The Gypsy Duchess (12 page)

Devon passed him without a word, then loosening his grip on Moira’s elbow, drew her arm through his. She left it there. What choice did she have? Snatching it away would make her appear nervous and unsure of herself—the last image she wished to project to the arrogant earl.

For some time they strolled in silence, the only light that of the pale spring moon, the only sound, other than the pounding of her heart, the croaking of the bullfrogs in the lily pond at the center of the garden. Moira breathed in the rich earthy scent of the fresh-turned flowerbeds and the delicate fragrance of the early forsythia blossoms sprinkled along the bare tree branches above her head—hoping to find the same sense of peace she usually found in this beautiful spot. It was of no use. There was nothing peaceful about walking with her arm linked in Devon’s. She felt like a top whose spring had been wound so tightly, it was about to go flying off in all directions.

With a start, she realized he was talking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

He looked taken aback, even shocked, and she found herself with an almost overwhelming urge to giggle. “The most notorious rake in London” was undoubtedly accustomed to having women hang on his every word.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, as if to make certain she was listening this time. “I said if there was one thing I had learned about you in our brief acquaintance it was that, unlike most females, you meet every issue that confronts you head-on.”

“It seems the logical thing to do.” Moira held her breath, waiting for his next words and gripped by a strong premonition they would change forever her relationship with the enigmatic earl. He had certainly been acting strangely since she’d encountered him in the darkened dining room, and the look in his eyes could almost be described as predatory.

Devon had done a great deal of soul-searching while waiting for Moira to claim her slippers and had come to the conclusion he wanted to begin his affair with her as he meant to go on. Open. Honest. Without all the ridiculous posturing and subterfuge that he had found so boring in dealing with his previous mistresses. She was that kind of woman. Plain in her tastes and, he suspected, delightfully elemental in her passions. Exactly the kind woman he needed at this moment in his life.

He stopped beside a fountain into which a gigantic marble fish spat a never-ending waterfall of crystal-clear water, and smiled down at the lovely woman whose hand was still tucked in the crook of his arm. It was a delicate, slender hand and shockingly bare (for of course she wore no gloves)—which somehow conjured up an image of other, more delectable parts of her body in the same state of undress. He covered her fingers with his own, absorbing their warmth, and the ache in his aroused body instantly intensified.

“So, lovely Moira,” he said, getting right to the point, “what are we to do about this overwhelming attraction we feel for each other?”

“Do?” She looked genuinely surprised, and he felt a moment of uneasiness. She was a woman of the world and as such had to be well aware of how the game of seduction was played. He couldn’t believe the fact that he was cutting the chase a bit short would disturb her unduly.

“We cannot simply ignore our passions for the next fourteen years,” he said reasonably, wondering at the sudden tenseness he felt in her arm that was link with his. He cleared his throat. “I, for one, have never found self-torture to be the least bit satisfying.”

“I shouldn’t imagine you had, my lord, but surely even ‘London’s most notorious rake’ will admit ‘our passions’ cannot be our only consideration.” There was an edge to her voice that surprised Devon. She sounded strangely indignant, almost as if she considered his reference to her passionate nature an insult.

He experienced a touch of annoyance. One expected such prudishness in the insipid little virgins making their comeouts in the London marriage mart; one did not expect it in a practical woman of the world—especially one with Moira’s colorful background.

“I am well aware that we must be discreet for Charles’s sake,” he said. “Though God only knows how our liaison could further blacken two such tarnished reputations as ours.”

She continued to regard him with narrowed eyes. “You have a point there, I suppose, such as it is.”

She was angry. Definitely angry. Women were strange, unpredictable creatures. Why had he expected Moira to be all
that
different?

Devon swore softly under his breath, his patience growing thinner by the minute. His nose was cold; his fingers colder. What was he doing trading words with this beautiful woman in a chilly garden when they should be tumbling in a warm feather bed?

“Devil take it, madam, what do you want of me?” he asked. “I thought you, of all women, would be above demanding I do the pretty. Must I put it into words? Surely you know I desire you more than I have ever desired any other woman. You haunt my dreams when asleep; you torture my thoughts when awake. If I do not have you soon, I shall be forced to commit myself to Bedlam as a stark, raving lunatic. There, are you satisfied?”

Her face was pale in the moonlight, almost as pale as the marble that surrounded her. “I am satisfied you sound like a spoiled child who wants a new toy simply because it is the one toy he has not yet played with and discarded,” she said with such haughtiness, if he hadn’t known better, he might believe her a duchess born instead of one created in a bargain with a dying old man. “I will not be your plaything, my lord, not indeed that of any man. If I have unwittingly led you to believe I would be, I can only apologize.”

