thing she had seen Devon St. Gwyre do. The man was an enigma—infuriatingly pompous one moment, amazingly sensitive the next.

She watched the candlelight glisten in his golden hair and turn his tawny eyes into amber gemstones. She shivered, his uncanny resemblance to the legendary Golden Warrior of gypsy myth sending chills down her spine.

At the moment, flickering shadows softened the fierce line of his jaw and played across the bridge of his narrow, aristocratic nose, rendering him deceptively mellow, even as the patina of time might mellow a vivid painting.

But if the truth be known, there was nothing soft or mellow about Devon St. Gwyre. Forged of steel and tested in battle, he was a courageous man, strong in his convictions and firm in his sense of duty. He might be capable of pity for a weaker member of the human race, but she strongly suspected the passions that drove him were of the flesh, not the heart. Any woman foolish enough to give her love to such a man would be asking for heartbreak.

But she was not just any woman. Heartbreak was nothing new to her. A
mestiza
—a half breed—and outcast. It had been her legacy from the day of her birth. Many men, both gypsy and
gaujo
had lusted after her; she had never been tempted to give herself to any of them. Not even to Blaine, who had truly loved her.

Only one man—Devon St Gwyre—had awakened the inchoate sensuality that lay deep in the core of her being. So what did she have to lose if she succumbed to the desire she saw in his eyes whenever he looked at her?

She sighed. Not a thing except her pride in her own worth. But since that was the only thing of value she would ever possess, she must accept the fact that without it she would be as meaningless as the wind-scattered ashes of a deserted gypsy campfire.

No, the lusty Earl of Langley would have to whistle himself up another warm body to fill his bed until he returned to London and his accommodating opera dancers. In the meantime, what harm could there be in a mild flirtation with him as long as she set the limits? Surely the gods would not deny her that small pleasure when they had already denied her so much.

A nagging little voice in the back of her head reminded her that this was much the same argument she had used to justify her disastrous flirtation with Blaine, but she chose to ignore it. Devon St. Gwyre was nothing like his gentle young brother; the only heart at risk this time would be her own.