Devon felt ripped by a terrible coldness, whether anger or shock, he wasn’t certain. “I do not want you for my plaything, Moira. Nor even for my mistress.” He gritted his teeth. “I want you to be my lover, as I want to be a lover to you. I am not a man who seeks his pleasure without giving full measure to the woman with whom he shares his bed. If I have unwittingly led you to believe otherwise, I can only apologize.”

He braced his hands on the cold marble at either side of her face. “Now, Moira Reardon Handley, Dowager Duchess of Sheffield, will you be my lover and my friend for as long as we both shall passionately desire each other?”

For a long moment she searched his face, her exotic eyes dark with emotion. She was his, he thought triumphantly. Her protestations had just been the usual womanish tedium a man had to endure when dealing with the opposite sex. With herculean patience, he waited for her answer.

Finally it came. “No, my lord, I will not be your lover. Nor do I think we could ever be friends. Let us hope for Charles’s sake we can avoid becoming enemies.”

Devon dropped his hands to his sides and stepped back. “I think you owe me an explanation for that answer, madam. We both know you want me every bit as much as I want you,” he said with barely controlled anger. “Even my poor naïve, young brother was given a reason for his rejection—and in writing too.”

Moira pushed away from the marble statue and stepped forward onto the path that led to the manor house. She kept her eyes averted from Devon’s gaze, even though her pelisse brushed against his legs as she passed. Only when she was safely beyond his reach did she turn to face him.

“I owed Blaine an explanation,” she said in her low, throaty voice. “He loved me—to my everlasting regret. I owe you nothing, Lord St. Gwyre. You have only joined the long line of men who have lusted after me. I have forgotten most of their names, as I shall soon forget yours.”

Then she was gone, fading into the shadows, to leave only a marble fish to register the look of shock and dismay mirrored on his face.

E
arly the following morning, the Earl of Langley did something which no man who had served with him on the Peninsula would have believed possible. He ordered up his traveling coach and retreated to Langley Hall without firing a single shot in his own defense in the war of wits between the Dowager Duchess of Sheffield and himself.

Ignominious as it was, however, his retreat was not occasioned by cowardice, but rather by confusion. Somehow, without intending to do so, he had insulted the lady by proposing a liaison. But why?” That unguarded look of passion she’d turned on him had said more plainly than words she wanted him every bit as much as he wanted her. Nothing would ever convince him otherwise—and as for forgetting him as easily as she’d claimed? That was pure and simple humbug!

He stared glumly out the coach window as they exited the gates of White Oaks and bounced along the winter-rutted road that stretched between that estate and his own. He was not accustomed to rejection and he didn’t take it well. In truth, he couldn’t remember having ever before seriously set his sights on a woman who did not sooner or later succumb to him, and that included some of London’s most sought after courtesans, titled and otherwise. Yet the daughter of a common smuggler was insulted because he asked her to be his lover? The situation would be laughable if it were not for the damned ache in his groin each time a picture of the beautiful hoyden flashed through his mind.

He clenched his fists in frustration. What had he said to bring on her amazing display of virginal outrage? It was not as if she were a green girl yet to make her comeout, when an affair with him would rob her of both her virtue and her chance of a respectable marriage. She was a sensuous, provocative, highly independent woman—a widow who had known her share of men in the biblical sense. Something he had been willing to overlook, considering her unfortunate background.

Take Blaine, for instance. True, neither of them had ever actually admitted they’d lain with each other, but one had to assume…

And what of the magistrate and the other officials she’d had to bribe to save her ne’er-do-well father from the hangman’s noose. Not that he knew the actual names of such men, but one had to assume…

Then there was her husband, the duke. He’d been known as quite a rake in his youth. Surely he would have claimed his conjugal rights as part of the bargain he’d struck with her. As least one had to assume…

So why, Devon asked himself as the coach turned into the drive leading to Langley Hall, was she playing this cat-and-mouse game with him? Did she want him to woo her with the fatuous compliments and expensive trinkets one usually employed to attach a woman’s interest? Such nonsense seemed strangely out of character for the forthright duchess, but he supposed he could manage it if that’s what it took to bring her around.

But how could he know what the annoying woman expected of him? Nothing he’d learned through his experience with other woman was of any use to him where Moira was concerned. Even with all the information he’d gathered concerning her mysterious past, she was still a baffling enigma.

Or was she? Had he made the mistaking of thinking her so unique, he’d forgotten that all women have the same basic needs and desires? A sudden paralyzing thought struck him as he stepped from the carriage at the foot of the stairs leading the manor house. Could it be possible she had expected him to offer something other than a liaison? The very thought sent chills down his spine.

Seething with frustration, he pounded on the manor house door. Good God! Surely she hadn’t…but of course she couldn’t…he felt certain she wouldn’t…have expected an offer of marriage from him. The idea was too preposterous to credit. Still, now that he thought of it, her eyes had glittered with unshed tears when she’d made her bitter denouncement of him.

The door opened and he strode inside without a word of greeting for Partridge, his butler, after a nearly three-month absence. Too engrossed in his disturbing conjecture, he failed to notice the hurt that registered on the old man’s face.

“Passion is all well and good,” he muttered as he handed over his hat and gloves. “But no man in his right mind equates it with the woman he chooses to bear his children. When I set up my nursery, it will not be to cross my bloodlines with those of a rackety Irish smuggler.”

Partridge stared at him, a horrified expression on his usually stoic face. “I should think not, my lord,” he said fervently. “Such a connection would never do for the Earl of Langley.”

After a sleepless night rehearsing her speech demanding the Earl of Langley leave her house immediately and never return, Moira stood, with aching heart, at her chamber window shortly after dawn and watched him drive away without saying a word.

“So much for that,” she said when his carriage disappeared from sight. She would not see him again—at least not for a long time. He would probably have his solicitor handle Charles’s affairs in the future and avoid her like the plague. Which was fine with her. She had been so desperately hurt by his insensitive attempt at seduction, she had turned vicious as a wounded wildcat and the shocked look in his face had told her she’d drawn blood with her claws.

For, contrary to what most
gaujos
believed, gypsy women lived by a strict moral code. They might steal an occasional chicken or snatch a garment pegged out on a clothesline, but they guarded their chastity more fiercely than a titled Englishwoman guarded her jewels—and Moira had been raised by the proudest of gypsies.

She had been but ten years old when her grandmother had made her witness the punishment her grandfather had meted out to a gypsy girl who had committed adultery. He’d order the girl’s beautiful black hair shaved down to the scalp and then had her whipped publicly until her back was raw—and that in lieu of stoning her to death as had been the custom in the old days.

“Know this, granddaughter,” her grandmother had said the day she told Moira she must leave the gypsy camp to live in the
gaujo
world, “whether you live as a gypsy or live as a
gauja,
you must first learn to live with yourself
.
Search your heart and find the truth of who you are; then live by that truth. Only then will you live with honor.”

And so she had done, and not until she’d met Devon St. Gwyre had she been tempted to betray that honor.

“Be my lover,” he’d said with a smile calculated to make a saint turn wanton, but he’d neglected to mention that he was searching for a bride as well as a mistress. For, of course, not even a duchess could hope to become the Countess of Langley, if she had a common smuggler for a father.

She pressed her aching head against the cold windowpane, a bitter smile twisting her lips. And what could a gypsy
mestiza
hope to become? Probably not even mistress to the Earl of Langley; certainly not stepmother to the Duke of Sheffield.

She turned away from the window, wishing with all her heart she could convince herself Devon was cruel and evil like Viscount Quentin—instead of merely a man so accustomed to being spoiled by women, he’d grown insensitive to their feelings.

Maybe then she could hate him. Maybe then she could even forget him as she’d claimed she would.

But in the meantime, she must go on living—and, thanks to the duke, her blessings far outweighed her deprivations. She had wealth and comfort beyond her wildest dreams; she had her books and her stable of fine horses; she had her friendship with Elizabeth and young Alfie…and she had Charles, whom she loved as her own son. If she never laid eyes on Devon St. Gwyre again, she would have the most satisfying life any woman could ask for.

And if Vicar Kincaid was right, and lying—even to oneself—was a sin against God, she would be as much an outcast in the Kingdom of Heaven as she was in that of Mad King George.

The days following Devon’s return to Langley Hall crawled by so slowly, there were times when he felt certain the footman in charge of winding the clocks had been derelict in his duty.

The pain in his leg had subsided to where he no longer needed laudanum and surprisingly, he effected a complete withdrawal from the drug with relative ease, probably because he had begun tapering off while still at White Oaks. Withdrawal from Moira was not so easy.

He kept himself busy the first three days by visiting every tenant on his estate and studying every entry made in the estate books in the three months he had been gone. Then, remembering the charm of Moira’s uncluttered town house, he spent the fourth and fifth days directing the removal of more than half the furniture his mother and grandmother had crammed into the thirty rooms of the Hall and dispatching it to either the attic or the dower house. So busy was he, in fact, that he scarcely had time to think of Moira—at least not more than twenty or thirty times in any given day.

The nights were a different story. She haunted his dreams—sometimes as the siren who lured him to destruction on the rocky Cornish coast, sometimes a flesh-and-blood woman whose eyes glistened with tears and whose husky voice told him she could never be his lover because she couldn’t remember his name.

On the sixth day, he sent Ned Bridges to fetch Charles and Alfie to spend the afternoon with him. It was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreary week, and he found himself listening with embarrassing eagerness to their tales of riding in the new pony cart Moira had purchased or rowing with her on the lake separating White Oaks from Langley Hall.

Early on the morning of the seventh day, he mounted a horse for the first time since his surgery and took a short ride. His leg soon started to ache, but it was an ache he could live with. The excruciating pain that had been his constant companion for the past three years was gone. He felt like an escapee from a medieval torture chamber, and on a spur-of-the-moment decision, turned his mount toward his favorite spot on the bluff high above the rock-strewn beach that bordered the northernmost boundaries of his land.

The first pale rays of the sun had scattered the morning fog by the time he reached the bluff, but a damp chill lingered in the air. Far below him the waves crashed against the shore in their endless, rhythmic crescendo, and a gust of salt-laced wind buffeted his face and whistled down the open neck of his riding jacket. He shivered, but loath to leave, sat staring at the ocean, absorbing the timeless peace of its vast horizon.

All at once a rider emerged from beneath the cliff and galloped along the water’s edge. It was Moira—hair streaming behind her, skirt in disarray, and legs bare to the knee; with shameless abandon, she rode bareback astride a sturdy roan mare.

Wild and free, unfettered by the stifling conventions of proper society, she seemed as much a part of the rugged Cornish landscape as the foaming surf and the wheeling gulls and the wind-tossed trees clinging to the jagged, rocky cliff.

Devon’s breath caught in this throat at the sight, and he was filled with a longing so deep and so profound, it shocked him to the very core of his being. His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out the sound of the waves, and all at once he faced the shocking truth: he didn’t merely lust for Moira. He loved her.

As he watched, she reined in the mare and as if she sensed his presence, raised her head and for one long, breathless moment met his gaze full on. Then abruptly, she turned away and guiding the mare back beneath the cliff, disappeared from his view, leaving him empty and lonely and sick of heart.

The aching loneliness stayed with him for the rest of the day. Wherever he went, whatever he did, the memory of that moment on the windswept bluff hunted him.

As the evening shadows lengthened, Ned helped him dress for dinner. “You’ve a forlorn look about you, Captain,” the Cornishman said in his usual blunt way as he put the finishing touches to Devon’s cravat. “You’re spending too much time alone these days, if you ask me. You were far more cheerful lying in that bed at White Oaks than you’ve been since we returned to Langley Hall.”

He brushed a speck of lint from the shoulder of Devon’s burgundy velvet frock coat and stood back to admire his handiwork. “If you’re looking for something to occupy your mind, there’s that letter from your mother that came in the post this morning.”

“A letter from mother? Why the devil didn’t you tell me?”

Ned looked sorely aggrieved. “I did tell you, Captain. Twice. But you were woolgathering at the time. There’s one from Captain Higgins as well and they were both forwarded from London so the answers are probably long past due. I put them on your desk in the library—on top of all the other letters you haven’t answered.”

Devon ignored the caustic comment, too accustomed to Ned’s impertinence to let it bother him. He slipped his watch and fob into his waistcoat pocket. “Thank you, Ned. I’ll pick them up on my way to the dining room.” A few minutes later, the two letters in hand, he sat down to his solitary dinner.

He waited until the footman had poured his wine and served his food, then opened the letter from Captain Andrew Higgins, his friend at Whitehall who kept him abreast of Wellington’s activities. The brief missive was unexpectedly disturbing. It hinted at dangerous rumors from the Continent and even more dangerous intrigue at home. Wellington’s detractors were putting it about that he was nothing but a Sepoy general who had falsely taken credit for Bonaparte’s defeat. Such rumors were gaining momentum, and there was even talk of recalling him from the Congress of Vienna.